Noticing can be simply observing your surroundings, whether it be the important and integral aspects of the world, such as what is in-front of your next step, or the little things, such as the colours of the leaves on the trees on your way to work. During the first week of class, we as a collective discussed the different ways we as people notice, such as through our senses, how we often notice the strange and out of the ordinary, and how we have become more aware of our technology and what it tells us.

In the set reading for this week, John Mason’s Forms of Noticing , the author discusses the accidental nature of noticing, and how it is so much harder to deliberately notice specific aspects of our life.  An example of this is posture, gesture and breathing, some of which are mentioned in Mason’s work. Once we start intentionally paying attention to these things, they become harder to manage and control, such as with becoming self conscious of your movements and presence, as well as ‘forgetting how to breathe’.

During the group exercise in which we listed what we noticed throughout our journey to class, I was surprised with how much I could recall, and the detail I could do so, down to the specific colour and style of a bag belonging to the person sitting next to me on the public transport I took in, or the number of cyclists I saw pass through a roundabout. This task showed truly how much I do notice in everyday life, and how much I can recall on demand.

For this assessment task, we are required to set ourselves a goal, using the prompt ‘tomorrow I shall notice…’, and pick something that we don’t often purposely pay attention to in a regular day. I have chosen to notice and mark the cracks, as I feel these are things I don’t often unintentionally seek out.

Mason, John. “Forms of Noticing.” Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing, RoutledgeFalmer, 2002, pp. 29–38.