Delight in the Unseen: The Art of Noticing
Blog adapted from Celia Lee’s presentation at a pecha kucha, Delight in the Unseen, hosted at Perkins and Will as part of the inaugural Design Week.
I am very fond of the meme below.
Looking at it always makes me reflect on what humans are capable of. The Mona Lisa, Versailles. For tens of thousands of years, we’ve been inspired by the beauty nature creates - its rainforests, its Great Plains.
Then we do things like… bestow McLeod Trail unto the next generation.
We thought it only fair to ask kids what they would do instead. What would help them get around on foot or bike in our communities?
The kids gave us design work. They also gave us poetry and philosophy.
Kids have been wowing us for some years with their design work - their ingenuity, their empathy. Over the years, they’ve proposed incentivizing snow removal by gamifying it: putting up hockey nets with heated storm sewers inside them to melt incoming snow. Alleyways would house the houseless, streets get turned into parks so seniors have relaxing places to gather downtown.
In short - when we’ve asked kids to help themselves, they consistently respond by helping themselves and others.
In our most recent project, Kids Reimagine School Streets, we asked grade 4 and grade 6 students to redesign their routes to school. Martindale students wanted walking spaces where – crucially - they could listen to the breeze.
““I like to walk because I can see the outside and it’s peaceful, it’s windy, I enjoy it.” ”
““I like biking because you can get the nice breeze on your face.” ”
This reminded me of the poetry of Hafiz, a 14th century poet whose words are always eerily relevant. “The breeze at down has secrets to tell you,” he said. “Don’t go back to sleep!”
Hafiz had been a thread weaving through the summer of 2023. Al, a local resident and student, had walked by the installation of the kids’ design for Martindale, and decided to pitch in for a few days. During that time he told us he was trying to read as much of the poet’s work as he could over the summer.
I shared how a 95-year-old Big Sur resident, Penny, had introduced me to Hafiz that summer by reciting his poetry to me within the first five minutes of our meeting – and (to my horror), bringing me to tears. Like any self-respecting bibliophile, Al thought that was awesome… and that I should really read the poetry in the original Iranian.
My favourite contemporary poet is Kaveh Akbar, who says poetry calls us to slow down and have a sensory experience with words.
“What poetry asks us to do is to slow down our metabolization of language. It asks us to become aware of the materiality of language and of the textures of language, and it asks us to become aware of language entering us.”
Owais, a sixth grade poet-at-heart, had similar things to say about walking. Walking to school helps you slow down, notice and empathize.
“[Walking] helps people notice their surroundings like - oh that tree doesn’t look that well, and realize how it looks, while cars they move so fast you can’t notice the changes.”
So while we were focused on designing to encourage walking, the kids pointed out that walking is a vehicle for noticing. This suggests that when we design for walking, we design for a slower pace, we design spaces that encourage us to notice - and help us care.
Philosopher Simone Weil and the poet Mary Oliver align with Owais’ observations. They both speak of the generosity that comes with noticing.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion”
Noticing helps us see what we take for granted — what’s considered “normal” or “desirable.” Those ideas - what Roland Barthes called “mythologies” - live in our streets, neighbourhoods, and public spaces.
And if walkable places nudge us into deeper observation, maybe they also help us rethink those stories — question assumptions, imagine alternatives, and respond better to community needs.
Challenging what we perceive as normal doesn’t assume “normal” is bad or good. But it’s worth checking in on from time to time, if only to ensure “normal” isn’t bringing on the apocalypse.
Or as Anne Carson puts it: we shouldn’t outlive our mythologies. A lot of our work at Sustainable Calgary takes aim specifically at the shared mythology that centres the personal vehicle in community design. Many of us would say we have indeed outlived those mythologies.
We take aim at it from the perspective of health: the way we design our streets affects every facet of our health and happiness. But the kids are nudging us further: centring community design around the car doesn’t just change our health outcomes; maybe it changes who we are and how we treat each other.
“ Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
In a car-centred community, it’s normal for destinations to be far apart. Streets are for throughput not connection. We travel separately in “boxes”, and if Matthew McConnaughy is any indication, those boxes make us sexy as hell.
As a girl from the suburbs of Mississauga, I’m far from immune to this story. But to get British about it, it’s evolutionarily maladaptive: a growing dependency on automobiles might just bring on the apocalypse. And to the kids’ point, it’s making us move through the world faster, pay less attention to our surroundings - and maybe empathize less.
The kids we’ve worked with have been subverting our mythologies with ease.
Kids may not know or may not yet have bought into our commonly held beliefs. This is something the tech industry has noticed and been capitalizing on - because looking at a problem from a different perspective can make you a great innovator. This has certainly been our experience, where kids in three communities independently developed precedent-setting projects that pushed city policy and practice.
In Connaught, students decided they could make their street safer by pairing it with another much-needed community amenity - greenspace. They wanted to turn three blocks into wildflower fields with a pond. Since there’s not much publicly-owned land in the Beltline, this was brilliant.
Rewilding three city blocks also seemed obvious to Lucia, the landscape architecture student we were working with, and to David, who took a lead in implementation. We piloted their idea on a third of a block, so we did, and now we’re working towards developing a permanent park.
I took a meeting in the space the other day. As I was sitting there, I actually stopped mid-conversation because I was noticing the sound of the wind in the trees. It wasn’t drowned out by traffic. I noticed the sounds of birds. They were more active here.
I noticed the woman sitting on her walker, talking on the phone, the 20-year old having dinner, and dozens of cyclists and scooter-riders whizzing through, and the elderly man crossing at the curb bumpout, where the crossing distance was shortest. There was no part of me that envisioned this is what the space would become, even in its temporary form.
As we inch towards a municipal election, I’m thinking about what this means for city planning. What I see in this work is a rationale for supporting walkable - and delightful - public spaces. Because far from being frivolous, these spaces help us notice, get to know each other, show care for each other, be more empathetic and through that - problem-solve. It’s not indulgent. It’s a long-term investment in empathy, care, and futures we can inhabit.
Relatedly, let’s give kids and youth more chances to lead, before they unlearn their ability to notice, their instinct for empathy, and their connection to mythologies that serve us better – whether those are new mythologies, or old ones that better withstand the test of time.
A few more related literary gems:
“All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you.”
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
“The truth about stories is, that’s all we are.”
- Thomas King, The Truth About Stories
“Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement — in which the muscles do not also revel.”
- Frederick Nietsche, Twilight of the Idols
