Brexit Design Manifesto: designer Marc Newson and architect Patrik Schumacher are among the leading industry figures to have added their names to the Brexit Design Manifesto since its launch yesterday. (more…)
The launch of Dezeen’s Brexit Design Manifesto features in this week’s issue of Dezeen Mail, along with a honeycomb structure of 154 staircases by Thomas Heatherwick and a Tokyo museum dedicated to architectural models (pictured).
Read Dezeen Mail issue 323 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail
“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.” ~ Ralph G. Nichols ~
We tend to pay a great deal of attention to our ability to speak. From Toastmasters to an unlimited amount of courses, workshops and training available we receive the message that speaking, especially public speaking, is a highly desirable, sought after skill. Public speaking is considered to be an essential ability for those who desire to advance their career in business and politics. In all the noise concerning the importance of speaking, listening is virtually ignored. Yet it can be argued that listening is every bit as important as speaking. Everyone desires to be heard and understood and we reward people who provide us with those opportunities with our trust and loyalty.
Here are 5 ways to increase our listening abilities.
Have you ever been speaking to someone and find that they are distracted by something and not really listening to you? Likely you have and found it annoying, frustrating and disrespectful. At that point you may have become angry or shut the conversation down. When someone is speaking, it is vitally important to be fully present and in the moment with them. If something else is on your mind, like a call you have to make, or a text you need to answer, let them know, do what you need to and tell them you are now ready to listen. When listening, pay attention not only to the words, but the tone of voice, facial expressions and body language. This will give you information that will be as important as the words being spoken. A good way to let them know you are listening and really paying attention to them is to let them know how you are seeing their emotional state. You can say things like, you look worried, or seem agitated or really seem to be relaxed when you become aware of the emotions you are picking up from them.
Whether you agree with them or even have an interest in what they have to say, it is important to them. Imagine yourself in their situation, wanting only to have someone listen to them. When they are speaking, make an effort to think of where they are coming from and why. Imagine what their life is like and what struggles they might be facing. People will appreciate that you made the effort to understand and really hear them.
Many people have trouble focusing on what someone is saying especially if they speak for longer than a minute or so. It is easy for our attention to drift to something else that we might find more interesting. If that’s the case, try to pick up a few key points in the conversation. After they finish talking, let them know that you heard them by mentioning the key points you heard them say and ask them to clarify anything that you did not understand. You will be forgiven for not being able to follow the whole conversation if the person talking believes that you made an honest effort and picked up some of what they were saying. If you are not sure of what they said as you let your mind wander elsewhere don’t try and bluff your way through and pretend you heard them. Instead admit that you lost them along the way and ask them to tell you again. They will appreciate your honest and sincere desire to hear them.
Most people are thinking of how they are going to reply when someone is talking. Instead of doing that, try to focus completely on what the person is saying. Pretend that you will be tested on how much of what they were saying you heard and understood. A good exercise to practice is to sit down with a family member or a good friend and practice simply giving feed back to them what you heard them say. You will notice that it gets much easier to focus on their words when you aren’t worrying about how you will respond. Another good practice that I have found is to be with people whose first language isn’t English. In my toastmasters club we have quite a few members who are fairly recent immigrants. Their accent can make it difficult to understand them forcing me to totally focus on what they are saying. Learning another language is another great way to force us to focus and practice active listening.
People who are naturally curious see conversations as learning opportunities. They are always looking to discover or learn something new and see everyone they talk to as having the potential to teach them something. They are open to the idea that their own way of seeing things may not be the only, or necessarily the best, way and don’t feel the need to always defend their own point of view or way of seeing the world. These people are continuously looking for new learning opportunities and taking on new challenges. You will recognize these people as the ones who are signing up for courses, volunteering and trying new experiences throughout their lives. For them, listening to others becomes an easy and natural way to continue on their self-development journey.
The post 5 Ways to Improve Your Listening Skills appeared first on Change your thoughts.
All through this week the National Book Foundation is announcing the Longlists for the 2016 National Book Awards in Poetry, Nonfiction, Fiction, and Young People’s Literature. Today the long list for the National Book Award for Fiction was revealed. Five finalists will be chosen from this list in October, with the winner to be announced in November. See the Longlist for Young People’s Literature here, Poetry here and Nonfiction here.
The 2016 National Book Award for Fiction Longlist:
Chris Bachelder, The Throwback Specia (W.W. Norton & Company)
Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan)
Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group)
Paulette Jiles, News of the World (William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers)
Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking Books / Penguin Random House)
Elizabeth McKenzie, The Portable Veblen (Penguin Press/Penguin Random House)
Lydia Millet, Sweet Lamb of Heaven (W.W. Norton & Company)
Brad Watson, Miss Jane (W.W. Norton & Company)
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday/Penguin Random House)
Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn (Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers)
Some detaila about the selections from the National Book Foundation’s announcement:
“The year’s Longlist is told from and about locations all around the world. Authors hail from and titles explore locations that range from Alaska, New Delhi, Bulgaria, and even a reimagined United States.”
“Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad follows Cora, a fugitive slave, as she escapes the south on a literal underground railroad in a speculative historical fiction that reckons with the true legacy of liberation and escape. In a very different journey, former Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s Sweet Lamb of Heaven follows a mother as she traverses the country with her daughter, fleeing her powerful husband. What Belongs to You, a debut novel by Garth Greenwell, finds its American narrator in Sofia, Bulgaria attempting to reconcile the shame and desire bound up in his own sexuality. National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson, in her first adult novel in 20 years, depicts a young woman from Tennessee who has resettled in Brooklyn with her grieving family.
“The perennial themes of love, marriage, and family are also deftly explored in three of the longlisted titles. In Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen, a soon-to-be married couple must navigate personal values, economic pressures, and politics as their wedding day approaches. Former Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist Adam Haslett explores how mental illness afflicts a family over multiple generations in Imagine Me Gone. Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special chronicles a group of men who has obsessively met to reenact a tragic football play for nearly seventeen years as they confront middle age, marriage, and fatherhood in this exploration of the American male psyche.
“Looking towards the historical, former National Book Award Finalist Brad Watson’s Miss Jane explores the life of a woman with a genital birth defect in rural Mississippi during the early 20th century. Paulette Jiles’ News of the World depicts post-Civil War America from the perspective of a retired Army captain who must deliver a young orphan, kidnapped by a Native American tribe, to her relatives on the other side of Texas.
“The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan takes us to New Delhi, India, where a community is devastated by the losses brought on by an act of terrorism. The novel shows the reader both sides of a terrorist attack—how the loss of even just a few lives can change the fates of others and gives us a window into how someone might become capable of committing such atrocities.”
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2cLL34l
London Design Festival 2016: architect Asif Khan has created three temporary pavilions thick with plants to give the harried London public space to relax, work and socialise (+ slideshow). (more…)
Can a building help stem the tide of large epidemics?
In 2010, in the midst of the world’s worst cholera outbreak in over a century, MASS Design Group was challenged to design a cholera treatment center where the construction process, as well as the finished building, could address the underlying structural and social conditions that allow cholera to thrive.
This is the subject of Design that Heals, a new documentary that portrays the challenges, innovations, and triumph of the project, proving that, “Architecture and health are inseparable.” (Dr. Jean-William Pape, GHESKIO founder)
The 31-minute film, an official New York 2016 Architecture and Design Film Festival selection, will premiere September 29th at 6:30 and October 1st and 7:30. Screenings will be held at Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011.
The film tries to answer how can we heal a community after a catastrophe by telling the story of Dr. Jean-William Pape, Haitian infectious disease specialist and Director and Founder of Les Centres GHESKIO, who has dedicated his career to combating diarrheal diseases that harm and kill Haiti’s poor.
In 2010, a large-scale earthquake devastated Haiti and its already weak public infrastructure. UN peacekeepers were brought in as part of the emergency response. Among them were soldiers from Nepal where cholera is endemic. Contaminated sewage from their camp leaked into water sources used for bathing and drinking. What ensued was one of the world’s worst cholera outbreaks in over a century.
Desperate to help, Les Centres GHESKIO set up and operated temporary cholera treatment tents for two years in order to care for the thousands who fell sick. The tents were miserably hot in the Haitian climate and difficult to keep sanitary. As the spread of cholera continued, GHESKIO realized that patient waste collected from tents being taken off site for treatment was actually being dumped back into the environment, contaminating groundwater and re-infecting people.
Dr. Pape worked with MASS Design Group to design a project that used the construction process to address the underlying structural and social conditions that allow cholera to thrive.
This documentary tells the story how GHESKIO and MASS Design Group invested both in long-term infrastructure and the Haitian people to heal the community.
Opening Night – September 28 General Admission – $20 Students – $15
September 29 – October 2 General Admission – $16.50 Student – $11.50
For a full list of Architecture and Design Film Festival screenings and events, visit the festival website, here.
The Living Boom is a public space on a pier in the Curonian lagoon of Lithuania, acting as a new enhancement to the public life of the city of Nida. Behind a 5-meter-high wooden wall “hides” an outdoor living room fitted with adapted local furniture from the Soviet era. The entire space of The Living Boom is painted in red, generating a unique public space in the middle of the natural attractions of the Curonian region.
Nida is one of the most popular summer vacation destinations of Lithuania, resulting in high touristic density in summer. During these months Nida’s existing public spaces are filled with visitors around the commercial areas of the city. The Living Boom therefore provides a public space, far off the busy, hectic scenes of the city and focuses on the main attraction of this region, it’s vast nature of lagoon, sand dunes and forest.
A pier is a dead end. How can one change the ‘end of this long path’ and celebrate its end as a new space? Being already set into boundaries on three sides by the element of water, the start of the project was to construct a fourth wall that creates a new space. As one walks along the pier, approaching the wall in the middle of the plain landscapes of lagoon and sand dunes, one yet has to find out what the space behind the wall offers. Only after physically walking through, one can see and grasp the new space, with furniture shining in red, generating an unseen space in the middle of water, sky, sand dunes and forest.
Being five meters tall, the wall is the most striking element of the new public space. Built as a timber construction, fixed into the concrete floor by metallic bolts and planked with long thin wooden elements, the wall is generating the border between the in- and the outside of The Living Boom.
The space is fitted with local furniture from the Soviet era which have been adapted with new elements to allow further functions. This public space offers a three-meter-long table, multiple benches with different characters, a fireplace, a giant wooden chair as well as a traditional wind vane, which was handed to the workshop as a present from the municipality.
This stunning underwater oasis is our nation’s newest national monument. Today President Obama designated Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which is located more than 100 miles southeast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the northwest Atlantic Ocean. The monument is home to undersea canyons and mountains, making up fragile and largely pristine deep marine ecosystems that provide a haven for rare and native species as well as important scientific research. The area’s rich biodiversity includes deep sea corals – some of which are found nowhere else on Earth – and endangered whales and sea turtles. Thanks to today’s action, New England’s unique seamounts will be protected for future generations. Photos by NOAA.
A branch of luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue has opened close to the World Trade Center site in New York, with interiors designed by London studio Found (+ slideshow). (more…)
Sig Nordal 