From Red House Blue House – Introducing Reason

By Lee

Reforesting the landscape of communication and interaction is entirely possible. All it takes is a little reason.

This is the goal of Red House Blue House, to be that initial step in discussing reason as it applies to all interaction – whether it be human to computer, business to business, or anything else. Reason begs “why.” Why we interact. Why we build. Why we do anything at all. But before we address the details, we need to understand the broader scope.

Red House Blue House – Chapter 1, Part 1

To design is to reason with an unreasonable world. And what a world we have made. Experience, sense… cascading, tumbling downwards ever faster to a home amongst the waves.

Our world is adrift in this sea of knowing, kept afloat by makeshift rafts built from our own confusion; pushed about by waves made of our own non-consequence.

What a journey we have made, thinking that we are alone in the pursuit of being, propelling our intentions and our ideas forward as if fanned by mad passion sans beginning or end. The furor drives us – products, plans, means and ends, all hoping for ears to speak with and hearts to touch. Yet, they rarely do. The ears and hearts of the world are too busy doing the same.

Preference then is sought where insight should be had. Innovation gives way to mindless invention, a mere exercise in individualism used to bandage the same tire wounds. Conflicts are had where none existed. Simplicity and complexity are wielded as barbarian swords, slashing through the air at clouds without water, hoping for a drop to spill, neither being recognized for their purpose or their intricacies. “I” has come to define “you” or “them”, creating orphans in its wake. We have rendered ourselves the ultimate point of reference, yardsticks by which we require everything else be measured.

We have chosen to live in an age where fact and wisdom are at odds, the purity of both practiced in hiding for fear of ridicule; the conventions of honesty and truth at the mercy of perspective. Where bastions of knowledge are found to be no more than the products of an elite and misinformed whole. Where the belief in solution and solving is treated as simple, banal, simple-minded, incomplete. Where the belief in the facade of choice just to choose has become the lustful and comforting fuel for how we move.

We think we understand. We think we know how to solve. Yet the mass of man’s efforts in reasoning, solving, design, have fallen down.

So, we float. Never reaching shore. Would we know it if we did? Or have we based and described our existence for so long on the self-important vagaries and enigmas of logic and presumption that, when the shore approaches, we would see it only as the cheap tourist bazaar we’ve grown to expect of ourselves.

Experience, sense. They wait for understanding, understanding founded in reason. They wait to be examined as witnesses to expression, as aides to commerce. They wait for a care that treats them as they are rather than how “I” thinks they ought to be.

Here, amongst the waves and atop the raft is where reasoning begins. Back to the house of misunderstanding. Back to the house of red and blue. A house built on discourse and framed by choice. A house met by inarticulate paths formed by both the individual and the mass. The place where mankind comes to lose himself in himself. Amidst the litter of logic and assumption. Amidst the shelves lined with preference and know-how, expertise and opinion. Here, at the house where discord is comfort and solution is the enemy. Here is where reason is discovered.

Posted on March 27th, 2010