Shapes
Dear Friends,
As a documentary filmmaker, I traveled the globe seeking the answer to one question: How do humans make sense of the world? From Abu Dhabi to Cuba to Liberia, I had to find a telling image that summed up a story. I found a key hiding in plain sight. It was shape itself.
I’m excited to share my new book with you, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times. May it help you see the world with new eyes.
I hope you’ll join me in becoming a shape-seeker.
Lois Farfel Stark
You’ve heard about trying to put square pegs into round holes. The message is they don’t fit. It’s one of the first games young children are taught—how to distinguish a circle from a square from a triangle. Once we learn this way of seeing, we tend to categorize. We determine the shape of things and figure out what fits where. As useful as this lesson is, it sticks so deeply that we forget there’s more than one way to see things, more than one approach to a problem, more than one way to write an equation.
In today’s world, visual information outranks text. Animations can show us dimensional fields. With 3-D printing machines, children can easily imagine multiple dimensions. So let’s teach them how what seems impossible is possible with a new way of thinking, and that there can be multiple correct answers to a question.
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