3.17 – Book Matrix

I won’t kid you; I’m a little bit zonked. I’ve spent the best part of the last nine hours dancing around a version of the Matrix made from books. I do mean literally dancing, too… it’s laid out across my kitchen floor, neatly stacked in twenty-five lovely, distinct piles, each with a one word title on an Artefact Card on top. There’s not a lot of room left, I’m sashaying past trying to make cups of tea and the like.

I had said earlier on twitter that I’d provide a fulsome list of links to all of the books. But sorry, I’m not going to, for two decent reasons:

1) I’d like to revisit each stack in light of finishing the words underpinning them.  I’d also like to be more precise about whether books are in the right place, and if so then why they are there (some books are in certain places for specific sections, rather than the whole thing).

2) I’m pretty spent. I can’t face typing out the names of over a hundred books and finding links for them.

What I shall do though, is share a quick thing about the process itself, and what I think it helped me do.

As I started placing each book by where I thought it went, it made me carefully consider what the category for that square on the matrix meant. Which was fine when it came to the PEOPLE side, which I’ve worked up pretty extensively by now, but the SPACE side immediately became problematic.

I’d had SURROUNDINGS / STRUCTURES / INFRASTRUCTURES / SERVICES / MATERIALS along the top, but it was hard to think well enough about what those things meant.

I’d expand on where I got to with them tomorrow, but save to say that playing in the physical space with the books, glancing here and there to see what books were next to / far away from, and hopping over to the far side to look at it from another angle, all helped me think about the idea as a whole more clearly.

The best bit is the peripheral vision. There isn’t really any peripheral vision in digital, you can’t spot things hidden in the system if you’re not looking directly at them.

Hooray for books, eh?

ACTION 17 – BUILD YOURSELF A PHYSICAL VERSION OF SOMETHING YOU’D NORMALLY DO DIGITALLY

• Category: Smithery 3.0