#23: Andrew Witt — Letting Ideas Grow
Getting Simple
English - September 27, 2019 11:00 - 1 hour - 59.7 MB - ★★★★★ - 31 ratingsSociety & Culture Education Self-Improvement Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Harvard University's Andrew Witt on the power of ruminating ideas, understanding complex problems, curating signals, geometric simplicity, introspective automation, and finding time for reflection.
Andrew Witt is co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based office for design futures and an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Barbican Centre, Futurium, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others.
Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn and Certain Measures.
Favorite quotes
"Feeling some sense of accomplishment or success allows you to understand, Okay. What it really takes to feel that level of satisfaction is this amount of work."
"When you are eighty, you can look back and see, That's the body of work that I put into the world."
"I try not to look at other people's work as much as possible and, partially, it is to force myself to create in a very particular way but also not to create false expectation of speed and expediency and immediate demand which can be super corrosive, especially if you want to nurture something that's going to be durable."
"There will be certain moments when you feel like, Okay. This was well done. This is something that I put into the world and is good."
"Our whole understanding of what it means to create something which is successful is about creating things which are frictionless and can be distributed as easily as possible through market channels. It's all about this process of consumption."
"There's this moment where you see the waves moving away from you towards the horizon. In its very basic way, it's only the water and sky that are around you."
Links
Gehry Technologies (GT) and Trimble
Critique of Pure Reason by Kant
Formulations: Encoding Architecture, Mathematics, and Culture by Andrew Witt
The adjacent possible with Stuart Kaufmann
Ten Books on Architecture—De Architectura—by Vitruvius
Books
Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi
People mentioned
Chapters
00:00 · Introduction
01:04 · Part 1 — Career, ideas, and geometry
03:33 · Certain Measures vs. Harvard
08:27 · Stitching ideas
13:58 · Letting ideas grow
15:23 · Where good ideas come from
18:04 · Mapping super-high dimensional spaces
21:21 · Mapping projects
22:33 · Big data
26:25 · A geometrical challenge
28:25 · Geometric simplicity
31:02 · Simple and intuitive
33:07 · Part 2 — Life, creativity, and the end game
33:17 · Daily habits
35:26 · Reflecting away from the screen
36:02 · Commute and time for reflection
36:40 · Marginalia, being a generous reader
37:11 · Indexing ideas when reading
38:33 · Creativity
39:49 · Types of ideas
41:29 · Practicing seeing
42:00 · Curating signals
43:33 · Scripting email
44:49 · A customized journal
46:03 · Time tracking
46:38 · Digital organization
47:39 · Quantified self
48:55 · Analyzing your writing
51:04 · Swimming
53:12 · A happy moment
55:46 · An influential person
57:49 · The end game
59:46 · Connect with Andrew
01:00:21 · Spreadsheet of goals
01:02:03 · (Not) looking at other people's work
01:03:28 · Outro
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Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.
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