WabiSabi and User Centred Design

Wabi Sabi can not be grasped or defined. However, Leonard Koren makes an attempt in his book: 'Wabi-Sabi'. There are stories of tea, which opens for the understanding, and today I received a picture of an unfolded tea sprout - which I Wednesday evening enjoyed as tea, and which on Thursday morning opened as portrayed here at the bottom of the empty cup. Somehow the picture tells what I in three consecutive lectures am going to talk aboutl this week: a systemic aesthetics: 'The whole is always in a metarelationships with its parts. As in logic the propositions can never determine the metaproposition, so also in matters of control, the smaller context can never determine the larger (Bateson in Steps, p 267) The meta-relationship which connects contexts is what Bateson understood as aesthetics: the need for double description/relational information, which is the source of innovations such as metaphors, art, science, religion, and poetry - designers should be sensitive to such patterns. If you look at the drawings on sustainbility you get the drift of what is NOT communicating about relationships http://computingforsustainability.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/visualising-sustainability/