I’ve been thinking a lot about boxes lately… literally and metaphorically.
Our house is often filled with boxes – a consequence of my partner’s job – delivery companies won’t deliver to her place of work. I have to say this does annoy me a bit though it is handy when we need to pack things up – like when the kids vacate one rented property to move into another or at the moment as we try to empty the attic of 20 years of collected stuff ‘that might come in handy/ be worth something one day’. (Handy Tip it won’t and it isn’t so just dump it at the earliest available opportunity).
Maybe it’s because I am feeling a little guilty about not being around to help Jeremy Jeffs and Marion Sander take down and pack away all of the Remedy exhibitions. Why is it always so hard to pack things back into the boxes they came out of?
Maybe it’s because I have been thinking a little about the boxes we put people into – sporty, creative, young, old, rural, urban, disadvantaged, connected, overweight, the list of boxes goes on and on. We all do it – I guess it helps us make sense of the world.
Apps, algorithms and the internet all do it – asking more and more questions (or analysing our activity) to be able to pop us into the right box and then send us all of the stuff that people in our box like.
Services do it – in theory to understand what we need but in reality to work out which box to put us in. Though life and people are not that neat. We don’t fit into boxes and if bits of our lives fit into certain boxes then other bits don’t quite fit there so when you try and stack them together you will end up with a bit of a wonky tower.
Why is it so hard for us to see the whole, the rough edges and the ‘anomalies’ and to accept those? To be more Mr Messy rather than Mr Strong. So it was nice to be at an event where the Dean of the Medical School at the University of Lincoln talked about how they have designed their curriculum in a non-boxy kind of way. Instead of the traditional approach of studying separate bodily systems they have designed a curriculum based around the whole person and not focused on hospitals. Good luck to all that pass through this programme as they enter a world that will try to put them back into their specialist boxes.
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