The get “smart” these days, city leaders usually beef themselves up with a network of sensors. They become a city of things, wired and tuned. Unfortunately, that alone doesn’t make a city a nice place to be. For that, you also need wabi-sabi.
It’s a Japanese thing, and like so much of Japanese culture that Westerners like, it’s hard to explain.
I picked up a little book, on Seth Godin’s recommendation, that does a pretty good job of explaining. It’s Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi, for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers.
“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” it says on the first page.… Read the rest “Data driven but wabi-sabi driven, too”