ZOOM

I recently came across an educational video from the 1970s that illustrates the relative scale of objects in the universe, from the "innerspace" between sub-atomic particles to the vastness of outer space. Yes, the production may seem a bit dated and even cheesy, but the point was really driven home. It also brought to my awareness the value of "zooming" in and out cognitively. But first, the video.

It so happened that I saw this just after a short but much-needed holiday, where for the first time in eighteen months I was able to step out of the urgency of work and family matters to "zoom out" to a bigger picture. As it turns out, the week away may have been one of the most productive in all that time! There is the wonderful idiom of not seeing the forest for the trees, and stepping away to see the forest has given me a much better perspective on the trees to which I have had my nose pressed for so long. Not only has this given new life to those projects, but it has also lifted my mood tremendously. 

Another discovery (or re-discovery) that drove the point home was dabbling in Prezi, the "zooming" presentation software that offers a welcome non-linear alternative to "death by PowerPoint". Prezis offer the alternative to zoom into elements, which can be hidden indistinguishably inside images and zoomed into... a bit hard to describe, but this example is well worth seeing. After watching a number of jaw-dropping Prezis and trying it out myself (with less stellar results), this idea of zooming in and out from the big picture to infinite complexity really stuck with me. 

As if this weren't enough, I then stumbled (or re-stumbled) upon the beguiling RSA Animate series, which uses an animation style known as scribing - representing the spoken word in a highly visual way. The end of each RSA animation zooms out from the intricate network of illustrated ideas to the "big picture", which includes the entire opus. This is the kind of thing that makes any chaos theory buff tingle. 

The point of all this is that human beings (especially the one sitting in my seat) benefit from using their faculty of zooming in and out to the fullest. Especially in the world of work, and perhaps even more so of study and scholarship, results can be enriched infinitely by "zooming out" to other activities, other disciplines and even total randomness (known in a more poetic bygone era as serendipity). In fact, an influential analysis of creativity (The Art of Thought by Graham Wallas, 1926) suggests that an "incubation period" of stepping away from a project may indeed be the most productive step after a certain amount of preparation, since it leads to "illumination". 

Zooming out is not a waste time: it may the the time best spent.