Lined & Unlined

Being available in response

Thu, 20 May 2010 01:25:00 -0400

Frank Chimero, a man full of good ideas, shared another one recently: a text playlist. Basically, it’s a selection of readings that he revisits on a regular basis, “almost a pep talk in text form,” as he describes it. Frank’s list included a ton of good stuff (I’ve done some thinking about “stock and flow” myself), and the wonderful Liz Danzico responded in kind with a great list of her own.

I’m still working on my list, but while I’m in the process of pulling it together I decided I had to share one reading that I’ve been revisiting a lot over the last few days. It’s from Lawrence Weschler’s incredible book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is about the artist Robert Irwin. Chapter 15 is called “Being Available in Response,” which is also the name of a project initiated by Irwin.

The first time I read this chapter I nearly lept out of my chair — I got so excited I reread it three or four times right away.

Rather than trying to explain the project too much, though, I’ll let Irwin (and Weschler) tell you about it as they do in the book. Here’s Irwin:

“I just sort of let it be known that I was available, in a way like I’m saying it to you. I mean, I didn’t put out any ads or anything, but word got around. And you could be, let’s say, up at UCLA, and you’d say, ‘Well, let’s take advantage of that. We’ll have him come up and talk to the students.’ And that’s what I’d do. Or, ‘We’ll have him come up and do a piece on the patio.’ And I would just come up and do that.

“There’s an important distinction to be made here,” [Irwin] continued, “between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest, on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don’t stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you’re going to get a half-hour answer.’”

People scratched their heads. Weschler explains:

Irwin was availble in response but for a long time nobody asked. Nobody knew what to make of the offer, and Irwin was no help: he didn’t have a clue. “Curators would ask me, ‘If we invite you, what are you going to do?’ and I would have to say, ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do; I’ll just spend some time there and then decide.’ […] In other words, we had no connection, because they kept needing something tangible, and I kept saying, ‘I don’t know,’ which also put into these situations the possibility of failure. I could go to the Walker Museum, let’s say, and they’d set up an exhibition with all their catalogues and press releases and everything, and there was a risk that when I got there, I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything.”

Though it was slow to gain momentum, Irwin’s idea eventually caught on. Weschler continues:

[…] By 1972–73, enthusiasm had soared to such an extent that Irwin was almost continually on the raod, wending his way through labrynthine tours, travelling weeks on end, for example, from one small midwestern college to another. […] At each stop he might stay a week, talk with students, contrive an installation, stir things up, and then be gone. For many young art students in the vast middle reaches of this continent during the pale middle reaches of the past decade, Irwin’s roadshow constintuted a first exposure to significant strains of modernism and minimalism.

The trips also grounded Irwin:

“The ideas I came to be dealing with during this period were getting real obscure, even for me, to the point where I was beginning to wonder what and how I practiced in the world. There were some critics who from a political perspective attacked that obscurity as a kind of elitism. […] To me, the crucial difference between obscurantism and elistism is availability.”

He charged nothing for his visits:

“I do things which from any social or political view are outrageous. I mean, they absolutely ignore all the social issues of the day. […] But my way of balancing that out is that there’s one thing I can do that has immediate social value, and that has been this kind of running around and talking with people. So I do that for free. Because I don’t want to put economics on it at all.”

Trapdoors and logic bombs

Sun, 16 May 2010 15:16:00 -0400

Taking a break to set my fear aside while reading this NYT review of former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke’s new book, I was reminded of how much I enjoy the language of hacking:

North Korea is suspected of being behind the cyberattacks of July 2009 that took down the Web servers of the Treasury, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department and is thought to have placed “trapdoors” — code that allows hackers future access to a network — on computer networks on at least two continents.

Trapdoors are just one device that rival nation states and cyberterrorists can use. There are also “logic bombs” (code that can set off malicious functions when triggered), Distributed Denial of Service (D.D.O.S.) attacks (in which a site or server is flooded with more requests for data than it can process), and foreign-manufactured software and hardware that might have been tampered with before being shipped to the States.

For more — including rock phish, flip buttons, and of course, Trojan horses — consult Wikipedia’s “malware” category page.

The invisible tribe

Sun, 16 May 2010 14:59:00 -0400

As is now widely known, and as NYT reports, Twitter has donated the tweets from its public timeline to The Library of Congress. The data takes up much less physical and digital space than you’d think. Ten billion tweets occupy just 5TB of storage space, enough to easily fit on a desktop. But dealing with the onslaught of primary source material may require a new kind of historian:

A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years. […] [History professor Daniel J.] Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the “staggeringly large historical record” of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward “anecdotal history.”

Rather than telling and retelling history, then, the new historians’ role will be to edit history. Liz Danzico explains,

[I]nformation overload is not a new problem and therefore does not accurately describe what’s at issue today. The critical issue is simply a failure of filters.

Enter the editor.

There has long been an invisible tribe, a mysterious group, who transform scattered thoughts into compelling stories, who splice hundreds of hours of video into feature-length films, who segregate the semicolons from the em dashes. These are editors working across media sectors — publishing, film, music, more — to deliver transformative stories with clarity and grace.

Whether we see it or not, we’re becoming editors ourselves. In the Gutenberg era, the one-to-many relationship, in which an editor dictated the content for the masses, was common. In the post-Gutenberg era, our reliance became more democratic: We sought out editors who could sift through the staggering amount of information for us, signal where to look, what to read, and what to pay attention to. Now there’s another shift at play; […] We are, for the first time, accepting the role of editor, and exhibiting our editorial qualities outward.

What’s interesting in comparing these two articles is the push and pull between the kind of bottom-up, user-generated editing that Liz describes and the kind of top-down, authority-driven editing that historians represent. My suspicion is that we’ll need a blend of the two — historians who are also users, who are sensitive to the kind of spontaneous, networked editing that Liz describes, but who are also comfortable taking a broader view than anyone in the midst of a historical moment ever could. Digital humanities, indeed.

Drugs for the body, books for the mind

Sun, 16 May 2010 14:26:00 -0400

Above: A West German “‘book forest,’ where people can leave or find old volumes.” Photo by Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times.

Michael Kimmelman pens an ode to Germany’s “D.I.Y. Culture” in the NYT. He inquires about the high volume of bookshops:

Berliners looked nonplussed when I asked them to account for all the bookshops. Along with currywurst and nude saunas, bookstores have long been such a banal fact of life here, as they are across Germany, that only an outsider might bother to think their number was remarkable. The proliferation turned out to derive from a very conscious decision after the war to restore civilization in West Germany by supporting a kind of ecosystem of small publishers and small bookstores to which, in certain small towns, trucks that delivered books to the bookstores overnight also delivered drugs to the drugstores: drugs for the body, books for the mind, a metaphor of recovery.

More on the effects of portability and movement on books here. More on the relationship between writing and pharmacology here, thanks to Plato.

Getting them to show up the next day

Sun, 16 May 2010 14:02:00 -0400

Today’s NYT has an interview with Lost’s Executive Producer Carlton Cuse that touches on Charles Dickens and the act of writing serially:

The thing that we actually do is we take the nemesis of network television — the act structure — and we try to turn it to our advantage. We have six commercial breaks in an episode of “Lost,” and so our goal is when we’re breaking stories, how are we going to really make each one of these commercial breaks really exciting. Those questions led to a lot of really intense scenes and cool reversals and surprises, and I guess it must have been how Dickens would cliffhanger the end of his serials in the newspaper when he was writing them to try to get people to show up the next day.

More on seriality and Dickens here — otherwise, be sure to push the button.

RISD Wintersession Workshop

Sat, 08 May 2010 14:46:00 -0400

Above, from top: Vendors for Ooga Booga, Sister, and The Holster, at the 2009 NY Art Book Fair, PS1, Queens NY. Photos taken by Martine Syms, Golden Age, Chicago IL.

In 2004 the New York Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas issue included an entry for the “Anti-Concept Concept Store,” which detailed a series of “guerilla stores” Comme des Garçons had opened in “hip, yet-to-be-gentrified areas in cities around the world, including Berlin, Barcelona, Helsinki, Singapore, Stockholm, Ljubljana, and Warsaw.” The article continues to describe the shops, “which are installed in raw urban spaces,” and their inventory: “‘seasonless’ merchandise drawn from current and past collections.” Comme des Garçons would keep the shops open for a single year, and then close up and move on. The new format enabled “companies to tap into new markets at low cost” and “to reduce inventory by recycling old merchandise. The pop-up shop, at least in contemporary retailing circles, was born.

But pop-up shops, by another name, are as old as human society itself. As long as we’ve been gathering in urban spaces we have built markets to trade, and those markets have sustained nomadic, made-to-order commerce, a mentality of sink-or-swim success, the retrading or recycling of used goods, and the aspirational promise of buying one’s way into a better life. The bazaar seller, the flea marketeer, and the street hawker all run pop-up shops, as do the pushcart vendor, the stadium winger, the traveling salesman, the Avon girl, and the Good Humor man. Tupperware Parties are pop-up shops. So are book signings and lemonade stands.

Shops are public spaces. For each of its objects available for sale, a value is assigned. Together, a shop’s setting and prices help its objects to become socialized. We collectively answer questions like: Which objects do we value and why? What can we do with these objects once they’ve entered our community? How do the objects gathered here represent us? The shop is a natural habitat for design.

Shops use a variety of displays to present present design objects and make those objects attractive and appealing to the public. One of the most common types of display is the table, which allows a range of objects to be placed in a common space. Tables are also often used as worksurfaces. And tables are social spaces as well: we dine at a common table, or take meetings across a desk. Because tables are in such frequent use, they are active and informal spaces. We generally consider our activities at tables to be everyday activities.

The table is a horizontal space, and it is a flat space, both in shape and in hierarchy. It places all objects on the same plane, ranks them equally, and includes our own bodies among them. When surfaces don’t abide by these simple principles, they become something else. Surfaces higher than our shoulders are shelves. Surfaces that create vertical hierarchies are partitions or walls.

While most shops employ tables as a common type of display, one type of shop does not: the art gallery. In the gallery, the primary mode of display is vertical. Instead of facing one another, the typical gallery rearranges its objects to face us directly. In the gallery, we do not physically interact with objects, we look at them. Rather than hold the things we find there, we behold them.

I neglected to include another forerunner to the pop-up shop in my list above: the trade fair. The trade fair, swap meet, or sales convention typically arranges its sellers for a limited time — a week, a weekend, a holiday — along rows of endless tabletops. To house vendors in the manner they’re accustomed, large halls and ballroom-like spaces are built.

Your MFA exhibition is in one such ballroom: the Rhode Island Convention Center, in downtown Providence. Presenting art objects in this context requires a serious reformation of the existing space. Partitions are brought in, lights are hung, vitrines are built, and the space is transformed into a large-format gallery. The final mode of the MFA exhibition is quite far from its original one. Rather than rows of tables, we find a maze of walls. And rather than presenting objects for sale, we find objects presented for appreciation and contemplation.

Together over the next several weeks, we will work to understand how these two modes for the Convention Center space — first as a trade fair, then as an art gallery — could be mixed, mashed, questioned, and blurred. As part of this effort, we will design and construct a pop-up shop and present it as a space within your existing MFA exhibition. To stock the shop, each of you will adapt portions from your thesis research into an object for sale. These can be anything: a book, a zine, a button, a tshirt, etc. Beside the issues of presentation, context, and display raised by the store, your creation of an object for sale to the public will ask you to consider your thesis work within a broader field of design production, estimate what the value of that production might be, and anticipate the public’s reaction to that valuation. Put bluntly, the production of a design object for sale in a shop will bring your work from the ivory tower to the market square.

Alongside the objects you present for sale, you may present vintage objects for resale that deepen, enhance, or complicate the objects you have made. Each of you must resolve for yourselves what you will produce, how much of it you will make, and how to price it. Together, you must also resolve the mechanics of the shop itself: how the table is laid out, how payments will work, etc.

Like any serious shop, ours will have a business plan. Consider this your project brief and objectives, or, alternately, my expectations for you.

Your shop will be:

01. Based on a tabletop as its primary surface
02. Easily moveable
03. Available in at least three different cities including Providence and NYC
04. Ready for setup and takedown in 60 minutes or less
05. Reliant on a cash-free checkout process
06. Able to generate $4,000 or more in sales
07. Profitable
08. Featured in the design press
09. Promoted in print and online
10. Fun to conceive, visit, and operate

Good luck, and I look forward to your progress,
RG.

This class was first given in winter 2010 at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.

Readings

Fortini, Amanda. “The Anti-Concept Concept Store,” The New York Times Magazine (4th Annual Year in Ideas issue), 12 December 2004.

Urstadt, Bryant. “Intentionally Temporary,” New York Magazine, 21 September 2009.

Links

Class photos, critiques, and store development on Flickr

RISD Graduate Exhibition annoucement

Make, Do shop and blog

Introductory lecture

View more presentations from robgiampietro.

Slide notes:
02. Grand Bazaar, Istanbul.
03. Market vendors.
04. Street vendor, NYC.
06. Jens Risom’s prefab weekend house. More
07. All parts of a Volkswagen Beetle. Via Paul Elliman.
08–09. Alfredo Häberli’s office form I.D. Magazine (June 2005). More
10. Moulton Standard bike construction. Via Mark Owens.
12–19. Joyn by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra.
20–24. I.D. Magazine 2008 Annual Design Review, designed by Pure+Applied.
25–38. Super Normal exhibition by Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa.
39. Mark Owens, invitation to the Free Library.
40. Student portfolio image.
41. Nieves book table. More
42. Herman Miller catalogue
43. Vitra group photo
44. Rough Trade records book, published by Black Dog
45–46. Timeline of London design for the Super Contemporary show at the Design Museum. Designed by Martino Gamper and Bibliotheque. More
48–54. Design Research restoration, Boston. More
55–56. Prada Marfa by Elmgreen and Dragset. More
57. Comme des Garçons popup shop in Warsaw, Poland.
58–62. 2009 NY Art Book Fair.
63–64. Everyday Life Objects Shop by Apartamento Magazine & Reference Library (Milan, 2009).
65–72. Generic Man Pop-Up Store (Los Angeles, 2009).
73–76. Dover Street Market, London.
77-81. Bullseye Bodega by Target (New York, 2008).
82–83. Gagosian Gallery shop (New York, 2009).
84. Parners & Spade (New York, 2008).
85. Apple Store by Apple.

Poetry of color

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:37:27 -0400

Above: Interior of Interaction of Color from Eye 75. Photo by Noah Kalina.

There are two types of primary colors: additive and subtractive. The subtractive primaries (CMYK) are made of pigment and become darker when combined, while the additive primaries (RGB) are made of light and become brighter when combined. In this formulation, Yale University Press’s new expanded edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is distinctly additive, brightening the corners of this influential classic and broadening it to a two-volume slipcased set.

With colored bindings inspired by one of Albers’s lessons, these volumes operate in concordance: one carries the text, the other an expanded set of 145 plates created by the artist and his students. The reworked design brings Interaction of Color closer to its original 1963 edition, which, according to Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, was a “set of unbound folders […] heavier and larger than anything Yale University Press had ever published.”

Once again more suited to a museum patron’s coffee table than an art student’s backpack, this comprehensive set changes our interaction with Interaction, insisting we clear a space, spread the book of plates beside Albers’s descriptions, and learn the act of seeing color afresh. In lesson after lesson, Albers shows the mutability and pliancy of color as a creative material, how it is changed by the colors surrounding it, by the time we spend looking at it, by its distance from our eye, and by our eye’s own imperfections as a perceptual apparatus.

Weber’s new foreword paints the book’s progress — and Albers’s career more generally — as a triumph over adversity, pointing out his impoverishment during the Weimar inflation, the discrimination he faced as a German at Yale after the war, and finally his efforts to persuade Americans of the value of his practice and pedagogy.

Weber is best, though, when he is providing flourishes of biographic color, including Albers’s favorite place to eat potato pancakes, or Albers’s evocative comparison of painting to spreading butter on pumpernickel bread. (Like your sense of color, your experience of breakfast may never be the same.)

Art instructors and autodidacts alike will appreciate this new edition — the classroom is thoroughly present throughout. “On the blackboard and in our notebooks we write: color is the most relative medium in art,” Albers instructs. He is a great master of analogy, teaching color relativity with an anecdote about three jugs of water, each at different temperatures. He describes the slipperiness of color memory with an almost Pop request to recall the red of Coca-Cola. Throughout, these tutorials turn into a kind of lyric free verse, with their texts broken for sense and set like poems on the page.

From a lesson on “2 natural effects,” Albers observes, “The water of a swimming pool with blue walls will look dyed with blue because of diffused reflection. Observing the white or blue steps within the water, we will discover that with each step down, the blue of the water increases progressively.”

The surface of this new edition may shimmer a bit more, but its lessons only grow deeper with time. Dive in.

This article first appeared in Eye 75.

Expansion by alphabet

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:45:00 -0400

Above, top: The Hamilton Digital Watch, the world’s first digital watch, released in 1970. Above, bottom: Emmett Williams, “IBM,” 1973.

One of the most important things I’ve ever read about typography is Paul Elliman’s essay “My Typographies.” Here’s the sparkling gem of it that I’m so fond of quoting to my students:

Writing gives the impression of things. Conversely, things can give the impression of writing.

Beautifully put. In the essay that follows, Elliman dances among several examples of things that give the impression of writing, each of which is connected powerfully to our own origins and the rhythms of life on this planet. He reads the types of clouds in the sky, looks at constellations and signals sent to outer space through the Arecibo Message, unpacks the passing of Uruk tokens, scans the Talmud, finds our flickering digital beginnings in ASCII text and LED watches, then turns to alphabetic codes, GPS messages, and more. Perhaps his most intuitive example, though, is the alphabet of DNA, on which he quotes genetics professor Steve Jones:

It has a vocabulary (the genes themselves), a grammar (the way in which the inherited information is arranged), and a literature (the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being). The language is based on the DNA molecule, the famous double helix; the icon of the 20th century. It has a simple alphabet, not 26 letters, but just four, the four different DNA bases, A, C, G, and T for short.

And now, via Kottke, we learn of Christian Bök, who will encrypt a poem on a particularly resilient bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans. As Wired describes Bök’s process, part of the appeal of doing this (apart from seeing if it Can Be Done) seems to be about constraint:

Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

In many ways, Bök’s project reminds me of Emmett Williams’s work — Sweethearts, of course, but also his lesser-known IBM poem, which uses a technique called “expansion by alphabet,” a process I intend to write more about in the future. However, for the time being, let me just say that no sooner had I found a computational method for collecting Williams Words then I found out that Williams himself had been experimenting with computational verse using this form. Williams is always one step ahead — beautiful. More on the IBM poem here and here.

Saturated with forms

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:28:00 -0400

Peter Mendelsund points to an interesting book by architect François Blanciak. From the MIT Press description,

What would happen, he asks, if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.

The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain-link towers, ball-bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing — and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from.

Metropolis’s blog has more:

Taken together, the drawings are meant as a tonic, Blanciak writes, to architectural theory’s “sole focus on writing,” offering “a creative alternative to critical academic literature.”

I’ll be interested to pick this book up. There’s a bit of Harris Burdick in it — the kind of book that sets the reader’s imagination to work.

Rethinking defaults

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:25:00 -0400

I’ve got a review of the new edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color in the most recent issue of Eye, but there’s also an interesting piece about the future of typography online that collects thoughts from Chester Jenkins, Jonathan Hoefler, and Stephen Coles that’s a good overview for those new to the subject. Titled “The End of Default,” this bit from Simon Esterson and Jay Prynne’s introduction caught my attention:

Clients such as corporations and publishers who were accustomed to branding every visible square inch with their custom fonts had to accept the default nature of the Web, and many designers have long resigned themselves to living through the typographic equivalent of the dark ages, relieved partially by the advent of Cascading style sheets (CSS) which allow much greater control over the styling elements of a website, including the size, weight and style of the (still limited range of) fonts.

For a significant minority of designers, the limited type palette became a signifier of authenticity, a cool hair shirt they could wear with pride. The “default look” of non-Flash websites has spilled into books, magazines and music design as a conscious style choice rather than necessity.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece about defaults for Emigre that tried to present them as the thorny, complex topic that they still continue to be. Defaults still serve to self-reflexively critique their own making (as diagnosed above), but they also extend Modernist concepts into the present and update them. I wonder if they will continue to be a productive area of critical inquiry. Historically, they were an intriguing response to the ’90s debates about the possibility of designer-authors. Where once the question was, “How do designers assert themselves as authors?”, defaults countered, “What if you take designers out of the system altogether?”

While the Eye quote above has a slightly skeptical bent about this work, I see it today with more positive eyes. Rereading “Default Systems in Graphic Design” now, I feel increasingly distant from my point-of-view then. That tends to happen with certain kinds of critique; they become dated faster than the work they describe. My goal these days is to write things that, whenever possible, are slower, richer, and hopefully more enduring.

I’ve also consciously shifted tone. Back then, following a lot of design writing I was reading, I thought everything should have a bit of an edge. I remember Jeffrey Keedy in particular seemed almost angry to me in his articles. (Rick Poynor, though I respect his work, has recently sounded grouchy too.)

I now realize that’s not really what I like to read or what I want to write. I think there was an unfortunate collision back in 2003 when my “edge” met the work of designers I deeply admired like Daniel Eatock, Experimental Jetset, and Jop Van Bennekom. I wrote about their work because I was familiar with it, I was excited about it, and I was thinking about it a lot. I still think that their work contributes in the best way to discussions about programs, systems, conditions of making, and contemporary life. But to label it as “default” does not afford it the care and thoughtfulness that I know it’s made with.

That issue — problems with the word “default” itself — came up in the article, as I tried to twist it from something negative into something positive, or, at least, more neutral and systematic. Emigre editor Rudy VanderLans asks,

While I understand how you have come to use the term Default Systems Design, I can imagine that designers would have a problem calling their design methods “default.” The term has many negative connotations.

I respond,

In most contexts, “to default” is to fail. To be “in default” on a loan is not to pay it; to “default” in court is not to appear; to win “by default” is to win because the other team did not play.The only arena in which the definition of “default” is not entirely negative is in Computer Science, where a default is “a particular setting or variable that is assigned automatically by an operating system and remains in effect unless canceled or overridden by the operator.” Defaults, at least in terms of computers, are the status quo. Theirs is not the failure to do what’s promised but exactly the opposite. Theirs is a promise kept in lieu of an “operator’s” (or designer’s) intervention. To view a computer through its default settings is to view it as it’s been programmed to view itself, even to give it a kind of authority. Naturally, “a default” is produced by systemic thinking — the definition mentions “operating systems” specifically — and “defaults,” taken cumulatively, could be defined as the system by which the machine operates when no one is actively operating it. The system makes assumptions that, unchallenged, become truths.

Years later, looking back, I’m inclined to scratch my head a bit. The points aren’t bad, but perhaps a different word was in order? Something more precise? To paraphrase Wittgenstein (whose work endures in almost every way), most problems of philosophy spring from the limitations of language. “Default” is a tricky term; if I used it today, I’d use it sparingly.

Note

A bit more on criticizing the critic. The critic is an ideal target: anyone who dishes it out had better be able to take it. This truth, coupled with the reality that design’s culture tends to defend the purely creative act (making stuff) over the critical or reflective one (writing about it), means that the critic’s role in design writing will continue to be challenging for some time to come. But there’s another mode, one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, that of the practicioner-critic. This mode is embodied by someone like Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas is literally a “critic in the studio.” He seems equally comfortable as theorist and maker. In many ways what he makes is dialogue between the architects at OMA and beyond: sometimes he makes buildings, sometimes he makes essays, sometimes he makes classes, sometimes he makes lectures. Whatever the specifics are, Koolhaas is helping to frame the discourse about what architecture is, what it can be, and where it’s going for his clients, his students, other practitioners, and the public.

Revisiting ESPRIT

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:45:00 -0400

Kelly at Nothing is New recently posted some of Lady Greyler’s scans of ESPRIT’s 1984–86 Catalog.

As a kid, I used to wander these stores with absolute delight. ESPRIT was perhaps one of the earliest brands I could pick out of a lineup. It still looks energetic and fresh today — the sassy, flirty sister of Memphis, decked out in its patterns, colors, and offbeat esprit.

An advantage and a gift

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:29:00 -0400

Stanley Fish plumbs the benefits of pragmatism in a lengthy post for the NYT. Here are his closing thoughts:

But if pragmatism doesn’t have a real world payoff, if it is of no help when the next crisis comes your way, what’s the use of it? Why should anyone be interested in it? Behind these questions is a larger one: why should anyone be interested in philosophy in any of its versions? The usual answer is that philosophy, by identifying first principles, can serve both to guide and justify our actions. When pragmatism tells us that there are no first principles, it not only disqualifies itself as the source of guidance and justification; it disqualifies the whole enterprise, at least in its more ambitious forms. What it leaves are the pleasures of doing philosophy, the pleasures of thinking about thinking freed from the burdensome expectation that we will finally get somewhere. Now there’s an advantage and a gift to boot.

My own thoughts on pragmatism as a useful set of ideas for contemporary design here.

Counting Peanuts

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:04:00 -0400

Named for the comic strip above, the Linus Sequence is defined as follows:

The sequence composed of 1s and 2s obtained by starting with the number 1, and picking subsequent elements to avoid repeating the longest possible substring. The first few terms are 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, …

The sequence’s sister set, the Sally Sequence gives “gives the sequence of lengths of the repetitions which are avoided in the Linus sequence.”

Both sequences are listed in the astounding Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. High five on that one, Internet.

Because there’s nothing to sell

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:13:00 -0400

Michael Pollan’s talk at The Long Now Foundation includes a glimpse of the gift economy at work in the business of agriculture:

A lot of it depends on redefining our sense of what a clever technology is. And what I suggest is that a really smart rotation — like that eight-year rotation in Argentina— is as clever and as powerful a technology as the latest genetically-modified seed. And we need to look at it that way. The question is why don’t we look at it that way? Well by in large because there’s nothing to sell, in the case of the rotation. And what makes agriculture really work in a sustainable direction are processes more than products, which is why there’s very little R&D that goes into developing these technologies.

Reminds me a bit of what Lewis Hyde has to say about textbooks in The Gift:

Scientists who give their ideas to the community receive recognition and status in return […]. But there is little recognition to be earned from writing a textbook for money. As one of the scientists in [Sociologist Warren] Hagstrom’s study puts it, if someone “has written nothing at all but texts, they will have a null value or even a negative value.” Because such work brings no group reward, it makes sense that it would earn a different sort of renumeration, cash. “Unlike recognition, cash can be used outside the community of pure science,” Hagstrom points out. Cash is a medium of foreign exchange, as it were, because a unlike a gift (and unlike status) it does not lose its value when it moves beyond the boundary of the community.

Contrast the natural process Pollan describes in which the land renews itself but no value is extracted to one in which the land is managed by commercial fertilizers that are sold at a price. The cycle of nature, like the circle of gift-giving, ensures its own success, but weakens when cash value is extracted at any specific point. It’s unmonetizable, but, as Pollan points out, learning from it might be the key to healthier eating and better food.

See also: Pollan’s writing about pioneering farmer Joel Salatin in Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Errors found herein

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:41:00 -0400

The Preface Paradox stems from a common enough source — that bit of text found in the prefaces of many academic books along the lines of, “the errors that are found herein are mine alone,” absolving advisors and other editors of any blame.

While this may seem nice enough, with this single bit of text the author has asked us to accept two mutually incompatable beliefs:

Such an author has written a book that contains many assertions, and has factually checked each one carefully, submitted it to reviewers for comment, etc. Thus, he has reason to believe that each assertion he has made is true.

However, he knows, having learned from experience, that, in spite of his best efforts, there are very likely undetected errors in his book. So he also has good reason to believe that there is at least one assertion in his book is not true.

Somehow, despite these paradoxical facts, we know to trust the author, and trust that his or her mistakes, if any, will be few and far between, a wayward needle or two in the haystack of facts. The paradox is an epistemic one, related to how we know what we know, and, because of its relationship between what’s likely (the facts are correct) and what’s not (the facts are errors), classed with another paradox involving the lottery.

Hot puppy love rock Arkansas

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:27:00 -0400

Kottke quotes from Steven Levy’s Wired magazine article on the syntax and evolving language of search queries:

Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context.

Being reasonably acquainted with Wittgenstein, I found myself wondering which of his ideas came so integrally into play in solving this problem. The Wired article only links to Wittgenstein’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, which includes a survey of all his major concepts and works. Was it his distinction between sense and nonsense? His arguments against a private language? His work on the connection between seeing and saying and his example of the “duckrabbit”? Or perhaps it was something he didn’t discover but simply weighed in on, like ostensive definitions or contextualism?

The strongest candidate, though, might be his concepts of language games and family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s best-known example of a language game is the “builder’s language.” Here’s how he describes it:

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar” “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.

This is a very small kit of parts; a lexicon of just four elements, combined in a certain way. But by uttering these words in the right context, a building gets built. The meaning these words have comes from their ability to activate the builder’s assistant to do what the master builder is asking. And their family resemblance has to do with this limited language, in which these words’ meaning is defined by their context and shared by the two builders. After the workday is through, the builder might look forward to how his children “beam” at him when he arrives home, and the context is entirely different.

The Wired article continues,

As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant.

A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.

Oh, and on the headline above — just my humble attempt to confuse the hell out of Google.

@ MoMA

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:08:00 -0400

MoMA acquires the @ symbol. NYT:

No one knows for sure when it first appeared. One suggestion is that it dates to the sixth or seventh century when it was adopted as an abbreviation of “ad,” the Latin word for “at” or “toward.” (The scribes of the day are said to have saved time by merging two letters and curling the stroke of the “d” around the “a.”) Another theory is that it was introduced in 16th-century Venice as shorthand for the “amphora,” a measuring device used by local tradesmen.

Whatever its origins, the @ appeared on the keyboard of the first typewriter, the American Underwood, in 1885 and was used, mostly in accounting documents, as shorthand for “at the rate of.” It remained an obscure keyboard character until 1971 when an American programmer, Raymond Tomlinson, added it to the address of the first e-mail message to be sent from one computer to another.

It was acquired formless—purely as a concept—and from the public domain:

[…] “MoMA’s collection has always been in touch with its time,” Ms. Antonelli said, “and design these days is often an act with aesthetic and ethical consequences, not necessarily a physical object.”

That’s why MoMA decided against adding a specific version of the @ to the collection in favor of using it in different typographic styles and sizes. Ms. Antonelli likens it to the museum’s acquisition of “The Kiss,” a performance art piece by Tino Sehgal, in which a couple embrace for several hours. Just like the @, each performance can take a different form with new protagonists — though there is a difference. MoMA reportedly paid $70,000 for “The Kiss,” while the @ is joining the collection free.

Money today, money tomorrow

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:50:00 -0400

As Liz noted, Fred Wilson’s MBA Mondays should be required reading for just about everyone, but especially for designers. (Nearly everything Wilson writes about is fascinating — his A VC blog is among the most fervently-read in my daily roundup.) Here’s Wilson on a fundamental business concept, the Time Value of Money:

Money today is generally worth more than money tomorrow. As another commenter to last week’s post put it “you can’t buy beer tonight with next year’s earnings”. Money in your pocket, cash in hand, is worth more than cash that you don’t actually have in hand. If you think about it that simply, everyone can agree that they’d rather have the cash in hand than the promise of the same amount at some later day.

And interest rates are used to calculate exactly how much more the money is worth today than tomorrow.

These interest rates are determined by many factors, but among them are inflation and risk. In aggregate, these rates frame the behavior of markets:

Markets set rates. Banks don’t and governments don’t. Banks and governments certainly impact rates and governments can do a lot to impact rates and they do all the time. But at the end of the day it is you and me and it is the traders, both speculators and hedgers, who determine how much of a discount we’ll accept to get our money now and how much interest we’ll want to wait another year.

Also excellent: his plainspoken breakdown of how to read through a Profit & Loss Statement. Makes me wish I had MBA Mondays back in high school.

The arrow of time

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:37:00 -0500

According to Wikipedia, the arrow of time is a term coined by British astronomer Arthur Eddington to distinguish between two types of physical processes:

Physical processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time symmetric, meaning that the theoretical statements that describe them remain true if the direction of time is reversed; yet when we describe things at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow) of time. An arrow of time is anything that exhibits such time-asymmetry.

Put another way:

Any process that happens regularly in the forward direction of time but rarely or never in the opposite direction, such as entropy increasing in an isolated system, defines what physicists call an arrow of time in nature.

There are also some helpful rules about the arrow of time:

1) It is vividly recognized by consciousness.
2) It is equally insisted on by our reasoning faculty, which tells us that a reversal of the arrow would render the external world nonsensical.
3) It makes no appearance in physical science except in the study of organization of a number of individuals.

More on the arrow of time, including a great interview with Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, here at The Long Now Blog.

Recursive reading

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:46:00 -0500

Mentioned earlier here, Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud’s sequence “Correspondence,” now online, is a brilliant and frequently hilarious recursive read:

I’ve just received your last letter and am immediately replying. You’ve asked if I’ve received your last letter and if I intend to reply. If I may, please let me point out that your having sent your last letter makes the letter you previously sent no longer the most recent, and if I reply, as I am now doing, it is not in response to your second-to-last letter. I cannot, therefore, satisfy the requests you’ve made in your last letter.

I don’t know about you, but my life’s imitated Roubaud’s art more than a few times, making “inbox zero” sound less like a productivity strategy and more like a distant Utopian future.