Field Notes
無聊 (wú liáo) in English means bored, boring, senseless, pointless, meaningless. In Chinese it might go a bit further: idle, silly, nonsense, not useful. That last part was the one we were looking for.
Which is slightly ironic because we are (apparently) designers. We spend a lot of time taking messy things and making them clearer.. making them beautiful.. giving things names.. building systems.. putting things into boxes (we are very good at the boxes).
The human mind is a meaning machine. See a shape, ask what it is. Hear a sound, ask what it means. See an object, ask what it’s for. This is useful, sure. It’s how we build things, solve things, make sense of things. But it also draws borders everywhere. A word is a word.. a drawing is a drawing.. music is music.. and design is design. Everything sorted and labelled, into its own neat little box.
After a while, you forget whether the boxes were even yours to begin with.
A child doesn’t sort like this, they just connect things. A cloud can look like a rabbit and a word can be a drawing and a sound can have a colour. They haven’t learned the categories yet, so everything still belongs to everything.
Even asking “what if?” in a meeting comes with a need to explain the objectives of asking “what if?”.
I used to get it, I really did, and then I didn’t.
So we made a room for being okay with not “getting it”.
Which is kinda funny, because the moment you make a room for something, you’ve already started defining it. A box for escaping boxes. (We are, as I said earlier, very good at boxes.) The difference is this box doesn’t know where it’s going, like a bridge from nowhere to nowhere.
A room for doing useless, silly, pointless things that people doing useful, important, smart things everywhere would probably tell you not to do.
It doesn’t always produce anything. Sometimes we just sit in it. Sometimes we make things from it (wrote about it here). And sometimes I just write something funny and call it a day at 3pm with a beer. That’s the point. Or the non-point. So it’s either very profound or completely useless.
Which, come to think of it, is a decent definition of 無聊.
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous