The Travelling Mindset: A Method for Seeing Everything Anew

This chapter presents an account of walk along the south side of the river Thames, the cultural quarter of London known as the South Bank. It began at the Tate Modern museum with a stroll through the galleries, and continued on to the Royal Festival Hall for a short early-evening concert of classical music. In his book The Art of Travel, the modern philosopher of everyday life Alain de Botton explains that de Maistre interrogated the concept of what de Botton calls the ‘travelling mindset’. By using a travelling mindset, detailed observation techniques, note-taking, and self-reflection, one can have a better chance of capturing thought processes, artistic decision-making, and the minute instantiations of craft in such a way as to be able to bring this tacit knowledge to the foreground. These ethnographic techniques can help to present the ephemeral but centrally important evidence of working process in a way that more clearly and convincingly presents its validity and value.