OCTOBER 22, 2018 (Seth Godin, Tom Goetz, and Anne Frances Wysocki)

OCTOBER 22, 2018 BLOG POST
Break (Video) By Seth Godin
Redesigning Medical Data By Tom Goetz
Sticky Embrace of Beauty By Anne Wysocki

In order to keep every aspect of this post reasonably digestible I'll first outline a few terms that I want to focus on related to the videos and reading. I'd like to focus on accountability, the connection of form with content, elemental layouts, the association of bodily sensation with conceptual ability, the aesthetics of Kant, pleasure, judgment, and harmonization. Hopefully some of these terms sound fairly familiar, that is, they all come from the videos and reading assignment.

Professor Downs must have somehow been aware of my deep affection for Immanuel Kant and German philosophy. Wysocki's piece started out with some suggestions regarding the agency of visual elements and the connection of form with content. Agency, according to most philosophers, is a type of recognition that an entity has the ability to act and manifest some form of change. It's almost like a sense of awareness that an individual can possess in regards to their environment or their mind, for example. Now how does agency exist in relation to visual elements? What Wysocki is suggesting is that visual elements have a sense of agency, that is, they have the ability to enact change, or influence the capacity to act. I've understood this by thinking about how something visual can influence people, even from a thinking standpoint. Visual versus nonvisual as it pertains to influencing thought or change in people engaging with it on any number of levels from emotions, to associations, to memories, to any other function that has the possibility to enact change.

Now on to the connection of form with content. An admittedly short time ago I was enrolled in a class that explored the facets and rabbit-holes of poetry. This class was one of the only ones to keep me up at night staring at the ceiling. I thought about poetry on many levels, as the instructor hoped, somewhat corrupting my view of words forever. It was a beautiful corruption, and one that I often reflect on fondly, thinking of how poetry content and form are always dancing together. Back to images and information sharing, how do we think about form and content connection?

Earlier in the semester we discussed this in class. Form and content can play together for maximum conveying potential, to word it quite inarticulately. It's audience consideration on one end, and it's a writer/speaker's keen observation and knowledge of his subject on the other. Knowing how to maximize effectiveness to an audience is key when thinking of form and content. What are you attempting to convey? Why? How?

She writes, "Form is itself always a set of structuring principles with different forms growing out of and reproducing different but specific values" (159). Wysocki suggests that form is "...a set of structured principles..." that relate to values. Content, however, in my terms, circles the meaning, the meaning behind those values and principles, what they suggest and what they hope to achieve in terms of engaging audience for the sake of inspiring change or generating consideration, evaluation.

Wysocki then ventures into the writings of Kant, a charming old friend of mine. She outlines the division of three philosophy studies established by Kant.
      1. The Cognitive: study of nature
      2. The Ethical: study of morals
      3. The Aesthetic: study of tastes and aesthetic
She bridges the gap by writing, "...Kant argues that, when we have a sense of pleasure, the faculty to judgment is what allows us to join the pleasure to the realm of universal design" (161). So aesthetic elements arrive from the sense of pleasure that is reasoned and rationalized using judgment, or recognition that something we observe provides pleasure for us. The pleasure we feel arrives from the portions of our experience that "...fit what is universal," which I understand to mean a form of standard for what we deem pleasurable to observe.

The diagram above illustrates this concept based on the writings of Kant.

Wysocki continues by writing, "When we see an object that is formed according to universal structures, then the particular and the universal are harmonized, the beauty is created" (162). It's important to note her distinction between the particular, the unique, and the universal, the standard. When we find alignment of these too, she writes, we achieve the highest form of feeling pleasure, the feeling of observing beauty through judgment, or recognition, to put it in Wysocki's terms. So back to the three divisions in philosophy, according to Kant. The concept of nature, that is, the cognitive study of nature and the judgment established in regards to beauty, the aesthetic study of tastes and aesthetics connect to the final, far-left side of the diagram, where the ethical study of morals rests. Wysocki has connected all three Kantian divisions of philosophy through the common thread of natural conception, human moral decision-making, and the existence of values.

I hope I understood that correctly, but moving on briefly to the two videos of Godin and Goetz. I discovered that the major theme of these two videos was accountability, which Godin discusses when connecting people to "broken things," his goal being to "...unbreak things that are broken." And Goetz appears to be discussing accountability in terms of information sharing, which he highlights along with the notion of decision-making. He intelligently said, "People know what they're supposed to be doing, but they don't do it," which speaks to some true and disappointing human psychology. But his point, if I'm not mistaken, is that information, decision-making, and accountability, paired with innovation and ingenuity, yield the most effective results in relation to the patients being treated by medical professionals. I may have to watch again more closely, but I was most fascinated by Wysocki's reexamination of Kant's writings.