Unflattening

Numenius drew my attention last week to a book by Nick Sousanis entitled Unflattening. This was originally his doctoral dissertation (!) but written entirely as a comic, looking to explore new ways of seeing. When you only are given one path — one perspective — you are blind to the myriad other possibilities, other ways, other directions, other modes of thinking.

The book is very dense and I just picked it up this morning from our local indie bookstore, so I haven’t finished it yet, but this is one I’ll be returning to again and again. Douglas Wolk calls it a “genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form.” Imagine my delight when I learned that it was published by my former employer, Harvard University Press… the notes at the back are worth the price of admission on their own, illustrated as they are with thumbnails and drafts of his pages.