Book by Rob Walker

Rating:
4 stars

Editors Foreword:
Welcome to the era of white noise. Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen.

Enter Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing—an inspiring volume that will help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises—131 of them—Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague, and finally, to rediscover what really matters to you.

Quotes and Personal Highlights

AS A KID, Davy Rothbart walked to and from his school bus stop by way of a ball field where various detritus piled up: candy bar wrappers, random papers, trash. “Sometimes I would pick up some note that was blowing in the wind,” he later recalled. “It could be some kid’s homework assignment. But it was at least entertaining reading for the rest of my walk home.”

Back in 1998, he started a project called “Favourite Sounds of London,” collecting submissions—short audio clips—from Londoners and posting the results on a dedicated site with a playable map. This has since inspired similar projects from Berlin to Beijing, and most recently Cusack’s own favouritesounds.org site has offered a map of favorite sounds of the British city of Hull: traffic, playground noise, squawking birds, a band at a fair, a public fountain. Cusack himself has embarked on other projects, notably “Sounds from Dangerous Places,” collecting audio from environmentally damaged sites around the world.

IN 1977, the famous husband-and-wife design duo Charles and Ray Eames completed the final version of a nine-minute film called Powers of Ten, dealing with “the relative size of things in the universe.”

In a new place, we pay attention to everything, it seems. (Ecologist Liam Heneghan has given this “heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place,” a name: allokataplixis, combining the Greek allo, meaning “other,” and katapliktiko, meaning “wonder.”)

IN HER ART HISTORY CLASSES, Jennifer L. Roberts makes her students regard a single work for “a painfully long time.” How long, exactly? Three hours. Her students, not surprisingly, resist the idea. “It is commonly assumed that vision is immediate,” Roberts has written. “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. But what students learn in a visceral way in this assignment is that in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.”

IN HER ART HISTORY CLASSES, Jennifer L. Roberts makes her students regard a single work for “a painfully long time.” How long, exactly? Three hours. Her students, not surprisingly, resist the idea. “It is commonly assumed that vision is immediate,” Roberts has written. “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. But what students learn in a visceral way in this assignment is that in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.”

McLean, who is British, has made smellmaps of Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Milan, New York, and other cities. In Amsterdam, she took multiple walks with dozens of locals, working with them to identify eleven core smells that “represent” the city and plotting the locations where one might experience them. Sometimes she focuses on details of some more micro smellscape: the way retailers’ open doors have an olfactory effect on a portion of a single city block, for instance. And of course McLean’s work confronts bad smells, investigating, for instance, the “smelliest blocks” of New York City, and the various combinations of stagnant water, dried fish, and cabbage. McLean offers a handy PDF guide for conducting your own smellwalk at sensorymaps.com/​about. (She calls this a smellfie kit.) I’ll quote here some of the basics: •  Be alert for curious and unexpected smells, but also for “episodic” smells specific to a particular area—flowers or cooking, let’s say—and background smells that are less intense but suggest an olfactory “context.” •  Walk slowly and note at least four distinct smells; she calls this relatively passive approach smell catching. Write them down, noting the location, the smells’ intensity and duration, and your own reaction and thoughts. •  Try smell hunting—crushing leaves, for instance, or actively sniffing at a wall or other object—and note four more. •  Collect four final smells using either method described; discuss your findings with fellow smellwalkers, if appropriate. Choose a smell that “summarizes the area.”

Apart from inspiring the closing shot of the first Men in Black movie, the Eameses’ film offered a vivid lesson in scale, how we measure it and experience it. Years later, their grandson Eames Demetrios organized a Powers of Ten exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences.