I am trying to find a subtle way to mention here than I have an amazon.co.uk wishlist, but I don’t know how. I ‘ll figure it out before my birthday (on the 11th of October, by the way).

It’s ugly, but it’s probably going to be my next phone. I do not particularly care for the camera, but I really appreciate the combination of Bluetooth, tri-band GSM, and speaker phone. The large colour screen considered, this looks chunkier than the average iMode keitai, but I prefer its hingeless design.

I have mentioned my interest in simplicity and abstractions here before. It is obvious in retrospect, but I have come to realise that my attraction to simplicity and my attraction to abstractions are related (if not one and the same thing). Simple things are those which can be easilly abstracted into diagrams with few elements and/or minimal structure. I have not yet decided which is a subset of which, which is what makes me suspect that the properties “simplicity” and “abstractability” are identical. Superficially contradictorily, complex theory is also attractive as it reduces complex systems and complex information into simple patterns.

Evolutionarily, this preference might be rewarded because it is associated with the ability to model the real world and use the models for prediction. But as a designer, this mode of generative thinking, abstracting the design problem to a few key concepts and building on those, was brought out in my first year in architectural education, perhaps as the only obvious answer to the question “how does design happen?”

Architectural education never provided an answer, of course; just arbitrary options. Several of these options are slowly revealing themselves to be less arbitrary than others. Reading A Place of My Own allowed me to realise that attractions to particular spatial configurations have been evolutionarily advantageous, for example. (Evolutionary psychology is particularily attractive to me, not just because of its conceptual simplicity and elegance, but also for its ability to accommodate a wide range of phenomena, even some which seem otherwise mysterious; and perhaps because evolution resembles computation.)

Okay, this amount of “serious stuff” should be sufficient to compensate for the frivolity and shamelessness of the first paragraph of this entry.