In this episode, host Claire Bown is joined by Menka Sanghvi, researcher, writer, guide and founder of Just Looking. Menka’s work explores attention through science, culture and creativity, and encourages us to slow down and notice more in our everyday lives.

Together, we talk about why ordinary moments matter, how our attentional filters shape what we see and the social dimension of noticing. We also explore the pull of digital technology, the difference between algorithmic seeing and intentional looking, and how small shifts can help us reclaim our attention.

Whether you work with visitors in museums, guide groups through artworks or simply want to nurture a more spacious way of looking, this conversation offers practical ideas you can apply directly to your facilitation practice (and to your life!).

The Art Engager is written and presented by Claire Bown. Editing is by Matt Jacobs and Claire Bown. Music by Richard Bown. Support on Patreon

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Menka is the founder of Just Looking, a global community of people looking at everyday life with slowness and curiosity. She is also the co-author of Your Best Digital Life. Her work invites people to notice more, reflect more and reconnect with both the digital and physical worlds.

Just Looking newsletter

Just Looking’s Instagram

60 Experiments in Looking

Your Best Digital Life

Menka Sanghvi’s website

Show Links

✨ If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider supporting The Art Engager on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheArtEngager

Or pick up a copy of my book, The Art Engager, for step-by-step guidance on creating meaningful, interactive guided experiences https://www.theartengager.com/

Buy it here on Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/buytheartengager

Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.

I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience

and bring art objects and ideas to life.

So let's dive into this week's show.

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of The Art Engager.

I'm Claire Bown, and today I'm speaking with Menka Sanghvi, a researcher,

writer, and guide who specializes in one of our most precious resources.

Attention.

One quick thing before we start.

I started this podcast in 2021 thinking I'd make perhaps just 25

episodes, and here we are at over 150.

Creating each episode is mainly a solo endeavor, and your support helps cover

hosting, editing costs, research, and interview time, and it helps to keep

the podcast ad free for everyone.

If you found this podcast helpful and would like to support what

I do, you can become a friend of The Art Engager on Patreon.

There are different tiers to choose from with monthly support starting from

less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Thank you.

Now let me introduce today's guest.

Menka Sovi is the founder of just looking a global community

project, celebrating slowness and curiosity in how we see the world.

With a background that spans physics, social change, and mindfulness.

Menka brings a unique multidisciplinary perspective to the question of

attention, how we use it, how we lose it, and how we can reclaim it.

Menka is the co-author of your Best Digital Life and the founder of Just

Looking a global Community project that encourages people to stay

curious about the world around them.

Drawing on over two decades of experience in behavioral change design

and wellbeing science Mecca's work invites us to slow down, notice more,

and reflect on how we relate to both the digital and physical worlds.

In today's conversation, we explore why focusing on ordinary moments matters,

the science behind attentional filters and what we unconsciously miss, and the

social dimension of noticing how looking together changes what individuals see.

We discuss algorithmic seeing versus intentional looking, practical strategies

for rewilding our attention and why.

Menka insists that slowing down isn't about duration, but attitude.

This episode is essential listening.

If you work in museums and want to help visitors engage more deeply with what

they're seeing, if you're interested in slow looking practices or if you're simply

curious about reclaiming your attention in our technology saturated world, enjoy.

Hi Menka and welcome to The Art Engager Podcast.

Hi, Claire.

Nice to be here.

So could you tell us who you are and what you do?

Sure.

I am a researcher, writer, and guide.

I specialize in the subject of attention, and I come to this from a scientific,

cultural, and a creative perspective.

I am also the founder of a global community project called Just Looking,

which is dedicated to slowness and curiosity in how we look at the world.

I am really concerned about how technology is impacting our minds and our attention,

which is why I co-authored a book all about it called Your Best Digital Life.

It came out a few months ago, and yeah, outside of that, I'm also a trustee and

champion advisor to several innovative organizations in the areas of mindfulness

and wellbeing, and so I end up working with a wide range of people from

business leaders and politicians to.

Musicians a few weeks ago and children too.

Amazing.

Um, your work caught my attention quite a few years ago now.

I think we've been emailing on and off for a number of years, but I'd

love to hear the story about how you ended up with this very varied

portfolio career that you seem to have.

Yeah, sure.

And that's a nice way of putting it.

My background is fairly multidisciplinary, but in a nutshell, I. Started off working

in social change and climate change, the external environmental social problems of

the world, and then became more and more fascinated with behavioral change and how.

Environments influence by design, our behavior, and how

we can regain control over it.

Over that, and then I moved progressively into the world of interchange.

So mindfulness and wellbeing, and I guess attention is that.

Is that touchstone between all of it.

At one point I just realized that everything starts with

attention and perception and how you see yourself in the world.

What we attend to shapes, our feelings, our ideas, beliefs,

actions, habits, basically everything.

I love that.

And you are just looking now, I don't know whether to call

it a project or a community.

I'm sure you have a way of describing it, but you started.

2017. I think I discovered it pretty soon afterwards with the community.

I think maybe you are trying to bring people together with similar

interests, thinking about how we explore the world, how we look at the

world, curiosities involved there.

Perhaps you could explain in a nutshell what just looking is.

Yeah, I describe it usually as a kind of a community

led or community powered.

Project celebrating slowness and curiosity, and I can

tell you how it started.

Might explain it a bit more clearly, which is I was experiencing, I guess

maybe like a numbness, overwhelmed by the news and looking at screens all the time.

And I was working in humanitarian emergency response at the time.

It's pretty intense.

And at the same time I had a meditation practice.

I have a meditation practice, which is it just focused on curiosity.

And I just wanted to expand that to the rest of my day.

I already had a passion for photography, so I thought that

would be a good place to start.

So I started to do these photography walks and my idea was to host a

series of playful kinda photo walks around the city of London where I

live, and we'd meet in places that are not exactly well known for photo.

So like for example, I remember one of the first ones we did at rush hour focusing on

the beauty of strangers in the financial district with everyone walking at high

speed and looking very stressed and tired.

And then on another walk on a Sunday morning, we were looking at

the play of light in a cemetery.

Another time we were walking across a bridge, but the whole one hour

walk was just, it was a small bridge, like a hundred meters the whole time.

We were just on that one bridge.

And we still do these walks, but the project has evolved in several ways.

So I have a love hate relationship with social media, but I do curate and that's

guess how you must have found the project.

I curate photography on Instagram and Blue Sky as well now purely with the

intention of disrupting people's feeds with moments of alertness and presence.

So that's a kind of key part of the project, but there's also

a monthly community newsletter and there's a different.

A theme about looking about attention each time.

So last month was about artificial intelligence and being hungry for

the human, which I think is more than the flavor of the month.

So I think there's gonna be more of that.

But looking ahead, I want it to be a platform for creating more tools and

books, and the idea is to recreate the experience of the photo walk

of the conversations that happen.

In between and after the walk, but in a way that people can do

it for themselves or with their family or with their communities.

So yeah, if anyone listening is interested in the project, I would

recommend signing up for the newsletter.

It's a lot of fun for me to write.

It's a labor of love and hopefully inspiring for others to read too.

I love your newsletter.

I really look forward to it landing in my inbox, and I can tell you

enjoy putting it together too.

As from one newsletter writer to another, you can see the care and

attention that goes into it and.

Thinking about just looking itself.

When I was looking around on your website and looking at some of the

things you've written about it and talk about it being the slow, mindful

and creative observation of ordinary moments, and I think it was those

words, ordinary moments, stuck with me.

I do a lot of work with slow looking, mainly in the museum, but we have a lot

of crossover into everyday life as well.

So quite often as museum educators, we are thinking about how we can

develop the practice first in ourselves before we then go and try

and teach others to use it in a museum.

So we might take slow looking into our everyday life and use it to

pay attention to those ordinary moments or things we overlook.

But I'd love to hear from you what drew you to focus on the

everyday, these ordinary moments.

Can I just respond to one thing you said about how we need to

embody this slowness of looking ourselves before trying to share it with others?

There's been a lot of research about teaching mindfulness, and one of the

key insights has been that it's not effective unless the person doing

the teaching practices themselves.

So that's quite different from a lot of different subjects

where it's less important.

But yeah, so this particular study I'm thinking about was a long term

study that was done at scale in schools, and one of the conclusions

was it's not really working.

And that was because the study itself required this kinda scaling

up and recruiting of teachers that weren't necessarily into

it and hadn't had much practice.

So, makes a huge difference.

But yeah, to answer your other question about ordinary moments.

Yeah.

Why ordinary moments?

Well, the everyday is important to me because.

That's where we live.

Yes.

Feeling connected, inspired and in awe is not just for special occasions

when we make that big trip to see the waterfall or the pyramids or whatever.

It's every day that we need to feel alive.

And so that's one of the reasons.

But the other is that we have this kind of evolutionary negativity bias for the

everyday, which helps us to survive.

It's important to be able to see.

Threats and danger and things that aren't quite good enough.

But this can be, to use that word, uh, used before quite numbing.

And I think it's important to counter that with taking in the

goodness to everyday wonders the taste of a peach at breakfast time.

The laughter of a child across the street, some rubbish on the floor that happens to.

Looked like a ballerina dancing.

It's feeling alive in the everyday by paying closer attention to those

things that we would otherwise have kinda rushed past and linked to that, I

think it is a sense of caring as well.

So one of, one of my mantras is noticing is a first step to caring as

a society we're currently experiencing.

And what's being described as a epidemic of loneliness.

We all live in our filter bubbles and, and we're so easily polarized

as well as a result of that.

But once we start noticing things in the everyday, we see the elderly neighbors,

the immigrants running the local shop, the pigeons who share our streets.

We feel connected to them, and we take them in.

We care about them.

It shifts us from this individualistic perspective too.

Being part of something bigger.

So I think that can happen every day.

I totally agree.

And I think when we take those moments to notice on our own, certainly

there's a shift there with the awe and the wonder that we can experience.

We can feel more alive.

But I also think when we have those moments of noticing together,

so when we are doing this.

Practice with other people, as we might do in the museum, but I've seen you

do in workshops that you lead as well.

There's something really special about discovering newness in the ordinary,

in the everyday looking for things in familiar places with other people.

There's a kind of social aspect to this connectedness as well.

Yeah, definitely.

I think that.

Attention is a social practice.

We miss that part of it because it's like so intimate in our minds, isn't it?

When you're a baby, how do you learn what to look at and someone points at something

and says, look, and that's how we develop.

Maybe we can talk a little bit about attentional filters, because this is

where the social aspect comes in, so.

The way attention works is through filters.

If someone in a busy room calls your name, you're having a conversation

with someone, there's like a hundred other things going on, but you will

still hear that name being called out across the room because it's your name.

So we have a priority that we place on certain information, right?

That's how filters work.

They filter out some things.

And they allow us to notice some things.

And it's not just names.

There's lots of things that we've developed filters for.

And as a result, there's things that we miss completely, like

we can't even believe afterwards if someone shows us a video.

Have you seen that guerrilla video?

Yeah.

The, yeah.

It's like, where was that guerrilla?

It's just a shock, isn't it?

And the first time you see it, and it's a phenomenon called

in Inattentional blindness.

You know, we are literally blind to it.

And, and the funny thing is that the information is being processed somewhere.

There was an experiment, which you were looking at one thing, but in the

corner of the screen, in the corner of what you can see, things pop up.

And if it's your name, you'll see it.

If it's someone else's name, you won't see it.

So like clearly both names yours and someone else's, that information

was getting processed somewhere.

But it's at quite a late stage of processing that the brain

actually determines whether the stimulus ought to be noticed,

like perceived consciously or not.

And so to go back to the social thing, this is where people can easily nudge

our filters 'cause we place a lot of importance on what other people say.

So.

If I'm running a mindful photography walk and I'm walking past a tree,

but there's someone standing there looking at it intensely.

I'm gonna stop and have a look at it too, even if they don't say anything.

But if I get chatting to that person and they say, yeah, actually, I, I

love trees and I've been studying, this particular is a London Planet

Tree and this one is 170 years old.

And so it would've been here with World War I, world War ii,

it would've survived the fires.

And I, it's gonna shift how I see this tree, right.

And it's because of that social importance and also the stories that we hear from

others, that our attentional filters can be influenced quite easily, more easily

than other ways of trying to do it.

And so, yeah, that's why I love getting people together and

pointing things out to you.

It's just always fascinates me what people notice and things

that I have completely missed.

Yeah, and it shows you how many different

literal perspectives there are.

When you see, you have a group of say, 15 or so, people looking at the

same thing and they're all noticing slightly different things, perhaps

based on where they're literally standing or just their own experiences,

their own thoughts, their ideas.

They're bringing everything.

To that looking, I think you say as well, that it needs practice that

we need to rewild our attention, retrain our attention to be able

to focus on the things that we're unconsciously filtering out.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

How do we strengthen our attention muscles?

Yeah.

I, I sometimes talk about like the freedom of attention and it's because attention

is rooted in habitual tendencies, filters.

And so it is a practice because we've practiced it so many times before.

So we will notice the things that we've always noticed, and therefore

we will feel and believe and act in ways that we've done before,

and it keeps us in a repertoire.

I talk about the repertoire of noticing, and I guess I, I like the

word rewilding because it's just.

If we start noticing things that we don't usually, that we normally

walk past, then we're strengthening our ability to place our attention

somewhere new and also to place our attention where we want it to be.

Aligned to what matters to us in that moment.

And that's freedom.

Like that's the ultimate freedom, right?

To shape our experience of life.

And you created a set of 60 cards to help us with

these experiments in looking.

So can you tell us a little bit about the cards?

I have my own set here in front of me that I absolutely love.

How can they give us this freedom of attention?

So the 60 experiments in looking are a toolkit that I developed in

collaboration with a designer called Anna.

She had come to one of my photo walks and as usual, I had these prompts

and cards that I was handing out.

And at the end she was like, this needs to be a thing.

We need to create this into something which people can do on their own,

or as I said, with their groups.

And so they're, yeah, 60 beautifully printed cards,

and they come in a black tin.

And there are series of prompts, and the reason I describe them as experiments

rather than prompts is because you don't have to believe them, like their

ideas or stories or suggestions, but you don't have to believe in them.

You just have to give them a go.

Entertain that perspective and then see, evaluate what it does to your looking.

So for example, one of the cards is called Sun.

It reads there's a massive ball of fire in the sky.

Its light has traveled more than eight minutes.

To reach your eyes.

I think that's an interesting example because you read that and then right

now I'm looking out of the window and it makes me feel differently about the

light, and I notice how it's bouncing off these orange leaves and making

them look more orange in some places, a little bit more Bown than others.

And that's because of a story that's playing in my mind right now about.

The light and that particular fact is happens to be a true story.

It does take eight minutes and 20 seconds, I think, because it sounds

like 150 million kilometers away, which probably doesn't mean anything.

It's a number that's roughly three and a half, 4,000 times going round the earth.

That's a long way away and.

It makes you appreciate the light more to know that it's traveled all the way,

don't you think?

Absolutely.

And when it's not there as well, when we get to the darker months

of the year, but I think there were quite a few that stood out to me.

I've got the boring card on top because I also really love the idea of really

paying attention to things that we would find uninteresting at first glance, and

then going back to see if we can find something interesting them about them.

So.

I love, choose something uninteresting to observe.

Notice how slippery this is, as new details begin to reveal themselves.

And that's such a wonderful prompt because quite often when I'm

working with groups in the museum as well, we have our favorites.

We will work with certain objects or artworks that we are drawn to in some way.

We can't explain why.

Maybe it's knowledge or maybe it's an aesthetic or a technical or some kind of.

Appeal from that particular object, and we will leave others by the wayside.

So the fact that we can perhaps focus our attention on something that we might find

uninteresting at first, and see perhaps what new details we can find, see if we

can see it in a completely different way.

So I absolutely love that one.

The definition for boredom is really interesting.

I mean, there's a lot of debate about it in psychology, but the

growing consensus is that it's.

An emotion of feeling unable to engage meaningfully in

whatever it is you're doing.

Like you want to be doing something meaningful and you wanna be engaged in

that, but you're just not able to be.

So it's interesting because the minute I give you that prompt, or the card gives

you the prompt being bored, you are.

Now meaningfully engaged in an exercise and unable to feel bored.

And so it's always really funny when people do that and then they come

back and say, that was really hard.

Like I just, I was trying to be bored and just look at something that normally

would bore me, but I just found it really fascinating in these layers of detail

or started reveal themselves and it's just so much fun to get that feedback.

So

tell me how you kind of imagine people might use these cards.

You do give a few tips for guidance.

There are some rules that I thought were super interesting as well.

The first rule being to slow down and what I loved.

Was that you said slowing down doesn't always take more time.

It is an attitude of not rushing to reach the end, and I think

that's super interesting as well.

I often think about slow looking and I get lots of questions from people

saying, oh, it takes a lot of time.

And quite often it's about thinking about the process of looking and

it takes as long as it takes.

It's not about the duration, it's about the process of.

Finding more beyond the first glance.

So can you talk a little bit about some of the rules behind the cards?

Yeah, and that's probably the most important

one that you just picked out.

I think there's a feeling of never having enough time, isn't there?

And so reminding people that it's just an attitude.

'cause I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a physicist by background, but, so

I, I studied physics at Cambridge and I've always had love for physics, but

time literally is, you know, stretchy.

And so a minute of looking at.

A leaf or a painting can feel really different depending on

the presence you bring to it.

So if you give yourself permission to, to slow down and you just assume

that there's gonna be something really interesting, I mean, it is

like you are in a treasure hunt now, and that one minute can feel really.

Luxurious.

And so, yeah, I think that's an important rule.

And the other really important one is about kindness.

So I, I feel like there's these two wings of practice, curiosity and

kindness that I, I try to practice every day all the time, and it's

easier to weigh in on curiosity.

But if I'm having a tough day, the curiosity comes with

like negativity and judgment.

And so be kind to yourself like every time our attention goes somewhere

where we don't want it to, and we bring it back like we are strengthening

those muscles and it takes time.

So just to keep bringing it back again and again, and

congratulate yourself for having.

Strengthened and exercised your muscles of attention in the process.

So I just wanted to say in terms of how to use them, as I mentioned the

cards, they come in a a metal black tin.

The idea being that you can take them with you on a walk

and not worry about the rain.

And also there's the guidance for how you can do it by

yourself, but also with a group.

And we've offered them to our community through our newsletter.

And now they're available in our online shop, but we're just about

to release a version for retailers.

So physical shops and, yeah.

I thought this would be interesting to your listeners 'cause hopefully

museum shops and art galleries.

Would like to stop them and so do get in touch if that's you.

Absolutely.

And these cards, I must say, I collect a lot of museum cards.

I'm a bit of a collector with these things, and they are beautifully packaged,

and as you say, they're in a really sturdy box so that you can take them with

you because you don't want your cards being in a cardboard box and getting

wet if you're stuck in the rain as well.

I have one more question for you about the cards, which would be you advise

people to take a card and stick with it.

What happens if you feel you cannot use that card or you

can't do anything with it?

What would your advice be?

Yeah, so we have this situation in photo walks and

we usually encourage people to swap.

So you, if you're done with a card, then you swap with someone

else if you're in a group.

But before doing so, as you say, I really encourage people to just.

Let go of some assumptions around what's interesting and what's not,

what's worthy of your attention and what's not, and give it a go.

Like I say, it's an experiment.

You can't really get it wrong, and you're definitely gonna learn something

about yourself and about the world.

So that's the kind of, it's a nudge, but I feel like it's also just a permission for

people to, to linger with whatever it is that they're being encouraged to look at.

Yeah, and I think we need that permission, don't we?

It's like if you're a parent, you're used to giving your child instructions in terms

of what to do rather than what not to do.

Like it's always easier to say.

I wonder if there'll be any squirrels out in the woods today.

Let's go check rather than no more bluey for you today.

And it's the same for adults, and we just need to be told what to do.

And sometimes, because it gives us permission to do that thing for

longer than we would if we were just.

On our own.

Absolutely.

I think it takes us back a little bit to the boring card that I put

at the top of the pile as well.

Sometimes that can feel a little bit uncomfortable to sit with something

that you don't always immediately see a way through or how that might work.

But sticking with it and really thinking about how we can perhaps sit with.

That feeling of discomfort for a little bit and push past

that instinctive reaction.

And I feel we sometimes do that very much in the museum as well.

If we're looking at something, particularly art that perhaps we

don't have an immediate reaction to or something that we have a cold reaction

to, then we can push past it by taking a little bit of time to sit with it and

seeing what happens, what comes up if we spend a little bit more time with it.

So, exactly.

Yeah.

The one card, for example, called shatter.

And the prompt is find a moving shadow and it's really clear, really specific.

And uh, the other day someone had that card and they said,

it just is nothing moving.

And then they realized that they were moving and they became really

fascinated with their own shadow.

It was like that Peter Pan situation where they started photographing

and leaning into their own shadow.

But yeah, it's that permission and that encouragement to go a little bit longer.

Go past that.

Point of discomfort and just ease into it, not take yourself too seriously.

Yeah.

And see what happens as well.

What happens.

I love that phrase.

You've been extremely busy in the past year or so.

You've also released a book, your Best Digital Life, and I loved reading

about how our digital habits, how our phone use, particularly our being

online all the time, can really affect the way we see and pay attention.

So can you perhaps.

Talk a little bit about this idea of algorithmic seeing versus

the more slow offline looking that we were just talking about.

Yes.

Yeah, so we were talking about filters earlier, attentional filters, and

at the moment, because we spend a third of our waking lives in digital

environments, and these days our filters come from those digital environments

and the information presented to us.

It is very compelling.

It appeals to our sense of urgency or social connection, or fear of missing

out our need for companionship.

This is where social media and AI comes in and meets our human needs, and it's

important to remember that this is happening to us because we're human.

And to be kind to ourself when we're wondering why is it that my

attention is so easily manipulated by these apps, these feeds, and I think

it's very easy to trade our agency over our attention for convenience.

So any practice that helps us to slow down, reclaim that control, that

agency, our capacity to make a choice.

Is really important in these times.

And so this book, your Best Digital Life is all about aligning your

attention with your intention.

So I sometimes say algorithms amplify our least intentional

selves because everything is so slippery and convenient that we end

up in a behavioral patterns that.

Are kinda designed for us rather than doing what we think

is important in the moment.

And to take an example from the book, like you can just pick up your phone

to check what time it is and then.

20 minutes later, you're wondering why you are posting a story on

Instagram, like, what happened?

And it's because it's designed to do that to us.

And so to just take a moment to slow down before picking it up, knowing that

it's a very slippery and manipulative environment that we're entering into.

So what is it that we wanted look at right now when we're picking up the phone?

And I think you also wrote that even having your phone.

I'm looking at my phone now and uh, even though it's face down on

the desk, it's still attracting our attention in some way.

Even it's mere presence.

Even if I can't see the screen or there's no notifications going off, it's

doing something to us at the same time.

Yes.

Yeah.

The phone has taken a very high position in our attentional filters.

Like it's up there with our name and our sense of home.

And so because of that, the phone has a tug on your attention.

If it's on your desk, if it's face down, if it's in a bag under

your desk, if it's switched off.

But if it's out of the room and it's switched off, then you start getting

back to your normal cognitive functions.

So

if we're using our phone as a camera, when we're out and about, does

it have the same kind of pull for us?

'cause I'm just thinking, sometimes I'm using my camera to zoom in on

things, to look at things, and then I might get distracted by something

else and having to pull myself back to what I was originally doing.

I've opened it up and I feel then that there's this kind of Pandora's box effect

where you kind of, you try not to get dragged into your phone at the same time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I am a big proponent of single purpose devices generally, so it just makes it

easier for my brain to know what I'm doing if the tool itself is telling me.

Right now you're taking photographs.

Right now you're listening to music.

Right now you're reading a book, and right now you're connecting with an

old friend or I was talking to my.

Teenage niece the other day about her phone relationship.

But one counterintuitive piece of advice I gave her was maybe you need another phone,

like, because there's so many things that you need to do on your phone, but

there's other things that you only wanna do once in a while, maybe once a day.

Like checking your socials or reading your substack or like just

to be really intentional about what you're doing, basically.

It sometimes is easier if your physical environment is giving

you some support in that.

And I think there's a real through line with your work here as well,

because it's thinking about intention and attention, which is always how I

describe slow looking and thinking about intentional phone use and where we place

our attention is incredibly important.

Something you talk about in this book.

Yeah, we talked about algorithmic looking.

Yeah.

Versus this intentional looking.

And the main difference is that when you are being kinda guided by algorithms as

to what to look at, you are in a passive mode, you're consuming information.

Whereas when you are out looking, whether you are just being curious

or taking photographs or in a museum, you are in an active mindset.

You're curating information so you, you're much more aware on

a kind of metacognitive level.

You're noticing what you're noticing, and so you realize like, oh, I find

this painting really interesting.

I wonder why.

And you're curious about your own attention at that point.

So that keeps you really active and engaged.

So I think that's the main difference, is kinda the passive scrolling and consuming

versus the active curating of information and deciding what you wanna lean in.

On and pay more attention to.

And do you have any other practical tips for kind of bringing that

freshness back to our way of looking?

Is there perhaps one piece of advice you would give to listeners to do when they

finish listening to this conversation?

So one piece of advice is to really think carefully

about what you wanna notice more of in your life at any one moment.

So for example, today I'm going for a walk at lunchtime and I

want to notice my neighborhood.

I'm probably gonna leave my phone at home, but yesterday I really wanted to enjoy the

birds and so I took my phone along with me and I have this thing called Merlin.

It's an app.

Oh yeah.

Which tells me which birds I can hear and.

It just made me feel so much more connected to the wildlife

and so there's no one right way.

And the challenge is making sure that we're really staying aligned

to our, so one thing that I've really learned from studying

technology and how easily influenced we are is that there's something.

In the human nature, which is resistant to friction.

You know, we always lean towards convenience, which makes sense, like why

would we wanna do the inconvenient thing?

But the challenge is that sometimes having convenience defined for us

isn't aligned with our intention.

And so I started playing with this idea of like adding

strategic friction into my life.

And so, for example, having devices that only allow me to do one thing on them

makes it harder for me to do those other.

You described as a Pandora's box of options of things to do.

So the prompts, the 60 experiments and looking are similar in the sense

that they're adding friction to what you would normally want to look at.

And they're saying, Hey Ashley, why don't you go look at a shadow

or go look at the light or go look at strangers walking past.

It's not always comfortable.

It's not always what you want to do, convenient in the moment,

but it gives you that meaningful friction, which takes you to a new

place and opens up your perspective.

So I think that the design world and the tech world's aim to create

a completely frictionless experience of life is a little bit scary because

it's what differentiates us from.

Being a machine, if everything that we do is predictable and we're always

taking the path of least resistance, which is what makes us predictable,

and there's a quote by Wendell Berry, which I love, which is that it's easy

for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between

people who wish to live as creatures.

And people who wish to live as machines creature, please.

That's what I would say.

Thank you for sharing that.

I'd love, uh, to ask you a couple of final questions.

The first one is always looking to the future.

What's next for you?

What have you got coming up?

And the last question is, how can people find out more about you and get in touch?

Thanks for asking.

I'm growing.

Just looking at the moment and working on a series of books, each one's focused

on an aspect of everyday life that is so easy to overlook, but it can be a source

of wonder and meaning and connection.

So lots of opportunities to collaborate with photographers, with experts, with the

people who are really passionate about.

Different ordinary sightings.

And so yeah, we're looking at pigeons and the London Planetree

and Moss and all kinds of stuff.

Call to action would be to join the just Looking newsletter noticing,

and email me if you're interested in stocking the 60 experiments and looking.

And yeah, come and hang out with us on Instagram or Blue Sky, but

obviously do it intentionally.

Thank you so much for sharing those.

We will put links in the show notes and thank you Menka for

coming on the podcast today.

You're very welcome.

It was a pleasure to speak to you.

So a huge thank you to Menka for being on the show today.

You can find out more about Menka and her work by signing up for

the Just Looking newsletter at We are Just looking.org or follow the

project on Instagram and Blue Sky.

If you are interested in stocking the 60 experiments in looking cards

in your museum shop, you can reach Menka on her email address, which

I've listed in the show notes.

Also go to the show notes for all the relevant links for today's episode.

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Art Engager will return in January with more inspiring conversations.

Thank you so much for listening this year.

See you next time.

Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.

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