From philosopher Alain the Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness (page 159-160):
Historians have often noted that the Western world in the late eighteenth century acquired a taste for the natural in all its major art forms. There was enthusiasm for informal clothing, pastoral poetry, novels about ordinary people and unadorned architecture and interior decoration.
But we shouldn’t be led by this aesthetic shift to conclude that the inhabitants of the West were at this time becoming any more natural in themselves. They were falling in love with the natural in their art precisely because they were losing touch with the natural in their own lives.
Thanks to advances in technology and trade, existence for the European upper classes had become, by this period, overly safe and procedural, an excess which the educated looked to relieve through holidays in cottages and readings of couplets on flowers.
In his essay ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ (1796), Friedrich Schiller observed that the Ancient Greeks, who had spent most of their time outdoors, whose cities were small and ringed by forests and seas, had only raraely felt the need to celebrate the natural world in their art. ‘Since the Greeks had not lost nature in themselves,’ he explained, ‘they had no great desire to create objects external to them in which they could recover it.’
And then, turning to his own day, Schiller drove home his message: ‘However, as nature begins gradually to vanish from human life as a direct experience, so we see it emerge in the world of the post as an idea. We can expect that the nation which has gone the farthest towards unnaturalness would have to be touched most strongly by the phenomenon of the naive.
Incredibly insightful and blatantly obvious at the same time.
1. UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
On sustainability
2. UNDERSTANDING HOW THE WORLD WORKS
On nature
On human nature
On the meaning of life and living
On culture
On morality
3. UNDERSTANDING HOW CHANGE WORKS
On the Next Level Society
On behavioral change
On marketing sustainability
4-A. FIXING HOW WE DESIGN THE WORLD
On naturalness
On naturalness in behaviour
On naturalness in art
Artworks of interest
On naturalness in architecture
Architecture of interest: naturalness
On livable architecture
Architecture of interest: livability
On naturalness in design
Design works of interest
4-B. FIXING OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OURSELVES
On well-being, self care and happiness
4-C. FIXING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUSINESS AND SOCIETY
On responsible business
On Positive Design & design ethics
On privacy
Progressieve bureaus van Nederland, 2021
OTHER NOTES AND WRITINGS
On digital design, CX/UX, and technology
On the travel & hospitality industry
Miscellaneous