In the weekend I’ve been to an amazing event. The 17th Summit of Architecta the Italian association of information architects. It’s been a unique event of its kind. Way beyond workshops and lectures I felt a sense of community that is rare to find in similar events I attended in the last few years. I’m really grateful for the time I invested in the event itself, for the people I’ve got to meet and for the time outside the event, in the beautiful scenery of Venice, spent connecting with these people.
I want to share little insights of what I brought home from this amazing couple of days.
Takeaways (TL:DR)
From the ancient oral tradition to the recent popularity of the podcasts, storytelling is something we crave for as part of our nature. As a species and as individuals, from our childhood bedtime stories to the more serious anecdotes we learn from as adults. This is the linking thread between the learning I collected this week, the biggest epiphany that put into perspective an inspiring two-days event full of value. I’ll share some of these stories with you.
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Weekly retrospective
So, before going straight to the stories and sharing what I learned from them I want to thank the people who told these tales: Monja Da Riva, Piero Polidoro, Sara Seravalle, Valentina Ziliani.
Yourself, parent and child
Whenever I get to the bottom of a staircase. I stop for a moment, and I remember vividly the memoire of my grandfather telling me to take my hands off my pocket to save my own teeth if I’d fall.
This is the first story, and teaches how your ego and mind can work as a parent for your own self and teach and preserve you from a dangerous situation.
I can’t resist at petting a dog when I see one. Once I reacted so lightly that I almost pet a sniffer dog at the airport. You can’t pet a sniffer dog while it is on service.
The second story shows how your ego and mind can get excited, loose control, and let you do dangerous or inappropriate actions
These are the the opposite sides of the states of the ego, the parent ego and the child ego. The two constitute a fundamental balance to the present and rational adult ego. The parent ego is the one about teaching, caring and about rigid rules, it can be positive to preserve you or others from danger and it can be negative by being strict and controlling. The child ego is the one about enthusiasm, curiosity, and spontaneity , it can be positive so that we can explore the world and grow and it can be negative by pushing ourselves towards dangerous or inappropriate behaviour.
These two sides, that are formed in our past from the experiences we live as childs and from the teachings we receive from parents and adults, can be balanced in our present through our rational adult ego. If one of the two is too prominent it can consume the space of rationality and become a problem. In both cases we start to “play games”. The psychological games studied in transactional analysis.
The theory is super interesting but the practice is even more. What I learned from these stories is to recognise this kind of behaviours and try to break these games in order to achieve better relationships and conversations, or even negotiations with people.
Aristotle, the logic and Paris metro
At some point in time, a guy was asked to do an extensive research on the way people used the metro in Paris. He conducted this research with sociologists and anthropologists and he observed two different types of users. Continuous users trying to achieve a fluent experience of travel, somewhat unaware of the interaction with the metro ecosystem, you could see them going through the travel with their Walkman careless. And the discontinuous ones, that cared about the breaks and milestones along the experience, like the moment of buying the ticket, passing the turnstiles, entering the train... But suddenly he also needed to realise that where non continuous and non discontinuous experiences. All the people that found ways to connect fluently a discontinuous experience or the ones that interrupted a continuous experience, maybe to explore a different path.
I wasn’t able to find the source of this story, so this is the reason it is told a little bit vague, by memory. Sorry for that. But the point of the story that I bring with me, is to learn to interpret the world not by scales and spectrums made of dualities but using instead the square of Aristotle logic, and describe a space that is not only made of opposites, but as well of contraries of those opposites.
This perspective could lead to consider a wider area of the problem or solution space, and I always like concepts that help me widen perspectives.
An old man, an historical palace and its garden
I once took part in a big project to retrain a botanical garden of a palace. The owning family had no heirs left, the keeper died, the place became responsibility of the town hall and no one knew exactly what to do with this garden and how it was used. While researching information, we discovered that there was a single window from a nearby building that looked exactly into the garden. Inside the apartment, an old man lived there for 84 years of his entire life. He lived by looking into the garden every day from the window of his bedroom, he saw every person, every couple, every story that happened there and he had covered his entire wall with cuts of newspapers, books, postcards and everything regarding that place. It was undoubtedly the biggest expert of that garden in the world, but try to explain to “experts” architects, politicians, and technicians that an old man with no education knew it better than them…
I loved this story, it doesn’t even seem real, it’s so good I could visualise it in my mind. With the underdog protagonist, the cynic antagonists, the drama and the incredible setting. But what I learned from this story is to observe better, the value of being an humble professional that listen and understand people and the environment instead of valuing “expertise” and “titles”.
Mycelium, dots, and connections
Mycelium is the biological structure that grows fungi. It’s an intricate and interconnected web that connects nodes and points of the structure but at the same time communicates with every other string that it crosses and encounters in the middle, creating a complex mesh of information gathering.
This is a short one, and is more a description than a story, but I liked it as well. It taught me to focus on the medium, the context, the intricate system that surrounds and support the connections that I create with other people. They are never isolated channels, but always an interconnected matrix of relationships.
People, community and creating memories
The last story is not a story, but are the stories of the lives of all the beautiful people with which I shared moments during these days at the Summit. It’s beautiful to listen to them, to be part of their story, and learn a little lesson from each interaction. I’ll share with you some memories.
What is your story? Share a chapter with me in the comments if you’d like!
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Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia