The Archive of Free Thinking

think – act – grow

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  • Can we ever go home?

    “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”  Maya Angelou The importance of the home is indisputable. It is both a physical place and an emotional experience; somewhere which simultaneously protects us from the outside world and helps us to…

  • Do you know your place?

    ​​There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. Ernest Hemingway Hemingway’s perspective that there is ‘nothing noble in being superior’ challenges our devotion to hierarchy. He does not argue that there are no differences between men, but rather that the enforcement of these…

  • The value of stories

    “Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” G.K. Chesterton Chesterton’s quote can be interpreted in four distinct ways. It is a criticism of intellectual elitism, a clarification of the distinctions between fiction and literature: between entertainment and insight, and between freedom of imagination and the prescribing…

  • The importance of understanding video games

    “They assimilate games into some other, more respectable category of human practice.”  C. Thi Nguyen Nguyen argues that comparing games to other art forms, rather than establishing and examining games within their own category, leads to an underestimation of their distinctiveness and importance. An importance which lies in a game’s unique quality as a medium;…

  • The secret to better parks – a visual essay

    “Parks are not automatically anything” Jane Jacobs

  • Are we drowning in data?

    “Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.” Mark Twain The conventional view on data and garbage is “garbage in, garbage out.” But Mark Twain raises a more fundamental point, that data is only as useful as its potential applications, and these must be…

  • How to ‘energise’ politics

    “Agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and sleepiness are the law of absolute monarchies.” Alexis de Tocqueville Tocqueville observed that ‘agitation and mutability’ are features of societies responsive to the political needs of their people. This essay examines the fundamental forces that drive this change: injustice, knowledge…

  • Artificial Intelligence; artificial results

    “Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person… on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your client’s refineries and…

  • How to pick the right medium

    “If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.” Stanley Kubrick While Stanley Kubrick’s words could be an observation on the intrinsic flexibility of film (or a somewhat arrogant assessment of his own skill as a director), it is more fundamentally a comment on the flow of ideas across mediums. This edition explores…

  • You should be listening to buildings

    “Interiors (of buildings) are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere.” Peter Zumthor Sound, like colour, offers architects a material with a wide spectrum of potential applications.  Sound in buildings can create atmosphere, rekindle memories and generate emotions. It can repurpose and refine private and public space, and it can be efficient,…