Water Fountains Are Thinking Technology

A family member recently had a small water fountain installed in their garden. It’s a cascading waterfall that looks right out of a Japanese garden, complete with a constant little trickle sound. Next to a patio heater, it looks like a kind of odd divergent fold of reality inside England’s suburbia.

I recently had the pleasure of doing a day’s work next to this slice of Japan. Thinking about ideas. Strategising. Pondering. And as the day went on I was struck by the clarity of thought I was having around this little thing.

I started to realise that this fountain - any fountain - may be a kind of thinking technology.

Yeah. Thinking technology. This little fountain gave me space to think in a way that few other environments do. But why?

I think it’s to do with how it engages your brain. And to understand that, we need to look at where we spend a lot of time.

The daily modern experience

For those of us who live in cities and built up areas, or even just busy rural areas, our environments can require constant attention. Billboards and adverts demand interpretation (the good ones at least), conversation and noise need translating, and your physical body and brain are almost always trying to find the easiest route through the madness.

I don’t often experience urban environments as places designed to help me think. That’s why parks are so good. Almost all of my good thinking is done within parks within cities. There’s something about being inside a peaceful place surrounded by noise which feels conducive to good thinking.

Turns out psychologists already made ART

In my digging I came across this theory, ironically called ART - Attention Restoration Theory.

(Definition from Wiki):

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) proposes that spending time in natural settings or even viewing natural scenes helps people recover from directed attention fatigue (mental tiredness that occurs when sustaining deliberate focus on tasks). Natural environments often evoke a state known as soft fascination that allows the mind to rest and reflect, supporting later task performance.

Soft fascination is a great phrase.

I also counter the whole busy city thing by working in coffee shops with manageable noise. They allow your brain to be plugged in to what’s around you - but not needing to actually actively manage it. That helps to give space for thinking. That was my first thought next to the fountain, how similar this situation is to my coffee shop routine.

But ART doesn’t quite fully explain the coffee shop example. So what does constitute good thinking technology?

What makes good thinking technology?

Take silence. It can at times be hard to work in. You become kind of hyper aware of yourself trying to think. So you start scrolling and your mind starts searching because it’s not focused on something.

But fountains or coffee shops or even just manageable background noise...they’re essentially stimulating you without implicating you in what’s happening. By implicating, I mean placing you in an experience which asks something of you. Once your source of attention needs something from you, some portion of your attention has to be allocated to it.

Find your fountain

When you find the right environment for you to think well in, it won’t drain your attention. It’ll support it, like a sauce on a low heat bubbling away. It just gets better the more time it spends there.

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Thank you and hope this piece, and what’s on this site, helps you.