The Pleasure Principle as design ethic

Yesterday I read The Vagina Monologues for the first time - compelling reading from cover to cover. It's an amazing, moving, searingly honest and often funny series of first-person accounts from women about their experiences of their vaginas - from menstruation to sex to physical violence. Brings a taboo subject to the open with a spirit of love. Why should we feel ashamed of our bodies?

So - how is this relevant to what I'm working on? Well, I think it's all about celebrating the pleasure principle, and being grounded in our bodies. Reading the first-hand accounts of other people made me feel more grounded and connected to myself,and to my own experiences, and by extension to other people. More human, you might say.

In the afternoon, I also read a series of pamphlets on environmental economics written by the pioneering think-tank new economics foundation. Although undoubtably brilliant, they were dense, hard to read, and very intellectual: a bit like the prime ministerial debates on the telly.

In short - they made me switch off, physically contract, and get a slight headache, though I made a mental note to self: must get my head round this later, as an awful lot of good sense and clever thinking was contained therein.

Of course, the two books written deliberately in different styles, and for different reasons and occasions, but maybe it's just worth remembering the pleasure principle as a design ethic when we're talking about communicating ecology - after all, ecology is all about connection too...