Jason Farman's Blog

Tactics For Waiting

Herbert Blau and the actors he was directing were nervous. Standing backstage before their performance of Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot, they would peek through the curtain at the audience that had gathered. The venue hadnt hosted a performance in forty years, but each seat was occupied. The play, which premiered four years earlier in 1953, was being performed for a unique audience: prisoners in San Quentin State Prison, just north of San Francisco.

Blau chose the play in part because it...

Publicity

I’ve had the chance to talk about Delayed Response in a range of settings. Here are some of the highlights.

Radio Interviews: Innovation Hub (WGBH, Boston), January 25, 2019, “Waiting Really is the Hardest Part”   http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2019/1/25/waiting-really-hardest-part/ Constant Wonder (BYU Radio, Provo, UT), January 24, 2019, “Delayed Response”   https://www.byuradio.org/episode/4e131727-8cc3-4cde-9860-43ed71c909cc/constant-wonder-evolution-of-books-healing-power-of-oxyge...

Reviews

Delayed Response has received some fantastic reviews in the press thus far. Here are the reviews.

Christianity Today (Ashley Hales), April 10, 2019, “Waiting Time Isn’t Wasted Time”    https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/april-web-only/delayed-response-jason-farman-art-waiting.html Australian Book Review (Alex Tighe), March 18, 2019, “Alex Tighe Reviews ‘Delayed Response: The art of waiting from the ancient to the instant world’ by Jason Farman”    https://www.australianbookreview.com....

Spinning in Place

Below is an excerpt from one of the chapters in my book.

Spinning in Place

Before the invention of traffic signals, the flow of cars through a city was chaotic. As the automobile increased in presence in the early 1900s, it drove alongside horse-drawn carriages, trollies, and pedestrians, all vying for passage through the snarled streets. People depended on the police officers in a busy intersection to guide traffic smoothly, and on everyone knowing the right-of-way laws. This r...

Winner of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant

Waiting for Word has been awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation! The grant is part of their program in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology. This program offers funding to support the research and writing of books that are public facing, able to communicate their ideas to a broad readership. Since the book grant was started in 1996, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded around 100 grants to authors, such as Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures. The Sloan Foun...

How Buffer Icons Shape Our Sense of Time and Our Practices of Waiting

Below is an article that I wrote for Real Life magazine (original can be found HERE). This piece is from one of the chapters of the book that focuses on “designs of waiting” like buffering icons. We have an acute awareness of duration, and that awareness is always linked to prevailing technologies that shape how we understand and experience time. One such technology reshaping our sense of a moment is an otherwise unassuming little piece of interface design: the buffering icon — the circle sp...

Pneumatic Tubes in New York City

There are moments in history when technologies allowed us to connect with each other at unprecedented speeds. These moments gave people the ability to send messages at rates that seemed to eliminate waiting altogether. The rise of the pneumatic tube mail system was one such moment.

In 1898, miles of tube were laid underneath the streets of New York City in order to shoot canisters of mail around the city at 30 miles an hour between Post Office stations. The pneumatic tube mail system, which p...

Medieval Royal Seals at the National Archives, London

One chapter of Waiting for Word looks at how power allows people to wait differently, often giving them immunity from waiting altogether. Yet, how does someone in a position of power exert his or her influence from a distance? How does the power get communicated through messages where the person can’t be present to assert their own authority? This is one of the primary dilemmas with messages — they remove the communicator from the person they want to communicate with. The medium of that messa...