Truth & Darkness

Truth and darkness
On Wednesday night I had dinner in the dark, at dans la noir, courtesy of the mind gym. It was an interesting evening.
There was a lot of preliminary claptrap to the effect that we would gain some insight into how it is to be a blind person: I suspect that sitting in the dark for two hours whilst waited on by blind waiters does not really compare in any way to life as a blind person. There is the obvious point that we were all sighted people, experiencing sightlessness as bourgeois experimentation, but more importantly I knew all the people around me were in the same position. My companions included editors from the daily mail, the times, assorted journalists and significant learning people (if that isn't a contradiction in terms).
It was utterly, completely pitch dark in there. We were guided through a series of curtains with hands on each others' shoulders, finding ourselves suddenly and disconcertingly seated in an undefined space, populated by voices to which we could not assign a face. I felt sick and thought I might have to leave.
Superficially the challenge was to figure out what we were eating - there was a quiz to this effect following the meal and lots of trepidatious patting of sticky foodstuffs. But for me the real discovery was existential: relating to people in the dark changed my perception of myself and of our relationships quite profoundly.
Firstly there was the question of identity: our space was no longer three dimensional - not even two dimensional. There was only the interplay of voices, and in this exchange it was possible to doubt which of the voices one 'was' - or even what this meant. Really, to doubt which voice I was. You and I incorporate more than one voice in our own everyday thinking, but in the darkness what was clear to me was how arbitrary the sense of identification with one voice rather than another was. Which was my voice? There were simply voices - I'm not sure I really 'owned' any of them - the only remaining clue to identity was the physical sensation of utterance.
And then there was the question of closeness - that sense of oneself as both discrete and related in physical space. In the darkness some of us felt pitifully close, achieving something that our miserably elucidated lives prohibited. There was no space between us, no personal space to be defended or intruded upon. It was a dream-like intimacy, almost a feeling of immortality - each of us rendered as warm voices, all too human, in a shared opening - not the discrete clearings, the Dasein of Heidegger - but a directness of contact mediated by absence; absence of the space that separates us.
And the darkness was truly revealing: the absolute absence of light seemed to give our voices a poetic quality - a beauty brought about by the lack of distractions - in just the same way that simple words spaced carefully on a page, like a Larkin poem, may take on a fresh charm our voices traced rich forms in the warm air. Voices variously crisp like a dry white wine, or smooth and rich like Chianti.
It was easier to talk, I felt - people attended so much more carefully, and I could devote more of my mind to what I was saying rather than how I was appearing - those tedious negotiations with eye-contact, personal space, gestures etc.
Overall, then, a point that I will not be the first to remark upon: that light plays a central role in our understanding of truth - of who we are, who others are and how it is with the world.
Not everybody felt the same way. I am a radio listener - I don't watch television. But I wondered if there was something of a spectrum of attitudes along these lines: how addicted are we to visual stimulation? People's ability to converse, to follow a train of thought has certainly been eroded in recent years - perhaps these are the people who are most afraid of the dark.

Cover Story

Cover story
Breakfast in Tescos on Sunday. My elder daughter asks 'what's your favourite colour?' 'Black' I reply. 'That's not a colour, it's a tone.' she says matter-of-factly. 'I disagree, black refers to the absorption of visible wavelengths of light so really black is no colour. Anyway, your point is a technical one - in practice if you walked into a shop and the assistant said 'are you looking for any particular colour' and you said 'black' I don't think they would say 'I'm sorry m'aam, black is not a colour' or 'actually black is a tone'. She munches a hash brown 'I still think black is a tone'. 'What's a tone, daddy?' asks my youngest. 'It's like a colour' I say.

It sometimes strikes me as amusing how far the day-to-day can drift from sense - and the extent to which we take for granted the sensibility of the day-to-day. I spend my day doing silly, non-sensical things; you spend your day doing silly, non-sensical things. Sometimes we just keep quiet, other times we build up a whole world of justification. An example: instructional design, or even experience design. This is something I have spent many years concerning myself with, to the extent that respectable institutions occasionally ask me to speak on the topic, despite the fact that by and large it is has little value and arises largely from historical accident. If you work in audio or vision let me ask you: do you have experience designers for your programmes? Should we all have small teams of people called 'experience architects' who reconstruct our output on the basis of what is known about human cognition. No. Why not? Historical accident.

I suppose the argument is crudely that for the purposes of entertainment you can do whatever the heck you like on the screen or airwaves so long as it entertains, whilst in the area of learning there is science to be applied. Instructional designers do your thing. Back in the 90's some research I carried out suggested that this was basically hogwash: people take what they want from content and instructional design is at best mostly harmless. I guess that in reality online learning design is quite a lot like programme-making in other areas: there are some basic rules that are pretty much common sense and then the rest is down to hard work, experience and creative flair. The experience designers that bring so much to our programmes do so because, first and foremost, they are good programme makers - not because of any specialist area of knowledge. Equally, I would trust a good programme maker to make better instructional content than many of the instructional designers that I have known in the past. At the core of the problem lies the traditional role of the teacher, someone who was once in charge of the classroom and who now commands via proxy - wielding the arcane art of instructional design.
And so I sometimes feel a bit of a charlatan: helping to perpetuate a field of study that I know full well to be little more than a cover story. A lot like marketing, really.

Probably the most useful thing I read recently I found in a book called 'Made to stick' by Chip and Dan Heath. Drawing on a military analogy they note that the army has more or less given up the detailed planning approach, having finally realised that 'No plan survives contact with the enemy.' Which, it seems, is very much the case in the BBC: you make plans, nothing goes to plan. Instead, they substitute the notion of 'Commander's Intent': a crisp plain statement setting out the desired goal. The key idea is that teams of competent people working together will figure out how to achieve a goal, taking into account the prevailing circumstances, and that this is a far better approach than doggedly trying to execute and revise a project plan. At the risk of spoiling the book, the answer to the question 'what sticks?' are messages that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories (SUCCESs). I can't tell if it's a book for programme-makers, marketeers or instructional designers.