We are surrounded by sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures – and most of it barely registers. Time to slow down and take it all in …
What was the last thing that made your body feel good? Maybe it was the first sip of tea or blast of water in your morning shower, the warm silk of a cat’s back arching to meet your fingers, pulling on a T-shirt softened by repeated washing or the moment you align the numbers on your bike lock and it releases with a weighty clonk? Maybe somewhere you encountered a paper coffee cup with a cardboard sleeve embossed with ridges that offered “a surprisingly gratifying tactile delight”? Maybe you’ve never considered paper cups much; I hadn’t before I read that in Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff: The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life.
The Small Stuff is a manifesto for tuning into the tiny opportunities for gratification being human offers, even in increasingly frictionless, AI-enabled, automated lives. Starting from that paper cup, Bogost – an interdisciplinary academic at Washington University, video game designer and writer – explores how we’ve become what he calls “dematerialised” and how to fight back, analysing the idiosyncratically pleasing qualities of plastic drinking fountain tumblers, using “steel-crank-roll paper towel dispensers” and – don’t tell me this one doesn’t resonate – peeling the plastic protective film off, in his case, a wooden knife block (I have happy memories of doing this on our microwave door).
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We are surrounded by sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures – and most of it barely registers. Time to slow down and take it all in …What was the last thing that made your body feel good? Maybe it was the first s...
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