Question your tea spoons

A quote by Georges Perec is a good way to start off the year:

"What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.

Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

Question your tea spoons.

What is there under your wallpaper?

How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?

Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?

It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth."

(Georges Perec, The Infra-Ordinary, 1973) Why do I blog this? I think this words are a good agenda for now, they nicely show the sort of attitude towards techniques and technologies one can have "to rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds". And as he said "Nothing strikes you. You don't know how to see." Why is this important, maybe first to highlight how the mundane is intriguing. Beyond the descriptive level, it's also curious wrt to innovation and design as it allows to ask question and possibly to nurture near future worlds.