Paying attention is the only thing that guarantees insight. It is the only real weapon we have against power, too. You can’t fight things you can’t actually see.Michelle Dean
Here a few practices you can try now! Adopted from “Art of Noticing” written by Rob Walker. And please gift yourself this book. A physical copy – not a Kindle! How I wish every educator and every leader carries this book with her till all practices are internalized.
Conduct a Scavenger Hunt
Play a game – a single object scavenger hunt. Play for the fun of noticing.
If you are a birder, look out for songbirds. Or any specific species. If you are walking in a city, look out for security cameras. Locksmith stickers. Hand painted signs. Cell phone towers. Stray traffic cones. Sign boards. Whatever. Practice conscious noticing.
Spot something new every day
A heightened observational mind-set takes over when we’re tourists. In a new place, we pay attention to everything. But we spend most of our time in familiar places that have lost their inherent novelty. We take these surroundings for granted, and we stop playing close attention. A recurring commute becomes profoundly numbing. Psychologists who study perception call this inattentional blindness.
Notice something new every day. From a bike, car, bus, or train.
Take a Color Walk
Do a one-hour color walk. Let color be your guide. Allow yourself to be sensitized by the color in your surroundings.
- What are the colors that you become aware of first?
- What are the colors that reveal themselves more slowly?
- What colors do you observe that you did not expect?
- What color relationships do you notice?
- Do colors appear to change over time?
Start a Collection of Pictures
Dream up interesting search images to hunt and document: arrows, public clocks, manhole covers, street corners, geometric shapes, specific architectural details, signs and objects prohibiting specific behaviors, foot prints. Abstract angles and curves, texture, and repetition, as well as contrasts between the very new and the very old, the natural and the built, the colorful and the drab, the crumbling and the pristine.
Or search for contrast. Look for hardness and softness and the contrast between these two qualities. A flag outside a building is a contrast between rippling cloth and the solid wall. Or the contrast between soft lips and hard teeth.
It’s about observation and thinking. When you discover something special out there it’s like stumbling into a cafe or shop that was not listed in the tourist guide – your experience of the world is much richer because you did it on your own.
Count with the numbers you find
Find numbers in the urban landscape. Looking for them is a good eye-sharpening exercise. Even make a collection (see previous idea) – pictures of number 100 and counted down to 0.
While travelling by foot, bike, or car, start “counting” and see how far you can get. The hunt can be very satisfying and the reward a new awareness of something previously invisible. The game of course is to find unexpected shapes, sizes and contexts.
Document the (seemingly) identical
Regularly take pictures of a blue cloudless sky. All the sky gradients! Or of telephone poles. Sometimes the image may show texture of the pole, another riddled with staples, or touched by an odd jab of paint, The colors vary, the subtle patterns appear.
Sidewalks, parking lots, grass, tree trunks – both human and man-made features and natural ones offer endless possibilities.
Look Slowly
A study by MMA, NY concluded that its patrons spend a medium 17 seconds in front of any given painting. Now, look at five works of art for 10 minutes each. You’ll see details you missed. You’ll draw new connections, and you’ll reconsider first impressions. Perceive your perceptions.
Look Up and then Look Farther Up
For starters, you can simply look up from your phone from time to time. Lift your eyes to what’s not right in front of you, but just above.
Look further up. You might glimpse drying washing being whipped by the wind, a flock of pigeons homing, or someone secretly sun-bathing, or water towers, chimneys and aerials.
Up is a place that might be glimpsed while in motion.
Farther up requires the suspension of movement and activity.
Looking for chimneys raises your gaze, which seems to boost your mood (possibly because it lets more light into the eye). You become aware of the way the land meets the sky, the various ways that roofs are built, and the wildlife living up in the rafters and the treetops.
The farther you look up, the more time it takes to see anything. Try seeing birds and planes way up in the sky.
Find a place to sit or lie down and look up. Take your time. See what’s up there. Then look for what’s beyond that.
Repeat your point of view
Noticed a incongruous bench not far from your classroom that no one sits on? Make a habit of occupying this spot for fifteen minutes every day and studying passersby. Or sit by a office window that you hardly bother to glance through anymore or on your own front porch.
The determined repetition of the same view over time will likely reveal something that is not really the “same view” after all.
Look out a window
Spend ten minutes looking out the window you most persistently ignore. Find one in your office or bedroom or wherever, the one you so take for granted that you forget it’s even there.
Examine the edges of what the window makes visible. Find three things you’ve never noticed. Describe the scene in front of you.
Next time you encounter a window that’s new to you, stop and look. Study the view. Tally the details. Look for movement. Think about what you can’t control. See what happens.
Windows are a powerful existensial tool … The only thing you can do is look. You have no influence over what you will see. Your brain is forced to make drama out of whatever happens to appear. Boring things become strange.Sam Anderson
Reframe the familiar
Make a simple viewfinder – cut a rectangular hole in a chunk of cardboard. Hold the frame up to an object or scene and write a one to two word description on it. Beautiful. Vacant. Or Cloudy. Then shift the frame to focus on a different subject, leaving the original description. How does the earlier description influence what you’re looking at?
It helps us to take things out of context. It allows us to see for the sake of seeing.Sister Corita Kent
Look really, really slowly
It is commonly assumed that vision is immediate. It seems direct, uncomplicated, and instantaneous – which is why it has arguably become the master sense for the delivery of information in the contemporary technological world.
Is it possible to regard a single work for a “painfully long time?” How long exactly? Three hours. In any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive. Looking really, really slowly forces you to notice things you initially passed over, sometimes changing your entire understanding of a work. The process unlocks meaning and potential that first glances can miss. Not just for works of art, look really really slowly at almost anything, and chances are good you’ll see more than you ever could have imagined.
Look repeatedly
Devote time to studying something you’ve see before. You can look over and over – until you are seeing something in a way that nobody else could.
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