musings of an exuberant fool

Fantastic Worlds and Cinematic Spectacle

2009-05-03T12:57:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the most fantastic landscapes and worlds from movies/documentaries/films/animations I've seen:

Paprika Parade

a hodgepodge of walking appliances, oversized frogs, creepy toy dolls, robots walking around in an inexplicable parade from the psychological thriller anime, Paprika best encapsulates the sense of wonder and schizophrenia of a particularly incomprehensible dream

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (because the landscapes of love is amazing)

Maborosi seaside

Koreeda Hirokazu's film about loneliness and redemption has a quiet tranquility especially in the rural seaside landscapes

Tetsuo's mutation spawned a new genre of anime

A great movie about the subsconscious and death

Unbelievable hand drawn animation from Studio Ghibli

Little Nemo and adventures in Slumberland

Nemo's flying bed was always something I wanted to travel through when I was little

Baraka

The Ocean and the whale in Pinocchio

Richly gilded and fantastic images in the fall

Urban decay in Watchmen

Old Boy

Beautiful Landscapes of Dil Se

Hitchcock's SF

Kung Fu Hustle

Forbidden Planet

The Forest in the wizard of Oz

Akira Kurosawa's dreams

The country side in Modern Life

Herzog's La Soufriere

Another film about urban growth and globalization

Violence and urban decay

The city of the future

the future of immersive user interfaces in minority report

Parrots and telegraph hill

peaceful (and cute) country side of Komaneko

Book Summary 1: In the Beginning was the Command Line

2009-01-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the memorable quotes from this book. I will revise later to come up with my own spin on things.

Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends' dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair.

In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people's relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.

The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere--about as interesting as peering over someone's shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience.
For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted.

The division of responsibilities implied by all of this is admirably clean: computers do arithmetic on bits of information. Humans construe the bits as meaningful symbols. But this distinction is now being blurred, or at least complicated, by the advent of modern operating systems that use, and frequently abuse, the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a larger audience. Along the way--possibly because of those metaphors, which make an operating system a sort of work of art--people start to get emotional, and grow attached to pieces of software in the way that my friend's dad did to his MGB.

The important thing is that no matter what splendid multimedia web pages they might represent, HTML files are just telegrams.

Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish video game?

Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the memory chips on the video card, and it had to do it very fast, and in arbitrarily complicated patterns. Nowadays this is cheap and easy, but in the technological regime that prevailed in the early 1980s, the only realistic way to do it was to build the motherboard (which contained the CPU) and the video system (which contained the memory that was mapped onto the screen) as a tightly integrated whole--hence the single, hermetically sealed case that made the Macintosh so distinctive.

It was seen as not only a superb piece of engineering, but an embodiment of certain ideals about the use of technology to benefit mankind, while Windows was seen as a pathetically clumsy imitation and a sinister world domination plot rolled into one. So very early, a pattern had been established that endures to this day: people dislike Microsoft, which is okay; but they dislike it for reasons that are poorly considered, and in the end, self-defeating.

CLASS STRUGGLE ON THE DESKTOP

It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically unappealing, or that don't work very well, it does not mean that they are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft's excellent management has figured out that they can make more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious, known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free. This is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself.

All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the bourgeoisie, which is as much a mental, as a material state.

Apple therefore had a monopoly on hardware that could run MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible hardware came out of a free market. The free market seems to have decided that people will not pay for cool-looking computers;

It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them.

In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.

But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is possible to go and visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled upon skeleton, recent ones on top and more ancient ones below. In theory they go all the way back to the first single-celled organisms. And if you use your imagination a bit, you can understand that, if you hang around long enough, you'll become fossilized there too, and in time some more advanced organism will become fossilized on top of you.

The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is the Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking (possibly illegal, but free). Executives at companies like Microsoft must get used to the experience--unthinkable in other industries--of throwing millions of dollars into the development of new technologies, such as Web browsers, and then seeing the same or equivalent software show up on the Internet two years, or a year, or even just a few months, later.

By continuing to develop new technologies and add features onto their products they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization process, but on certain days they must feel like mammoths caught at La Brea, using all their energies to pull their feet, over and over again, out of the sucking hot tar that wants to cover and envelop them.

Survival in this biosphere demands sharp tusks and heavy, stomping feet at one end of the organization, and Microsoft famously has those. But trampling the other mammoths into the tar can only keep you alive for so long. The danger is that in their obsession with staying out of the fossil beds, these companies will forget about what lies above the biosphere: the realm of new technology. In other words, they must hang onto their primitive weapons and crude competitive instincts, but also evolve powerful brains. This appears to be what Microsoft is doing with its research division, which has been hiring smart people right and left (Here I should mention that although I know, and socialize with, several people in that company's research division, we never talk about business issues and I have little to no idea what the hell they are up to.
I have learned much more about Microsoft by using the Linux operating system than I ever would have done by using Windows).

Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making its money on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that both hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed; one about price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about price gradients over time in a given place.

Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making its money on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that both hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed; one about price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about price gradients over time in a given place.

INTERFACE CULTURE
DAZZLED BY MANUFACTURED OBJECTS

Since then I've always thought of that man as the personification of an interesting human tendency: not only are we not offended to be dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it. We practically insist on it. We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with cosmetics.

Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.

Disney is in the business of putting out a product of seamless illusion--a magic mirror that reflects the world back better than it really is.

The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners).

In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it.

. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.

The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!

Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

* It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on "real" ones in Kenya.
* The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise.
* The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries controlled via the command-line interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live.
* Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that is to instill basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly adorable cartoon characters.
* My own family--the people I know best--is divided about evenly between people who will probably read this essay and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.

Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines.

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Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are comparing not the underlying functions but the superficial look and feel. The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.

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But because the VCR was invented when it was--during a sort of awkward transitional period between the era of mechanical interfaces and GUIs--it just had a bunch of pushbuttons on the front, and in order to set the time you had to push the buttons in just the right way. This must have seemed reasonable enough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so many VCRs. Computer people call this "the blinking twelve problem". When they talk about it, though, they usually aren't talking about VCRs.

By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: "The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books." As long as we stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of:

Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they're making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.

Some Very Interesting People with Good Things to Say

2008-12-24T08:24:00.000-08:00

Feynman on How to think Like a Scientist--- about thinking and investigating how you think and what you know

Ira Glass on how to create meaningful creative work -- failing a lot, setting aside just as much time for looking for interesting things, and waiting to get lucky -- never settling for mediocrity.

Malcolm Gladwell on why there is no perfect _________ there are only perfect _________'s

Hans Rosling's poignant (and beautiful information aesthetics) on how the world is as flat as ever.

Jennifer Lee on "Chinese" food in America

Secret History of Silicon Valley -- Basically: Terman (of Terman Engineering) is the man: some of the core ideas of silicon valley -- IP Protection, Entrepreneurial Stanford Engineering Students, Venture Capital Models, Education and Startup Cooperation were a brainchild of him --- oh yeah and it all goes back to weapons

Daniel Suarez on our bot mediated reality.

Will Wright and Brian Eno on Generative Systems

Jonathan Haidt on the difference between liberals and conservatives

Randy Pausch on really achieving your childhood dreams -- a little self helpy but this is very good

Steve Jobs's three stories on life

Dieter Rams on revolutionizing the design of objects

Vint Cerf on the future of the interwebs

A.J. Jacobs on living his life following all biblical rules ( of the outsourced life fame)

Marilyn Manson Pwning Bill O'Reilly -- and talks about presentation and the veneer of self

Stephen Hawking on finding good challenges for the mind

Salvador Dali on what's my line (hilarious and absurd)

XKCD guy at Google

Ben Huh on the history of Icanhascheezburger

Seth Godin on Purple Cows

Michael Welsch on the internet

John Cage performs

Milton Friedman on Societies that run on Greed -- the only cases where the masses escape grinding poverty is through capitalism

Stewart Brand on the importance of squatter cities

Steve Levitt on why incentives don't work

Speaking of Carrots -- Ali G's literal interpretation of carrots

Tim Hartford on the Logic of Life

Steven Pinker on reverse engineering Romance

Richard Buckland on hidden messages

Dan Dennet on the power of memes

Stephen Hawking on asking big questions about the universe

Ramachandran on intersection of physical and real

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on creativity and flow

late night

2008-05-01T02:29:00.000-07:00

a cup of coffee that I drank at 9 pm today is the reason why I am still awake, and i thought it was time again for another journal entry. since my last entry, i have found some more interesting activities on seventh and folsom.

first, the mysterious fleet of tiny, middle aged chinese women that peddle what seems like commissioned state food items on bryant and seventh, right in front of the newly opened subway. everyday, it's the same (or perhaps different) chinese lady with several one-off food items laid out over a piece of cloth on the ground. the specific items vary per day, sometimes there will be a small box of cereal, or some canned peaches, or sometimes , mysteriously, a few packets of active dry yeast. each time i always look furtively to scan her items, and get a momentary desire to photograph her. she always looks me in the eye, wondering if perhaps the packets of active dry yeast have caught my interest. it must be a lucrative endeavor if its worth doing everyday. a few weeks ago, when i was running a little bit late to work, i saw that there are a fleet of them, and not just one. i wonder what street intersections these other chinese ladies are stationed, and where they will be going to after they've done their peddling.

moving on to another mysterious phenomenon on seventh street, is the always frothing sea of soap foam that emerges at about 6 pm everyday. my best guess is that it is there to counter the ever pervasive tenderloin city scent (aka pee and poo). I wonder though who is the secret benefactor of this "sea of foam" that washes a stream of frothy, bubbly, springy freshness through the entire alleyway in front of the seventh street bar. I am grateful for this, but then saddened to realize that soon this pristine frothy bubble will eventually merge with the neverending supply of urine from the happy folk that love loitering in this particular street.

orzo is such a delightful food. i made something with orzo, shrimp and basil last weekend. mangoes are also in season which makes me happy. i've been snapping it up by the dozen.

Some really great stop motion videos

2008-02-27T08:15:00.001-08:00

GMAIL VIRAL VIDEO
peeps paint a larger than life gmail interface

SHISEIDO
guy paints something in large scale, people come in to form the head's hair

POST-IT VALENTINE
just simple animation + simple story + post its

SCISSORS SINGING MUSIC VIDEO
campy animations of singing scissors has a crafty feel

TIME LAPSE -- DRAWING + ANIMATED PARTS (2 million views)

LEGO MILLENIUM FALCON BUILDING ITSELF

SPEED PAINTING WITH FRENCH FRIES

INTERESTING REFRAMING OF MOVING IMAGE (not really stop motion combo of video )

MOTION GRAPHICS + DRAWING (effects I wanted for the shirt going into person)

HOW TO MAKE A PANCAKE (the pancake makes itself)

SONY ADVERT WITH CLAY and huge BUNNIES IN NYC

LIVE PAINTING (Interesting this one only has 8K views, which might be in the artist masturbatory mode...i.e. impressing only the artists)

BOOK OF SPAM

15 MILLION VIEWS ON JUST HANDS

KELLOGS STOP MOTION with CEREAL

KID AND BALLOON (not stop motion but good)

RINPA ESHIDAN (drawing on walls amazing)

MANUFACTURED BEAUTY ( photoshop tells a really good story)

DAFT PUNK (shirts )

austin is so hot

2007-09-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend in Austin to go to a music festival. It was a nice town.. the weather was warm and balmy and reminded me of my childhood in the Philippines. I went to the Austin City limits festival and according to the local paper, it hosted over 65,000 people in a large outdoor park.

There was a green river that ran through the park. It looked nice and some of the locals were jumping into the river. It made me think of various idealized memories of young midwestern boys jumping through a lake or a creek and wish I had something like that as part of my childhood.

I had Texas BBQ for the three days, a Mohito at a TGI Fridays to get me reasonably buzzed before Jolly, me and two folks we met at the concert sauntered off to a bridge to look at the famed Austin bats. I liked looking at the lake more than i did the spectacle of the swarming bats. There was a nice cool breeze amid the 80 degree Austin weather that night, and again I felt calm.

a beautiful thing

2007-08-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

"I realise that I have a recurring interest in notions of ‘belonging’, particularly the finding or losing of it. Whether this has anything to do with my own life, I’m not sure, it seems to be more of a subconscious than conscious concern."

Beyond any personal issues, though, I think that the ‘problem’ of belonging is perhaps more of a basic existential question that everybody deals with from time to time, if not on a regular basis. It especially rises to the surface when things ‘go wrong’ with our usual lives, when something challenges our comfortable reality or defies our expectations – which is typically the moment when a good story begins, so good fuel for fiction. We often find ourselves in new realities – a new school, job, relationship or country, any of which demand some reinvention of ‘belonging’.

This was uppermost in my mind during the long period of work on The Arrival, a book which deals with the theme of migrant experience. Given my preoccupation with ‘strangers in strange lands’, this was an obvious subject to tackle, a story about somebody leaving their home to find a new life in an unseen country, where even the most basic details of ordinary life are strange, confronting or confusing – not to mention beyond the grasp of language. It’s a scenario I had been thinking about for a number of years before it crystallised into some kind of narrative form."

Link: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

the visitors from europe

2007-08-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

as you all know my faithful readers, I dutifully buy a blueberry bagel with cream cheese from the corner bakery at market and seventh. this bakery is a weird hodgepodge of homeless people from the tail-end of the tenderloin, the suits at the now recently built deathstar/federal building, and travelling tourists from el-cheapo hotel row on seventh street.

this month especially i have seen a barrage of family tourists from europe. you can tell from the way they carry themselves that they are certainly not american, and certainly not of the market street ilk. the typical set includes, a tall dad in capri pants (?!), a mom, and two teenage children.

as i rush to my daily work, i sometimes idealize what these people's lives are like. i wonder where in germany are they from. i sometimes feel bad that their view of san francisco will be blemished by the first blush of the tenderloin "city scent". i also wonder, why on earth are these middle aged men still wearing capris! i gotta give it to the europeans though, their travelling dads look better than american travelling dads with the signature hawaiian shirt and waist high khaki shorts.

back to the work day.

quote of the day

2007-08-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

“The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued - except as a stimulus for further moves.”

--Richard Diebenkorn

point of view

2007-08-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

i hate taking a point of view. it takes so much work to take a stake in the ground and say "this is what I am doing for the next year". how does one focus ones adult life in the best way possible.

i've been trying to find a balance in the continuum of being too creative and the other side of being too rigid. the problem with most things is that most people want a clear hook to wrap their brain around you. quite frankly, there is no clear hook around me.

i am a creative person who wants to spread my ideas to the world. the problem with this definition is that often the path from idea to spread ideas to the world, is long and fraught with obstacles, and often involved coordination with many people. i've been mulling over the idea of switching over to corporate land where things are much more stable and regimented in terms of process.

the biggest take away from my implementation class, is that life is about finding the right scope of challenges to take on. now that i have graduated, the world has opened up at an overwhelming speed, but i continue to feel like the opportunities around me are few and far in between. how could one simultaneously have these two feelings? but i do.

my friend chris took his dog who lives in central valley with a nice yard to his small san francisco apartment. i forgot her name, but lets call her dolly. dolly was frightened to death of the new environment so she stayed in chris's room, tail between her legs. chris discovered a neat way to open her up, she put a leash on her neck and soon dolly opened up and walked around the house, bright eyed and willing to explore. after an hour or so chris took the leash out and she was happy to run about the house.

was college supposed to be the leash? i think i need a little more leash time.

one nonsequitur. i have decided to not capitalize any of my sentences for this blog and i must say it has increased my productivity by probably 5%.

Steve Jobs is so awesome. Its really disappointing that he's sort of an asshole as a person. But its ok, he's still pretty damn awesome. I really liked this interview that he did with wired magazine.

Some Cool Things

2007-08-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

The Watercone® is a solar powered water desalinator that takes salt or brackish water and generates freshwater. It is simple to use, lightweight and mobile. The technology is simple in design and use and is discribed by simple pictograms. With max. 1,6 liters a day the Watercone® is an ideal device to cover a childs daily need of freshwater. UNICEF: "every day 5000 children die as a result of diarrhea coused by drinking unsafe water"

Link:Watercone

A pretty thing. Some sort of shelving system.

Link:Basaglia and Nodari System

A very cool infographic music video.

This is not bad either

Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto For Growth and other uplifting things

2007-08-14T11:59:00.001-07:00

Today I ran into icon magazine's "manifesto" issue. It lists 50 designers and their beliefs on the current state of the design world. I very much enjoy reading these words to inspire and drive me to work harder as a young designer. The first manifesto is from a designer named Peter Saville which very clearly articulates what I feel is wrong with the current state of design -- that is that it is intrinsically tied to having to make a profit.

Morals
The cultural adventure has been consumed by business. Making things better is a moral issue, but morality and business don’t go together – business is, if not immoral, then amoral. We know we should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business. It can’t really be all about idealism and altruism.

However, I recently finished reading "Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur" and found some pretty straightforward advice from an entrepreneur named Stuart Skorman. Earlier this year I was working on a project to help mom and pop video stores using design strategy and research and one of our interviews lead us a store owner who had been approached by Mr. Skorman. Skorman created some minorly successful dot.coms and more notably elephant pharmacy and seemed to have some pretty down to earth, straight talking approach to what good design and business. I will elaborate more later.

Here is another case where we are faced with multiple frames to look at this problem. For instance, there is the more local frame of having to make a living, the higher frame of creating meaningful stuff, and of course, every designers dream to create beautiful, functional things that affect people's lives in a positive way. Its a lofty goal and I am always inspired when I see things on Notcot that seem like great ideas.

Bruce Mau was another one of the people who had a great manifesto. I remember stumbling onto his "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" when I was a senior in high school and being tremendously inspired by it-- it is what ultimately made me want to become a designer instead of a painter.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements that exemplify Bruce Mau's beliefs, motivations and strategies. It also articulates how the BMD studio works.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Onto more inspiring things, there are always the TED talks. I especially like Dr. Roslings engaging information graphics on the state of the world through lenses of quality of life (such as healthcare, etc, etc).

LINKS:
icon magazine's "manifesto issue": fifty manifestos of today's leading design figures who actually care about the state of the world.

Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: a great book for any aspiring entrepreneur.

Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for growth: The entire text is in this blog entry. This manifesto has inspired me in so many ways and affected the way I think to this day.

Ted Talks: Ideas of amazing, inspiring and intellegent people who are trying to change the world.

Damn why do I have to be such an idealist.

Weekend Festivities

2007-08-06T09:47:00.000-07:00

Were there really wasn't that much...

I did finally finish the last Harry Potter book. I enjoyed most of it, a bit slow-going at the beginning, but the wizard duels etc, etc, seemed appropriate for the finale of a seven book series.

I managed to get my hands on a Swiss version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Having just seen the fifth movie two weeks ago and just finished the final book, I thought it would be fun to contrast how much the actors have grown and also to see if there were anything that would make sense now that I know the entire story that would've been imperceptible back then. The only thing I noted was the use of Dumbledore's deluminator and of coures, Ron receives it in the final book. However, I just started re-reading the first book also and it was certainly called a different name then.

I very much enjoyed the movie.

I also randomly ran across the great website of a webdesigner/graphic designer/coder named Jonathan Harris. Looking at his work, I noticed that he has responsible for many of the things that I find wonderful in interaction design including:
1)10X10 a news aggregator 2) the graphic layout/interface of etsy.com 3)some mints I noticed at the airport called oral fixation

and finally I really enjoyed wefeelfine.org which scours the blogosphere for the phrase "i feel" and creates graphical representations to analyze the data and to look at what people across the world are feeling right now.

friday

2007-08-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

I discovered that a lot of people are creating PDF magazines. Its a great way to get graphic design inspiration. I loved the Candy Collective mag's feature on the use of Helvetica font through the years.
This site has a great listing and links. I also really love Adobe's PDF magazine for design professionals.

"You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years"

a more design centered blog

2007-08-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

I really ought to have a stronger point of view for this blog.
The last few months have taught me much about the strength of messaging and the importance of a strong point of view.

I thought I would just list some sites that I visit everyday:

Notcot.org

is a very visually stunning and daily updated design journal. I like it because it doesn't have words and I usually just get eyecandy

Popurls

is an aggregator of aggregators. I tried fiddling with Netvibes or with igoogle, but popurls is punchy. Besides I usually only read the Reddit entries , and if I feel like catching up on more webdev stuff, probably delicious.com

Gmail

I love Gmail. It is the best web client out there, and it is awesome, I dont need anythign else

website creation

2007-08-01T17:45:00.000-07:00

I dont usually talk about work related things, but I thought I would like to document my webcreation process. Throughout college, I've always been amazed by well-designed websites. It didn't seem that complicated to me, as almost invariably most of these websites were created by "graphic designers", thus, must not be that complicated.

I decided to take on the challenge of re-designinging my company website. First I had to learn CSS as i had learned from a product designer/ web developer friend that it is the new standard for web design. So I looked it up. I'm not sure what entirely the benefit of it is, other than the actual process of learning CSS "containers", floating and creating layout in general, has afforded a new way of design. It is indeed much more flexible to redesign the individual elements of a website and really, the table based design of HTML days of yore really is quite cumbersome.

So I learned CSS all of last week.
I had a tutorial from my webdev friend a few months ago where he taught me the difference betweens and classes and ids. Pretty much this is all you need to know to do CSS.

I then went and tagged websites that were very well done.
Smashing Magazine has some very good resources for web inspiration. I then also looked for company websites in my company's "category" of products and sought for inspiration there. Most designs in that category were simply lackluster, but it is best to keep this in mind, as our clientelle would probably be more intimidated than impressed by a fashion forward website.

I then had to learn the nuts and bolts of CSS. So I delicioused CSS and true enough, it was a gold mine of resources. For any webdevs out there, I hihgly recommend using delicious for all your researching needs. My two favorite websites for this are:
1) HTML Dog and 2) W3 Schools. These two sites will give you everything you need to know to catch up on sites.

Then came the bewildering idea of how to handle tables now that CSS has completely obliterated tables. For some reason, the idea of floating was completely bewildering to me and some websites were simply floating left and floating right; this is a completely different way of doing it with tables. Somehow this website explained everything I needed to know .

Then came the problem with Menus. I liked the idea of having drop down menus as they look streamlined and allow for easier navigation. I liked Stu Nicholl's site for its amazingly extensive collection of open source Menus completely done in CSS. However, I wanted to do a combination of text and images rollovers and this site albeit butt ugly looks promising.

Finally, I also had to learn flash because my boss wanted me incorprate it into its website. This site was surprisingly the most straightforward way to learn flash. Then I wanted to get ambitious and add clickable elements to my swf. Amazingly Adobe has a very rich collection of video resources that I highly recommend. Talk about taking advantage of their own platform (so awesome).

I absolutely love the internet. If I run into any problem I simply google it and I can pretty much find a little forum somewhere, or a tutorial site that discusses the very problem I have. How amazing when you create an entirely open platform.

globalization and product design

2007-07-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

I listened to Fresh Air on NPR today. Terri Gross interviewed a woman who was an international correspondent for some newspaper to India and China. She noted how globalization has created immense wealth in these two countries and how that affects job security in America.

She used the ipod to illustrate the point. She claims that the idea for the "chip" or "brains" of the ipod was developed in a shack in Hyderabad(sp?). Further, the development of the ipod is contracted to Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers. Then the products are sent to America, where they are marketed and sold. Apple being the brand associated with the Ipod gets the lion's share of profits. However, engineers, accountants, creatives, etc can output the "same quality" of work for tenth of the price of an American engineer.

This is an interesting point. Since in the last 20 years, America's manufacturing industry has certainly collapsed. We have since reshaped ourselves into a service economy, but with the export of white collar jobs as well, the job security of most Americans continue to diminish, and thus the job security of everyone in general.

This makes me think of Snow Crash where in the future, the only things America is good at are: entertainment, pizza, and software. Indeed, it seems those remain to be the few remaining exports we have to offer.

People who I think are cool

2007-07-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

1) Muhammad Yunus

founder of Grameen bank. Started the idea that you can lend to poor people and give them a sense of empowerment. Right to credit is the number one right to poor people. Credit means creating self employment. Earning income, and achieving other things becomes easier. Savings is a long time asset building process.

2) Steve Jobs

such a strong point of view. such a good product designer. so totally awesome.

3) Founders of Kiva

more later

things that I like #7

2007-07-05T16:24:00.001-07:00

1) mangoes.
manila style mangoes, even if they really are from mexico.

2) skittles.
yum!

3) project runway
I like Laura from project runway even if she seems bitchy and cold.
her designs are impeccable, and she has six kids!

4) the philippines
i love the country!

5) my workplace
light and airy and bright

things that I like #7

2007-06-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

1) the feeling I had the winter of 2002. I would listen to blackbird by the beatles and drink lots of green tea. Somehow in my little room in New Jersey, I could escape that world and dream of a grand life ahead of me.

2) being finally friends with my mom.

3) my room being clean.

4) being somewhat ok with loneliness again.

5) reading stories of people who have achieved great things.

things that I like #6

2007-06-25T11:07:00.001-07:00

1) sunshine

I like sunshine a lot. I like it when the sun hits my skin and I am lying down on my back in a park somewhere.

2) a moment of random connection

Yesterday, I was at the park and there was a dog who I played catch frisbee with. He seemed quite cheerful and happy to catch my frisbee.

3) the word pleasant

pleasant is halfway between peace and adventure.

4) good conversation

I like hanging out with smart people and talking about smart things. Ugh, what a guilty pleasure.

5) feeling a sense of expansion

phoebe once said, dont you think gravity is weird. It feels like its pulling you down and dont you just want to escape it.

something I don't like:

An awareness of the current frame of my life. Isn't it lame to realize that the connections you have with people and your frame of yourself is only a sad reflection of who you are. Also had a discussion about the push pull between awareness, philosophies and a reflection of the current state of society. an example of this is: how in your youth was a staunch communitarian but when grow up and had a taste of individuality, and so then realize the beauty of capitalism.

I liked the discussion about the origins of the western mindset of individuality.

advertising is a great distillation of cultural values.

things that I like #5

2007-06-20T18:36:00.001-07:00

1) the show the office

it is funny. that is all.

2) things that are done well.

for instance, I really like the website of this illustrator. It looks like he really know what he is doing. Or the work of the video guys we were talking to today.

I just like things that are done well.

3) rest and sleep
I dont do enough of this really

4) the song "angel won't you call me" by the decemberists

well looks like its just 3 for today

things that I like #4

2007-06-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

1) good quotes and books:

for instance:

"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Beginner's Mind" -- Zen proverb, as quoted by Steve Jobs

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, quote them, disagree with them disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

- apple
good books:
seth godin's the dip

2) panoramic vistas of san francisco

they sure are beautiful

3) when someone dies, on their tombstone, no one ever talks about what they have achieved, but in their relationships with other people.

thats not really something i like but something i heard someone say

4) good technology, like cellphones and podcasts

5) books and smart people. like Cornell West... or any of the random people on Iinnovate.

things I like #3

2007-06-14T23:16:00.000-07:00

1) the laser light on the star wars building on folsom
I wasn't sure what the point of the little "landing pad" looking part of the
building was for, but I like the laser
2) the weather
I like the weather right now. It feels like spring.
3) muni fast pass
what a great idea. I'm glad I bought one this month
4) the Stanford on ItunesU podcasts
I love it! Best selection of lectures ever! I didn't really have a chance to
listen to these great lectures when I was in college because I was too busy
to do it, but now I can!
5) great conversation
When I talk to someone and it feels like I have a genuine connection with
them. That stuff is really hard to come by though.
6) cherries that are ripe
I like them.
7) tea and milk
I like this too.

things that I like #2

2007-06-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

1) Starbucks Coffee Frappuccino
It tastes good and makes me feel good. I don't know why. Its just that good. Too bad its actually bottled by Pepsi. Co. Stuff like "it tastes good, makes me feel good" can't really be marketed either though. Rats.

2) Pho
The broth is light and delicious and reminds me of childhood meals with my grandparents. I douse the meat with Hoisin sauce and it is so.damn.good.

3) Guy Kawasaki
He's so smart and amazing and "revolutionary". Too bad truemors is kind of lame. Thats what happens when good marketers try to develop products without good engineers.

4) My friend Jolly
She always calls me on my bullshit and I think she cares about me. She's quirky like I am. She's just a good friend.

5) Being in a state of Flow
Flow is when you are given the appropriate challenge to your skillsets.
according to wikipedia:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

As Csikszentmihalyi sees it, components of an experience of flow can be specifically enumerated; he presents the following:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time - one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. When in the flow state, people become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975. p.72).

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.

things that I like #1

2007-06-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

this is the first of a list of things that I like. I will be posting 5 things that I like on a semi-regular basis.

things that I like list 1:

1) Seth Godin.

ok this is not really a thing. Seth Godin is one of the most inspiring people I know in the business world. He has a way of distilling things into believable and inspiring chunks. His books has taught me that the only way to go in life is to be remarkable.

I just got his other book called "the dip. a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick)". Its pretty small. I look forward to reading it.

2) Barack Obama.

he has a sense of authenticity about his words. he seems like he lived his entire life thinking life realistically. he seems real. note the stress on "seems".

3) POM tea

purchasing POM tea is a bit of an indulgence unfortunately. But it tastes so good.
The graphic design is awesome also, packaging is great. Homerun packaging designers of POM tea. You get a golden star.

4) Vitamin Water

unfortunately they just got acquired by coke. I hope that doesn't reduce their quality. I really like the graphic design and the taste of this beverage. The side comments on the packaging has also been surprisingly quite inspiring and entertaining to read.

5) Resting my head on the BART when I am going home.

I like to rest my head on the window of the BART when I am going home. The window isn't 100% sealed so when the BART runs, a rush of air goes through and it feels like I am riding through open air.

2007-06-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth

ooof

2007-02-06T10:46:00.001-08:00

I am so exhausted!

Why is Seth Godin so awesome?

2007-01-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

Yes, indeed.
quite awesome my friends

Click here.

things I dont like

2007-01-09T14:57:00.000-08:00

1) people who leave foreign languages in their away messages. Or people who spent a semester abroad and start talking like everyone can understand Italian.

2) my server Raj at Denny's who kept trying to make it sound like all the "sides" he was offering were free. Oh, would you like hash browns with your grand slam breakfast?
Oh yes FUCKER. Thanks for making me rack up a 30 dollar fucking breakfast at Dennys.

DAMN. I hate chain stores.

neat!

2006-11-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

Spell with Flickr

dreams

2006-10-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

i've been having rather strange dreams lately. in it i'm often not part of any of the action that is going on, instead i am seeing things from a removed "god-like" perspective. Things happen, the characters in the narrative interact with each other, and I weave in and out of different camera views.

yesterday a character said in the dream. The government was built on the idea that it will evaluate and then enforce what is going to be the maximum "good" for the maximum number of people. However, what the government has turned into is to enforce the maxiumum "good" for the minimum number of people within strategic "interest" groups with enough power to tip the scales.

Its strange, its hard for me to come up with things like this when I am awake, but its really opened my mind to a new framework of understanding politics and the world. Something dealing with minority/majority and decision making and it makes me sad.

Its too bad that I've always been a de-facto minority and every since I started to think for myself have always had rather progressive tendencies. Strange.

All this from a dream.

rectangles

2006-10-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

nerd speak

2006-09-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

"I like moving through potential gradients."
-- Jon, on biking downhill

So True

2006-09-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

pineapples

2006-09-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

Today my apple stick tasted like pineapples.
I hate it when they confuse the pineapples and the apples.
Don't people get the fundamental difference between these two fruits?
But then again, I guess apples and pineapples do look alike in paste form.

I've been listening to the Smiths obsessively recently. I am supposed to not listen to it too much because its depressing, but I really enjoy it.

walk to work

2006-09-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

Before i left for work today, Jon said "life is always good if you can still afford tea." I drank some green tea when I got to work. Its warmth was very soothing. I don't think I've ever had any beverage that has had the same effect on me.

I walked past the school right next to my house. A woman just dropped her child off at the side of the road. As her daughter ran out of the side doors, she said, "be strong minded!". I thought that was a strange parting comment. Most moms say "I love you" with their children hastily mumbling a response. I thought I would like to say that to my children right before they go to school someday. "Be strong minded!".

This reminded me of the time my grandfather used to pray over me right before I had to take exams. He would ask god to help me, and to give me presence of mind. I always liked that too, when he asked god to give me presence of mind. It always made me feel more confident right before tests.

I wonder what I will tell my children, have presence of mind! Or be strong minded! Im not sure. Depends on the occasion I suppose.

It was the evil bus driver who picked me up at the bus stop again today. She is very particular about people not stepping over the "yellow line". Despite our efforts, the bus always gets very crowded, and invariably someone spills over the yellow line. This bus driver will most definitely flip out, and bitch about the yellow line. It is very distressing. I hope she gets transferred to driving another bus line.

I got two applesticks instead of one today. I told myself I would only eat one on the walk to work, and then eat the other one on my desk with a cup of tea. I couldn't help it and ate both before I got to work. Rats. Although, the two applesticks was characteristically soggy today. I really dislike it when my foodstuffs are soggy. It is possible that my obssesion over the right proportions of meat and starch in my mouth could be related to this.

There was a charming two year old girl who said hello to everyone on the street right before I got to work. She said hello to me, with her wide brown eyes. Children are lovely things. I don't know why I've grown to be fond of them; It must be part of growing old.

in the grand tradition of this blog

2006-09-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

getting life lessons from CEOs :) weee

Find and follow your passions; develop a culture and live it. Positive financial results
will flow from that

Learn the business from the ground floor up – not from the top floor down.

Ask lots of questions! And, when and if you get the chance to travel, always look for new
ideas to bring home! Set your goals and never give up!

Have great focus, set high but achievable goals and work EXTREMELY hard at achieving them.
Be flexible and ready to adapt to change.

You are the next wave, and all of our shoes will be filled by someone. It may as well be YOU.
Never give up trying.

Never give up, and have a positive reaction to failure.

Have a passion for what you do, work hard, have great people with good personalities, enjoy the
ride, but balance work and family.

Accumulate a lot of singles and gradually get into the doubles and triples before you try for the home runs.

Listen to yourself. Be guided by your real passions and convictions, not just by what you think might get you ahead in life.

Identify where you have or can create an edge over the rest of the world and doing something you enjoy. Then push that advantage to extremes.

Be curious. And ... the more you give, the more you get. It’s as simple as that.

Identify and affiliate with creative talent. Brainstorm concepts and analyze constantly, but at the conceptual level, not the spreadsheet level

To succeed, you have to put in the hours and when you think you are there, put in more.

where is the madness that you promised me?

2006-09-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

Where is your sense of indignation
You are too kind
Much too kind

No one will ever love you honestly
No one will ever love you for your honesty

But you're not here to make my sad songs more sincere

I'm so glad this song doesn't hurt as much as it should have.
You mean relationships didn't have to be a long, drawn, out
self-loathing piss fests?

Wow

2006-07-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

Interesting new Sony Bravia ad

Design in the Philippines

2006-07-13T16:22:00.001-07:00

This is interesting

Pandora!

2006-06-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

I just discovered
Pandora try it. It creates a radiostation from an artist or music. Its pretty damn good.
I have so far listened to Neutral Milk Hotel and the Pillows (the latter had better results)

I've already discovered two new songs... in the last 5 minutes that I really like!
Freebee Honey by the Pillows
President Kochalka by James Kochalka Superstar (kind of.. .)
All These Things by All Systems Go
Trust Vs. Mistrust by The Spinto Band

And I got tired of listening to the Neutral Milk Hotel station because it started playingi songs that started to sound too much like country music, but I did like this song:

I felt your shape by The Microphones

passage from Kerouac's Lonesome Traveler

2006-06-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they'll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dresses thru workingman Frisco of Walkup truck drives and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard and here's all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and commuters of America and Steel Civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful, they've got to catch 130, 1321, 134, 136 all the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains. It's all in California, it's all a sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sum hot meditation in my jeans with head on handkerchief or brakeman's lantern or (if not working) on book, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and have insane conversations with Negroes in second-story windows above and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains.

But it was that beautiful cut of clouds I could always see above the little S.P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your heart. It was the fantastic drowse and drum of hum of lum mum afternoon nathin' to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness -- the people -- the alley full of trucks and cars of business nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my like three thousand five hundred miles from birth-O opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America.

Now it's night in Third Street the keen little neons and also yellow bulblights of impossible-to-believe flops with dark ruined shadows moving back of torn yellow shades like a degenerate China with no money -- the cats in Annie's Alley, the flop comes on, moans, rolls, the street is loaded with darkness. Blue sky above with stars hanging high over old hotel roofs and blowers of hotels moaning out dusts of interior, the grime inside the word in mouths falling out tooth by tooth, the reading rooms tick tock bigclock with creak chair and slantboards and old faces looking up over rimless spectacles bought in some West Virginia or Florida or Liverpool England pawnshop long before I was born and across rains they've come to the end of the land sadness
end of the world gladness all your San Franciscos will have to fall eventually and burn again.

From the first day of school

2006-06-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

Be happy. If prozac/booze/crack cocaine does not work, a
fine-looking stalkee will do the trick. Not that I'm encouraging your talents in
this aspect of human indiginity or anything.

- Jolly (from a letter trying to cheer me up about hating Stanford the moment I got there)

Very soon I will be graduating. I'm going to miss Stanford.

hmmmm

2006-06-04T22:24:00.000-07:00

after watching myself on video for 6 hours now, OMG, I didnt know I was THAT nerdy.

2006-06-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

I hate girls who look like the girls who have/had the hots for my boyfriend.
Gwoss..

graffik!

2006-05-30T21:03:00.000-07:00

wasn't accepted... trying a nonzombie looking one.

but those hands are so evocative!

holy shit

2006-05-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

I have so much work these upcoming two weeks. WTF.
Also my boyfriend has been swallowed by finals and apparently will never resurface, or perhaps will after next week? Or after he graduates? Or I'm not actually sure.

OMG OMG OMG I have so much work *shrivel*
I hate me216b... its been VERY STRESSFUl. Is this what I want my life to be? me216b and ulcers forever?

I better suck it up and descend into the world that is hard work these next two weeks. Damn it.

i wonder

2006-05-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

Will I always be so incredibly lonely? I cannot stand being around "artsy" people because I find them to be pretentious and concerned about their self images. I cannot stand being around engineers and practical people because they seem so heartless, uninspired, and, uncreative. I cannot stand "well adjusted" people because who the hell cares about the world they are so well adjusted to. I think no matter how hard I try, I'm always doomed to fuck up. I wonder, who the hell cares?

I have memories of my life, the lonely ones, being in Cebu, Jersey City, Manhattan, Palo Alto, all the periods of loneliness.

I saw a Munch show at the Cantor last Thursday. It was very good. I think I remember an old art teacher say that Munch practically drove himself crazy during the most productive artistic periods of his life. I was bummed out because some anal guard reprimanded me for "getting my hands" on the plexiglass case of Munch's belongings. A whole bunch of bullshit if you ask me. A few moments later, I heard a faint scratching noise, and I saw him sketching on a little notepad. WTF, guards aren't supposed to be surreptitiously sketching while they are guarding museum corners. I mean what with all the museum goers getting their fingerprints on plexiglass cases and such. Anyway... a whole wad of bullshit that put a damper on my appreciation of Munch's prints. They had about thirty.

I went to the Stanford MFA art show. It was a whole lot of bullshit if you ask me. Or maybe I just cannot understand modernist art "theory". It just looked like badly made objects. Coming from product design, I had some complaints about the poor craftsmanship of some of the art pieces. One artist had exacto knifed "peep holes" into plastic containers. The exacto knifed serrations were really grating,and the sculptures were not functional. Didnt anyone ever teach these "conceptual" artists how to use exacto knifes PROPERLY?

anyway, this whole post is becoming piss and vinegar. I'm entering the real world. i dont know if I'm excited at all.

living in SF!

2006-05-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

here is the house where I will be living next year. Yes its purple! I'm excited and scared to be starting out life outside of college. I hope it works out!

learning to be an adult

2006-05-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

today i checked out my first credit report... and it looks like I am in good standing. Woopie! Maybe I can get an apartment. I am going to be living in the city and working for a firm called Unovo. They make wonder irons... that are simply awesome. I am excited. I am going to be living in SF.

And today I got my first credit report. Apparently, my creditors still think I'm living in New Jersey. .So far it looks like I have a pretty clean report. ACCOUNTS IN GOOD STANDING and NEVER LATE. Yay I'm a good person. Sort of.

I'm so busy busy busy nowadays. But my undergrad career is coming to an end, and I'm excited to start life as a real product designer! Woohoo. I've had too much caffeine and I'm feeling pretty wired right now.

by the way... if you're interested in getting a credit report, you can get one, once a year for free from the government!

Taco, taco , taco

2006-05-18T23:42:00.000-07:00

I heart Nornna!

2006-05-16T23:50:00.000-07:00

I feel whole when you are here.

I wish I knew this existed

2006-05-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

map of all the safe bike routes in the stanford area!

mmm

2006-05-03T23:18:00.000-07:00

So Jon's writing this paper on "a simple method for obtaining the period of nonlinear oscillators". It sounds cool. There are a ton of integrals in the paper. It looks kind of complicated and cool-looking. (delete math-fetish related comments here)

Elsewhere in the world, the Stanford Design Process... yes SDP seems to have divergent results in terms of life and me216b.

I tried to inspire myself with something cheerful today. I bought some Teddy Grahams (the golden honey variety). It wasn't very helpful. Also in other news, my body seems to keep breaking /hurting. Currently, I am getting muscle pains in my thighs. It must be because of all that walking in my stupid 3 dollar girly shoes through San Francisco today.

A notable quote from Val. "I can't help but notice, but this soup tastes like cancer".
Bergy.. "Yes, quite interesting. This is the best tasting cancer I've had in my life... but then again, this is the first cancer soup I've had ever."

And yes the soup , allegedly, tomato soup did taste like cancer. And by cancer I mean burnt.

another pet peeve

2006-04-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

I hate people who talk/write like they just memorized SAT flash cards.

Here's a sample:

"Hello... Boys are super cool and awesome, and cars, and mokeys. Oh my god, the monkey has such an AUDACITY for sneaking up on the dog like that"

Its especially glaring if the content of the message doesn't really mean anything.
Just because you pile a bunch of fluffy, flowery language to hide the lack of insight in what you say, doesn't mean you're a genius all of a sudden.

bah.

2006-04-13T05:33:00.000-07:00

Its freaking senior year and I am still pulling stupid all nighters.
Damn it! Damn it! Damn it.

stuff and stuff

2006-04-08T16:36:00.000-07:00

just got a job interview at Ideo AND Jump. Isn't that funny. I was just hoping I'd get one there and now I actually have them. Weeee.

Also... fascinating thing is coming up on youtube

http://theshoyshoyboy.blogspot.com/2006/04/you-tube-hearts-nornna.html

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=nornna

Steve Jobs again

2006-04-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

Damn Right thats the way I'm going to live my life and no one else is going to tell me otherwise.

Let's Pretend We Dont Exist

2006-03-27T06:48:00.000-08:00

Lets pretend we're in antarticaaaaaaa

(job search looking better)
3 interviews coming up

Stuart Karten
Unovo
PointForward

Hoping to get interview at
Ideo
Jump

the job search anxiety haiku

2006-02-16T09:03:00.000-08:00

oh no! my career!
why are jobs so hard to find?
pain in my belly

two songs...

2006-02-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

And all that I want, and all that I need
and all that I've got is scattered like seed.
And all that I knew is moving away from me.
(and all that I know is blowing
like tumbleweed)
- Joanna Newsom

and one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the
aeroplane over the sea but for now we are
young let us lay in the sun and count every
beautiful thing we can see love to be in the arms
of all im keeping here with me
- Neutral Milk Hotel

hmmm mmmmm

2006-02-06T23:39:00.000-08:00

Two of us wearing raincoats

Standing so low

In the sun

You and me chasing paper

Getting nowhere

On our way back home

We’re on our way home

We’re on our way home

We’re going home

You and I have memories

Longer than the road that stretches out ahead

I miss Jon.

Wow, what a long day

2006-02-06T23:04:00.000-08:00

Today:
9-10 job search, made the big step asking contact about certain job that I was sorta hoping i would get, eventually turned down but was offered a referral to another company! sweet!
10-10:50 learned about global warming. Lots of graphs, pictures, about the global doom that is facing us. Also! To illustrate the famous correlation is not equal to causation argument the guest speaker put up a number of pirates versus global temperature graph. This further strengthens my argument about the mystery that is the growing collective fascination with pirates? Why?!!!
11:00-12:15 learned about the Kozmetzky Global Collaboratory, which is a "collaborative think tank" trying to generate new ways of creating global shared prosperity, particularly generating innovative ways of helping the third world. The speaker was very persuasive, but very VAGUE. It was exciting though. Saving the world is always stimulating.
12:30 - 2:30 looked at people in Tressider specifically people getting drinks out of the coolers. Noticed a really weird thing. People often liked to shake their bottles of beverages when they picked them out. There seems to be no reason for doing this, just a quirk a lot of people seemed to share. The general manager came up to us being suspicious of what were exactly doing staring at the soda coolers for 2 hours. She ended up giving us a ton of information about product placement and marketing. Quite illuminating!
2:30 - 3:00 : synthesized need findings in Tressider
3:00 - 5:15 : Learned about the 2 by 2 matrix method of classifying things. We used this first to classify: Majors The two axes were "difficulty" and "usefullness". Quite controversial findings I would say. I tend to have a more egalitarian view of things, so this discussion sort of disheartened me, especially when people were quite mean about the humanities. But alas, such is life.
We then proceeded to perform the same methods on Cereal! Prof bought in about 10 brands of cereal,that at least was not a very loaded subject to me.
6:00 Had dinner. Was quite awkward. But the buttermilk squash soup was yummy.

7:00 - 8:00 Went to hear Douglas Hofstadter talk! Douglas Hofstadter!!! The hero of my youth. That was exciting. He taught about "Analogical reasoning as basis for cognition". He essentially built up an argument that analogies were the very building blocks of our thinking processes. I'm not sure if I quite agree, or follow, or care, but he was quite a charismatic speaker. I especially enjoyed the animated slides (yes no powerpoint!) and funny anecdotes
8:00- 10:00 did my laundry and searched for more companies to apply to

Dokonjo Daikon

2006-02-04T17:36:00.000-08:00

HA-HA! This is awesome. From the BBC News:
the article
This unlikely drama started last summer in the town of Aoi, when residents noticed the radish pushing its way through the asphalt of a pavement.

Impressed by its perseverance, they named it Dokonjo Daikon, or the radish with fighting spirit.

Imagine their dismay then when one morning, they found the radish had been decapitated.

The Japanese public has frequently been touched by the plight of stricken animals. But commentators are at a loss to explain this wave of affection for a mere vegetable.

Inspired by the radish's fight for life, the town council now wants to extract seeds or even DNA from its remains in the hope of producing offspring of similar fortitude.

The Zero Form: Space, Surface, and Creation in Malevich and El Lissitzky

2006-01-31T21:31:00.000-08:00

Malevich argues that by pursuing art as end in itself we reach non-objective suprematism; we “arrive at the domination of form as end in itself over content and things, at non-objective suprematism—at the new realism in art, at absolute creation . (Malevich,74)” Malevich’s “zero of form” represents a series of reductive pictorial processes that lead to the final logical essence of painting. This essence, very clearly embodied by paintings in the 0.10 exhibition of 1915, is characterized by elements that are non-compositional, nonmimetic, and nonobjective. This reduction to the zero degree results in forms that are so perfectly refined that they are imbued with living autonomy. This conception of art completely abandons the idea of composition and instead treats the individual pictorial elements as autonomous, and dependent instead on weight, speed, and direction of movement. El Lissitzky reinterprets Malevich’s Suprematism which is largely planimetric and extends it into three dimensions. His body of Proun work represents an extension of Malevich’s forms characterized by ambiguous planar directionality into multiple axes of spatial ambiguity. The axonometric projections characterized in his prouns represent a sublation of perspective, leading to ambiguous space that at once disavows the infinity suggested by one point perspective and creates a work of dynamic tension and reversibility. The prouns represent another manifestation of the zero form, one that is universal and nonobjective.

In his 1916 Manifesto, Malevich not only argues about the theoretical underpinnings about the zero form in art, but also talks about the methods used to reach it. He very clearly states that color and texture is the means to achieve and delineate the essence of form. The use of these pure color forms dominates the paintings in the 0.10 exhibition. Color is the necessary and sufficient condition for painting. It is living, independent from any referrent , and highlights the planarity of the painting surface. In Suprematism, one of the more baroque pieces of the 1915 exhibition we find elements of the first steps of Malevich’s reductive process. The piece consists of a number of flat, geometric shapes painted in various colors. The painting is also non-representational: it bears no resemblance with forms in nature. No two adjacent shapes are painted in the same color. Malevich claims that when a painting can still be “read” if you take away its color then it is not a real living painting as color should be the means through which the forms are created and distinguished from each other. Movement seems to radiate onto all four corners of the image, as the lines and shapes have varying orientations and groupings. Malevich argues that this arrangement is not a result of an aesthetic ordering, or what traditionally has been the ordering of pictorial composition according to the relationship of forms and color. Thus the individual elements are independent. Each form insists on an irrevocable existence. From this painting we see some of the lessons learned from Malevich’s exploration of Cubism. The shapes that are all parallel to the picture plane recall the conflation of space and the surface-depth ambiguity created by overlapping forms.

In Eight Red Rectangles we see a distillation of the reductive processes mentioned earlier. We have now established the importance of color, movement, and non-objective forms. The shapes have been reduced to rectilinear forms. The composition still possesses its non-directionality. As in Suprematism, the individual elements seem to radiate and suggest movement on all four corners of the canvas. Overlapping has now been abandoned. This painting illustrates Malevich’s new realism, characterized by “the realism of painted units of color which are constructed so that they depend neither on form, nor on colour nor on their position relative to each other.” We move on to the final step in this visual distillation, the Red Square. In this painting we find Malevich’s insistence on the life of the surface of the painting. It is a conception of art that pushes and highlights the importance of the textural elements and physicality of the painting surface. The square is what Malevich’s understands to be pinnacle of a creative form divorced from the limitations of recreating nature. The square he claims is completely alien in the natural environment and thus highlights the creative powers of the artist. This is painting as end in itself. The surface is glorified for the qualities of the surface alone. We arrive finally at the essence of painting, the zero form of art. Like the other two paintings mentioned earlier we can point to the use of color to delineate form, the directional ambiguity and the emphasis on the physicality of the painted surface. In numerical systems, zero is where we begin, the absolute starting point. This implies both the end and the start of pictorial representation. We have reached the square form, which through its lack of referentiality, its elegance, its nondirectionality, we arrive at the reduction of form to its logical conclusion. Malevich has created a system through which artists can create forms that are pure, intuitive, and creative.

El Lissitzky’s body of “Proun” works of art is a reinterpretation of Malevich’s zero form of art. From a more general definition of the zero form: we know that it is “creative” process of art creation characterized by a rejection of copying the forms of nature and by the reduction of painting to its essential qualities. This suggests an artistic predilection toward creating an entirely novel visual vocabulary, and an entirely novel set of pictorial production. To create the new Malevich suggested a complete abandonment of known conventions of representation. In his manifesto, he denounces the horizon ring which confines artists to the forms of nature. El Lissitzky demonstrates a similar denunciation of the pictorial spaces that limit the artist’s creative abilities. To liberate the viewer from the horizon of forms, El Lissitzky argues that “it is necessary to destroy the vis-à-vis relationship” between spectator and pictorial works. El Lissitzky does this by introducing axonometric projection.(Bois, 86) Axonometric projection is an architectural technique of projecting three dimensions objects onto multiple planes. Lines in an axonometric drawing are always parallel and never converge onto a vanishing point. Axonometric projection gives us a counter to traditional one or two point perspective. One point perspective centers the viewer and therefore inscribes the viewer into the space of the picture. This suggests an anthropomorphic approach to art in spatial terms. Axonometric design with its rejection of the horizon line and vanishing point allows the viewer to situate himself however he/she wants to within the image. As Malevich creates a living form by highlighting the autonomoy of colored planes, El Lissitzky creates a new structure that one can looking into, around, and across. It ceases to become an image, and instead is a marked topographical/geographical map of multiple possible viewings. The image is thus no longer pictorial, no longer mimetic, but diagrammatic. It is then a work of creation and not of imitation.

The removal of the horizon line also results in what Yve-Alain Bois calls “radical reversibility” in El Lissitzky’s work. Although Bois extends his argument to associate El Lissitzky’s proun imagery to his political photomontages, radical reversibility within the proun context refers to the oscillation between concavities and projections. Thus a cube can at once oscillate between moving back into space and projecting out of the picture plane. This coupled with the similar ambiguity of the two dimensional elements creates a multifaceted oscillation between planes and volumes. This radical reversibility is certainly a reinterpretation of Malevich’s planimetric nondirectionality, an application of the same rules of ambiguity into thee dimensions. This experimentation is enabled by Malevich’s conception of the importance of non-interrupted planes. El Lissitzky restructures this planes into three dimensional forms and breaks away from Malevich’s planimetric compositions. Taking stock of the Malevich inspired “zero-form of Lissitzky’s” prouns, let us inspect Proun R.V.N.2, a mixed media work from 1923. The two dimensional elements harkens back to the simple geometrical forms delineated by color so characteristic of the Malevich works of the 0.10 exhibition. Two dimensional shapes overlap each other. The central cross structure suggested by the negative image created by the four brown corner squares centers our vision into what is going to be a barrage of spatial and two dimensional ambiguities. The white circle is not quite centered complicating the reversibility of flat shapes. On the left the squares corners meet at arc of the circle while on the right side, the squares pierce the shapes creating an interesting dialectic between surface and depth, a dynamic tension of spatial ambiguity. On top of the white circle there are three rectilinear volumes oriented at 90 from each other rotated found the central axis of the image, and around the central axis of their bodies as well. The three volumes make sense as projections moving out of the picture plane but the image breaks down if we switch gears and interpret these forms to be moving into the plane of the picture. In Proun 2c, 1920 Malevich intersperses the flat planes of color with the volumes further keying into the displacement of the viewer and the utter novelty of the visual experience. Volumes jut out of the surfaces rejecting normal Euclidean space, and gravitational constraints as well. By rearranging Malevich’s planar elements into both two dimensional overlapping planes and three dimensional forms, Lissitzky creates a new zero form--one that gets to the essence of painting in its redefinition of pictorial space. The new form breaks out of Malevich’s heralded surface and displaces the viewer’s sense of position with respect to the image, subverts known conventions of the three dimensional and creates a work of art that is indeed a living work of art.

graffik

2006-01-17T21:17:00.000-08:00

Something about foodness.

Some things to remember

2006-01-15T00:56:00.000-08:00

I've been very nervous about life recently. Today, I've had even more troubling conversations that have made me more squirmy about the future. I remembered Steve Jobs' speech. I think some things are worth noting. Essentially, these are the three "lessons" concluding each of the three Jobs' stories.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

Well thanks, Mr.-Apple-CEO-Man. Here's to everything vital, and meaningful, and beautiful, and important in my life. I better start bracing myself. Wish me luck.

Intermission cover

2006-01-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

Starting off the new year with an intermission graffik.

Aaargh Matey

2005-12-15T00:28:00.000-08:00

Why am I noticing a collective fascination with Pirates?

The Friendly Place

2005-12-13T15:22:00.000-08:00

I find it amazing that all the workers at Ace Hardware just seem happy and are incredibly nice and accomodating! Its so amazing. It gives me faith in the world again. Yay, workers of Ace Hardware.

Task Light

2005-12-12T12:19:00.000-08:00

For me116: Formgiving. The only piece I am proud of.

Oh Nostalgia

2005-12-06T03:34:00.000-08:00

I remember the Friday nights when I studied for midterms for Anatomy and Physiology in high school. I would sit there, stare at the wall, listening to bad rock music, as the names of muscles, bones, the bodily processeses of circulation, respiration, and the magic of wound repair would weave through my brain, like a loopy, tangled mess of random facts. Or memorizing the twelve cranial nerves with only 2 hours left before the midterm starts. On Old Olympus..... The facts would leave my brain as quickly as they entered.

Oh I'm glad my education is now more substantive. Painful. But Substantive.

Old Boy

2005-11-21T14:04:00.000-08:00

Here are some screenshots from the beautiful/gruesome Korean movie, Oldboy:

Laaandy

2005-11-21T11:43:00.000-08:00

Image from Flickr. Landy from Caltech.

Wish List

2005-11-18T12:08:00.000-08:00

Designed it myself from NikeID.

Surface and Depth in Cubist Painting

2005-11-17T21:58:00.000-08:00

Clement Greenberg, in his essay, Modernist Painting, argues that the essential and unique element of a painting is its flatness . Literal flatness is the physical flatness of the surface of the canvas and a depicted flatness is the flatness portrayed by the artist’s usage of form, shape, and value in the image. In Cubism, where traditional modes of creating mimetic space within the image have been abandoned, we find a conflation of literal and depicted flatness. Previously, linear perspective has been the most popular means of depicting space in an image. This same perspective orders the canvas into clear and mathematical renderings of planes and depth. Cubists created a method of representation that completely abandoned the use of perspective. This exploration delineated the necessary and sufficient conditions of a pictorial space that demonstrates depth without resorting to naturalistic painting techniques. Both artists achieved this by allowing both literal and depicted flatness to overlap and sandwich each other on the picture plane, creating a sense of spatial ambiguity. The oscillation between surface and depth creates an illusion of space and a new method of signification that ultimately breaks away from the representational. In doing so, both artists demonstrate the limits of painting as opposed to the limits of natural representation.

Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

In Braque’s 1911 painting, The Portuguese, we find a good example of the overlapping planes of literal and depicted flatness. The depicted flatness consists of the amalgam of planes painted parallel to the picture plane, the unconventional use of chiaroscuro, and the lines that signify open and overlapping forms. The picture consists of multiple geometric shapes set side by side in a shading scheme that does not render the objects to look three dimensional and instead create a lattice of seemingly incongruous gradients of light and dark across the picture plane. Further, in the image we often find dark objects adjacent to completely bright objects. In a naturalistic painting with a well- defined light source, this cannot occur if we assume that the objects are three- dimensional. The shapes or facets are all parallel to the picture plane, as none of the lines seem to signify traditional orthogonals that recede into a single vanishing point. The diagonal lines in the image do not converge and instead seem to form edges of shapes and objects. The grid of geometric elements creates a compressed cubist space of pattern across a single plane on the canvas.

The literal surface of the painting is hinted at by several visual cues. The most prominent visual cue is Braque’s use of stenciled letters on the upper half of the image. Letters provide an interesting counterpoint to the other graphic elements of the painting because they occupy a physical space while connoting a linguistic non-representational element within the image. Thus, the letters are graphic elements that both have color, line, shape, form within the picture plane, but they also represent language and semantic meaning. Thus when we see letters, we are at once convinced of their non-representational meaning. Letters occupy a space on the picture plane that is on a different level than the depicted flatness. The letters sit on the literal surface and highlight the flatness of the canvas. However this flatness is made ambiguous by brushstrokes that interrupts the flatness of the stenciled letters. In isolated areas in the painting we find the first instance of oscillation between surface and depth. The stenciled letters’ unequivocal frontality is interrupted by brushstrokes that had previously belonged to the background grid of cubist shapes and non-mimetic chiaroscuro. The literal, depicted, and literal flatness are interspersed between each other.

More of these ambiguities between both elements exist within the image. The lack of orthogonals and traditional depth cues cause the space to contract making it hard to synthesize a unified image. When both literal and depicted planes are parallel to each other, it is difficult to determine their spatial relations. Thus we find elements in the image where both literal and depicted surfaces mesh together and create an illusion of a surface that is deconstructed. The line, shape and form become an unintelligible mass of pictorial elements. Both artists mediate this by introducing the use of line and contours of shapes that signify a more “representational” rendering of the subject matter. For instance, in The Portuguese we find lines that depict guitar frets, a nose on profile, an arm, and a mouth. These depicted objects are smattered across the canvas pinning the unmoored chiaroscuro into localized areas of pictorial coherence. These shapes break the grid of cubist geometry while still appearing to belong to the same picture plane. This prevents the image from breaking down into complete abstraction while still maintaining its depiction of absolute flatness.

Braque. Still Life with Violin and Pitcher

In another Braque painting, Still Life with Violin and Pitcher, a similar repetition of lines and shapes create a flat geometric grid. Similarly, the grid is interrupted by pictorial elements that add a sense of order to the mosaic of parallel facets and planes. However, in this image, Braque takes one graphic element and renders it with a high sense of realism, or trompe-l’oeil. The trompe-l’oeil pin rendered with shadow and linear perspective on the upper area of the canvas further highlights the sense of flatness of the other elements of the picture and synthesizes all the other elements into a unified picture plane that rests beneath the 3-d surface of the pin. The three dimensional form of the pin and the space that it occupies unifies the geometric patterns into a single flat surface. The pegs and the peg frameset are also painted with the same high degree of realism and thre-dimensionality. Similarly, the juxtaposition between the flat pictorial cubist elements of the geometric grid and the three- dimensionality of forms rendered in accurate chiaroscuro creates a dynamic tension between the various planes in the image. The trompe-l’oeil pin sandwiched between the literal flatness of the canvas and the depicted flatness of the imagery again oscillates between surface and depth. While we initially apprehend the two-dimensionality of the facetted shapes, the “surface” is pushed back when we realize the existence of the pin, which itself has size, dimension and occupies a three dimensional space.

Picasso. Glass and Bottle of Suze. 1912

A similar oscillation of surface and depth occur in papier colle. Greenberg explains that the progression of using stenciled letters, to the use of large areas of wood veneer or sand synthesized the cubist geometric grid into a larger shapes that balanced the large areas occupied by these new pictorial additions grew naturally out of the way in which the individual elements of the images were being read. Thus in Synthetic Cubism, the facetted planes completely disappear and are replaced by large areas of paper cut-outs or newsprint. Similarly, surface and depth oscillate as the abandonment of chiaroscuro allows for a figure-ground reversal in several areas of the canvas. For instance, in Picasso’s 1912 papier colle, Glass and Bottle of Suze, the blue circular shape in the center of the image has a physicality reminiscent of the stenciled block letters of analytical cubism but it also serves as a background plane to the planes occupied by the glass and bottle. Its serves both as depicted background because of the way in which the other depicted objects overlap the shape and also as a marker of the literal flatness of the picture as both foreground, the white Suze bottle, and background, the blue plate share the same planar depth in the picture plane. Both paper cut-outs exist on the same plane even if they denote two objects that are overlapping each other.

Picasso. Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass. 1912

Remnants of the linear elements delineating shape still occur at several parts of the image, most visibly on the surface of the glass and sometimes outlining the edges of the cut or torn newsprint and paper. The rows of overlapping newsprint highlight the literal flatness of the surface on which it is pasted but the intermittent charcoal outlines around the newsprint push the plane back, giving it a sense of depth. The newsprint functions as both surface and background, figure and ground.
In Picasso’s 1912 picture, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass, multiple “readings” of the configurations of the paper cut-outs exist. For instance, the piece of white paper with a charcoal drawing depicts both a cup and the shape of the guitar. Similarly the bottom black shape can both be a bowl or the outline of the guitar. Aside from the slight modeling on the cup, no effort is made at depicting three-dimensionality. The painting is a composite of shapes that all occupy the literal surface of the picture plane. Through the viewer’s own cognitive interpretations the configuration of shapes reveal a construction that is pictorially coherent. Even without a depicted surface and depth, the viewer restructures the image according to the relationship of the individual parts to the whole. A foreground can be simultaneously a background as the cup can once be a figure, or the ground behind the guitar. As the surface becomes completely flat, and depth is annihilated, the images take on a higher degree of ambiguity. The Cubists invent a new method of representation in which the undepicted is transformed into a coherent image without the aid of naturalistic painting techniques. Through the ambiguity of the depicted surfaces, the image is reconstructed by its literal and depicted flatness.

Funny how that works

2005-11-17T10:16:00.000-08:00

Why do I find gratification in a good grade? That really doesn't make any sense.

New Controller

2005-11-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

New design for controller.

Graffix

2005-11-14T00:49:00.000-08:00

Something about a DJ named Kevvy Kev. An interesting character really. I'll post a link about him later.

Oh I love Product Design!

2005-11-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

Blue Ball Machine!

2005-11-09T10:14:00.000-08:00

An unbelievably LARGE array of Rube Goldberg Mechanisms, Robots, people, and blue balls!

the woooorld is changing

2005-11-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

This project with Microsoft has really opened my world to the world of user interface design. I find it interesting because of the notion that IDEAS are more important than the actual IMPLEMENTATION of real or virtual products. I think this is the first time, where its been drilled in my head where the actual mapping of user experiences are actually more important than just the inherent "coolness" or excellence of the product (i.e. no matter how awesome/beautiful/technologically savvy your product is, it still has to be used by a human being and that is what matters the most,duh.)

Here is the current iteration of the main menu for an interface. The metaphor for
exploration is looking at a "galaxy" of stars. This leads you to a network of related programming, hopefully clusters exist that link certain types of genres. Jon of course,being the math dork that he is, told me that this system is actually sort of mathematically impossible. The mapping cannot be one to one. I think for now I am content with having multiple stars being shown?
So one scrolls at this "galaxy" of stars to find different types of shows and explore new possibilities. It is essentially a histogram of all shows currently being viewed and the user can make his/her choices accordingly, depending on how nonconformist or conformist he/she wants to be.

A lot of talk has actually been built around these new "maps. For instance there is
Google Maps, then there's Google Earth, there's a number of really great API's for Yahoo Maps . These API's enable people to increase functionality of a certain product. For instance someone has used Google Map to show crime rates in Chicago, by geographic area. Similarly Yahoo Maps has its vast array of applications too.

An article in Wired magazine spells it out pretty nicely.:

"How did we get here? This technology used to be top-secret government stuff. Then, in the 1980s, McDonald's dumped thousands into buying satellite images and developing software called Quintillion, which predicted the growth of cities and school districts. Ever notice there's always a McDonald's where you'd expect one? The company looked down from the heavens and dropped new franchises wherever it saw the right combination of kids, interstates, and suburbs, using one of the first geographic information systems for business analysis."

Mapping of real time crimes occuring by type of crime, and geographic area at Chicagocrime.org using the google map interface

Real Time Caltrain Schedule

Flickr Photos by City

I'm excited to see where this will go.

Now that we're talking interaction

2005-11-03T16:54:00.000-08:00

Here is one that uses Cellular Automata

Awww man this site Rawks

Interesting Interfaces

2005-11-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

a Map of the stock market

a Map of what people are thinking about right now

a Map of whats going on in the world

Graffix

2005-10-30T21:39:00.000-08:00

Feminism complicated by being "African-American"

A Mix Tape of How It Feels To Be With You

2005-10-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

As I am apt to do such things...
1. Till There was You - the Beatles
2. Sadie - Joanna Newsom
3. My Wandering Days are Over - Belle and Sebastian
4. Super Me - Velvet Teen
5. I Found a Reason - Cat Power
6. Hardest Geometry Problem in the World - Mark Mothersbaugh
7. Takk - Sigur Ross
8. Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland,Illinois - Sufjan Stevens
9. Sunshine and Clouds - Clap your Hands Say Yeah
10. The Luckiest - Ben Folds

Intermission Cover

2005-10-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

"Worst Case Scenario: Stanford"

On a different note...

2005-10-23T23:33:00.000-07:00

Let me pose two questions... or maybe a question and an observation... or would that rather be two observations?

1) Why is it that people often use the phrase "impending doom". Does doom always have to impend? What about an inevitable doom, or a doom-in-progress, or a concurrent doom? Something of that sort?

2) I just saw a photo of a memorial of sorts in Nagasaki with the inscription "God is Love." I wonder, if god is love, and love is the feeling I have toward Jon, then maybe God isn't so bad after all. Because if God is indeed love and if he repressented the totality of all the good memories I've had, then he can't be all that bad.

Back to toiling. Isn't it funny. That sounds like Toilet. Toiling is Crappy.
On a good note, and very much related to toilets and crapping, I talked to Songhua and asked if I could get switched out of Sunday Bathroom Crashing and very kindly obliged. Yay for kind House managers.

Why virtual relationships are purer?

2005-10-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

The literature also suggests several reasons for why this might occur. For example,
Walther (1996) suggested that one of the reasons why hyperpersonal interactions – interactions that are more intimate, more intense, more salient because of the communication channel – occur in CMC is because participants can reallocate cognitive resources typically used to maintain socially acceptable non-verbal gestures in face-to-face interactions and focus on the structure and content of the message itself. The message itself then comes across as more personal and articulate. Indeed, in virtual worlds where we do not have to constantly worry about how we look and behave, we would be able to dedicate more cognitive resources to the message itself.

Nick Yee's paper on MMORPG's

A Better Image?

2005-10-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

Which is the better image?
The only information you have:

Mark Rothko. Orange and Yellow. 1956
47" X 39"
"I favor the simple expression of the complex thought"

Chuck Close. Big Self-Portrait 1967-1968
107.5" X 83"
"paintings first and portraits second"

Those Crazy Italians

2005-10-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

Hey they made some good art.

Oh Paper-age

2005-10-19T19:14:00.000-07:00

"There is an inherent truth which must be disengaged from the outwared appearances of the objected to be represented... Exactitude is not truth"
-- Matisse

Revived? Sort of

2005-10-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

My computer feels like a wilting patient just coming off of a really bad accident. It is quite delicate. Every now and then (i.e 15 minutes) I have to restart it because of a memory allocation error. Further, I now cannot upload any USB devices into it and currently have zero working applications on my computer. However, this "internet" capacity has now put the world at my fingertips as Jon puts it.
I hope that the problems get fixed soon enoough and my computer be restored to its old glory.

Neat!

2005-10-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

Abstract Art from your own DNA.
FINALLY reformatting computer right now. wooo

Lao-tzu knows it

2005-10-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

manifest plainness,
embrace simplicity,
reduce selfishness,
have few desires.
-Lao-tzu

can I really do that?
an interesting world view.

Naoto Fukasawa

2005-10-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

Naoto Fukasawa is a really really amazing designer. He has a sense of humility and skill in designing his products that is astounding. In the world of 3d Cad and easily-modifiable curvilinear surfaces so commonplace in consumer products it is refreshing to find someone so honest, so skilled with such an economical use of visual and design cues. I like Fukasawa because of his attitude as a designer. He says that really good designs show the absence of the designer's ego, an attitude very rarely found in contemporary western design (i.e. Rashid and his ilk)

Here is another direct quote:

“My approach to design is located somewhere between the subjective and the objective. In plus-minus terms it might appear to be all about adding and subtracting, but that isn't what it's about. I locate myself at zero, the ideal median point. You don't notice when it's not necessary to do so, but if you look closer, you can see that it's been well thought out. What I do therefore is to give the design some depth so that people who appreciate such things are able to do so. People who aren't concerned about such matters can just get on and use the products and become absorbed in this action. In order to maintain both these elements, it's essential that neither is too obtrusive and that an ideal balance is maintained. Depending on the situation and the context, the design may seem to make the product very easy to use. On other occasions, the design blends into the environment without stressing its identity, playing a role behind the scenes as it were. This is what I mean when I talk about “plus-minus zero.”

I suppose my approach has something in common with the affordance approach and in that respect differs from previous types of design in which the emphasis is placed on the identity and impact of the object itself or on deliberately avant-garde forms of expression. It's all about discovering the essence of new design as it lurks within everyday life as represented by the idea of uncovering things there to be found. What I try to do is to discover the essence of new design latent in the everyday environment.”

Fukasawa also has a visual aesthetic that is minimal and almost anti-technical and really ANTI-CAD looking that is very attractive. He has a sensibility for "the simple" and for products that find its value with its relation to its environment. His works ofter spur a sense of desire for the mundane and for the ordinary.

“I think about what is “iconic” for a sofa or a watch. I am not thinking to expose myself, I am thinking more about the common view of products. If I make something iconic then people say, ‘Oh, I know this one!’ – but I ask them, ‘Why do you know, because you haven’t seen it before!’ It means I am interested to describe how people already share something. Does that make sense?”

"Fukasawa’s search for the “iconic” product, the product that communicates its function and identity so efficiently that people recognise it automatically, means that his work cannot be overtly radical. “If I wanted to design a completely new nice telephone I can’t remove the image of the ugly old telephone because people’s image of the telephone is of the ugly old one,” he says. “I gently show new things and mix them together.”
“People say I’m a good creator of ideas, but I’m more a good shape-maker. Really, you need a good form-making designer who can make good ideas. But I’m on the other side. Give me an ugly object and I can make it better like magic.”

Ideo's Profile of Naoto Fukasawa

Revolutionary Tides

2005-10-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

Jon was here over the weekend. We went to see the Revolutionary Tides show at the Cantor Arts Center. It was really amazing. I thought it was interesting how varied cultures even with diametrically opposed political views could coalesce in the visual representation of their ideologies. The Russian posters were the most stunning I thought. For some reason American painting always seems so ordinary and watered down, and mainstream, secular. I wonder if I think that because I actually live in America and the visual vocabulary has become so banal, or if American graphic designers are just inferior?

Design: Oscillations of a Multifaceted Identity

2005-10-17T18:56:00.000-07:00

Every machine is a spiritualization of an organism

The existing discourse in design is framed in the context of form vs. function, machine vs. natural aesthetic, bourgeoisie vs. cultural elite, modernism vs. primitivism, and the commercial vs. ethical. Often in western tradition, opposing dichotomies exist to help deconstruct highly nuanced categories. Thus, in the history of design we are often presented with these notions in tandem and often opposed to each other as though implying that design has been a struggle between opposing predominant trains of thought. However these rough demarcations often mask the dynamic nature of the discipline and its more frequent oscillations and the existence of design artifacts that simultaneously hold various opposing categories. While it is arguably naïve to opt for an overarching structure of design that encompasses all these definitions it is reasonable to postulate that good design can span these irreconcilable polar opposites and often embrace a previously unacceptable norm. Design finds rich and salient manifestations by a process of systematic integration with the patterns of human action. Design ultimately achieves this by mediating between vocabularies that have previously been obtuse or situated within a cultural, economic, technical, or artistic minority and cast them in a vocabulary that is at once accessible, multifaceted and ultimately human.

We see these binary and seemingly contradictory themes dictate the philosophies and design in the canonical figures of design history as well as in the design of objects and selection of culturally relevant artifacts. This is especially evident in the debate between Hermann Muthesius and Henry van de Velde and in the stark differences of points of view between Raymond Loewy’s capitalistic zeal for reinventing product identity and Henry Dreyfuss’s user centered “design is for people” approach, or with the move toward ornamentation with the arts and crafts movement in contradiction with the sparse rationality of the international style. During the Werkbund Conference of 1914, Van de Velde expresses a distrust of anything that might sterilize his actions and stifle his freedom of thought or a ‘universally valid form that he sees only as a mask that seeks to make a virtue out of incapacity (). In contrast, Muthesius had a faith in standardization as a means to creative a clear design language that will be distinctive of the Germans. He also believed in the simplicity of forms and in the creation of objects that embraced the new possibilities created by the industrial revolution rather than spurn them or rein them in with selective design. Muthesius and Van de Velde both sought an authenticity in design that expressed honesty and an unequivocal expression of a point of view. Muthesius, like the many functionalists and anti- ornamentalists that follow him ( eg. Le Corbusier, Loos, Bauhaus, The Ulm School) believed that purity of form was nothing more than a symbol for a purity of mind and therefore a more sincere expression of design. Van the Velde and the others who have design philosophies akin to his (Mcintosh, the Eames, the Memphis design movement) sought to have a more vital and artistic approach to design, to be able to express creative and individual expression into design. These divergent attitudes toward design fail to underscore its main goal, that is to create an effectively constructed and well communicated form that expresses clarity in its function, execution and ability to engage the user whether it is through engaging his different senses, enabling the user to perform a task or to appeal to his aesthetic or philosophical tastes. Design is a dangerously all-encompassing label with numerous categories in its orbit and opposing ideas in its history. It is often seen as a totality of various points of view whether technological, social, emotional, rational, ethical, aesthetic, and cultural. Thus we come to the realization that any conclusive definition of design is impossible. One could only guess as to the many permutations of design that exists. However one could argue that there is successful and unsuccessful design and therefore its various manifestations have been subject to a value judgment determined by present cultural norms and history. Successful design relies on a clarity and honesty of intent and execution that communicates a sense of utility and pleasure in its usage. While the polar opposite characterizations of design give insight into the concerns that go into these definitions, there are points of convergences where anomalous categories exist, things which transgress the binary divide and hold a particular interest for me because it points to a particularly strong and richer design point of view. These critical points exist in the different facets of design and I will outline clearly how they have been played out and resolved throughout design history.

Technology (the logical and aesthetic language of design)

The triumph of the industrial revolution ushered in the first incarnation of the break down of what is arguably the most visible of these dichotomies (form vs. function). Since the separation of art and craft during the Renaissance, the practice of design (i.e. the process of planning and executing products that have functionality as its primary interest) has had a separation with the motivations of art for art’s sake. Thus the world was filled with artworks unsurpassed in their value as objects of ornament and cultural productions and objects that were highly mundane but functional. However, the advancement of engineering as a profession together with the advancement of mechanical and electrical technologies lead to a proliferation of structures and objects that whose beauty were a strange and unexpected side-effect of their mechanical efficiencies. It is especially notable that these devices were not intended to be objects of design, or designed to be objects of desire, or intended to be anything other than its explicit function deriving from its compliance with the laws of physics and scientific experimentation. Nothing could be farther from our conception of design as an integration of a completely rational and objective object into the sphere of well designed objects. Thus giant electric generating turbines, engines, and industrial artifacts became the inspirational driving force behind the Futurist movements, Le Corbusier’s reconception of life as a mechanical problem and ultimately to the Bauhaus principle of using the powers of industrial production in the service of beauty. So we see a constant oscillation between the different purposes of technology and its relationship with beauty, personal expression and design. Initially technology has, to quote Richard Buchanan in his essay, Declaration of Design: Rhetoric, Argument and Demonstration in Design Practice, provided the logos of the design argument. Design which Buchanan contends is a “rhetorical activity that relies on technology to be the backbone of a design argument […] In essence, the problem of technological reasoning in design is the way the designer manipulates materials and processes to solve practical problems of human activity”( Margolin, 98). This activity might sound rather banal and certainly technology has been initially viewed as the mere enabler of design thinking, the means through which ideas ould be executed to their full completion. The sudden break in this interpretation occurs at the onset of modernism where we shift from viewing technology as a means to execute design to the embodiment of good design. It is not the way to achieve design, it is good design. The engineering and scientific process is then cast as a valid design methodology one that when wedded with previously ‘artistic’ domain of design has produced stunning results. This movement evolved from genuine acceptance of the nature of technology, the celebration of the machine and an awareness of the present that was radically different from the past. It is even arguable that this respect for the objective and self effacing design methodologies of the engineer that address problems at their fundamental physical and compositional underpinnings has trickled into the prevailing value in art criticism. The art critic Choicy highlights the importance of form as the logical consequence of technique and the value of technique and construction in the creative process. The architect and designer is expected to make an educated appraisal of the problem before him after which the form of the building would logically follow from the technical means at his disposal. This casts design solutions and gives it a claim to ethos, a rightful place that is not merely a superficial indulgence. This paradigm in design thinking holds particularly true today with the technological revolution and the miniaturization of technologies and the silicon revolution. With Moore’s Law and a continuous packing of circuit elements increasing by a factor of 2^(1/2)every year it is hard to say what new paradigms of design thinking could be achieved as a result of this revolution. However, technology has served both as design inspiration and design enabler. It has inspired many an art movement, Futurism and Cubism to name a few. Thus it has been able to simultaneously hold these disparate categorizations gracefully. Today, technology at its rawest is hardly accessible to the general public. Design has taken equations, scientific formulae, and engineering diagrams to tangible entities that provide delight, utility and gain public acceptance.

Social

Products have an undeniable ability to change lives. A professor and I were having a conversation yesterday and my watch, like most digital Casios, has been set to beep every hour on the hour. “Is it seven already”, he inquired. I had informed him that I set my watch 4 minutes fast just to make sure that I get to my lectures on time. After hearing this he expressed regret that he had recently purchased a new cell phone with an automatic time set-up being fed from an atomic clock sent through a digital signal. He jokingly said that it felt like being trapped in a universe were time was set out in unchangeable increments. My Casio afforded me the ultimate power over my destiny – the time set-up button.

Design has a way of coordinating lives and lifestyles. It integrates objects into social activities. A successful design is a conflation of the technological or artistic devices that enable it, the current social conditions that choose to accept a certain design point of view. It is a process of bestowing things with added value. Design links the economic to the cultural. It is a way of restoring meaning to an array of simulacra, combating the presence of meaningless objects. This goal is at odds with the present phase of the capitalist development where market conditions are dictated by the desire and buying patterns of consumers. Thus more theoretical modernist design tenets are at odds with the anonymous developments in technique industrial production and consumerism. Our society has created an infrastructure where the designer has massive reach and influence because of the power of mass production. This is at odds with the design of high culture which often seeks to be a cultural minority. The task of the designer is a difficult one for he or she must create meaningful products in a world where millions of people could potentially be using their products. The power of multiples and the masses has an ability to bring design to its lowest common denominator as evinced by the questionable products on the shelves of Walmart today. The designer caters to a market with certain tastes dictated by psychological, social and historical patterns. We often see designers foisting their visions upon a seemingly unknowing public and while it might be an act of bestowing normative value onto objects more mechanisms are at play here.Design is architectonic and has the ability to coordinate various modes of production giving it order and purpose. Design provides the methodology behind the thought of idea it organizes all levels of production and coordinates human production and activity at various levels.

Culture

“As long as a universal high level of taste has not been achieved, we cannot count on German arts and crafts making their influence effectively felt abroad.”—Hermann Muthesius (Gorman, 89)

The development of products that gain the appreciation of a universally valid, unfailing good taste has been a goal of most designers. This was one of the motivations for Muthesius to call for standardization and the acceptance of industrial production to aid in the creation of objects. However, the process of achieving a convincing stylistic expression has often been overused by some designers to gain competitive advantage by superficial means. Guy Julien, in his book, Material Culture argues that “the fundamental problem is the seemingly inexorable tendency of the excellence of material culture toward attenuation, superficiality and even disappearance.” The problem of creating products that maintain a sense of integrity in the face of powerful shaping material culture resurfaces again. Cultural capital which is the ability to distinguish between the cultivated and the vague seems to be one of the things most designers keep in mind during the design process. Higher cultural capital often suggested a more cultivated or civilized background and this is why certain designer objects are cast as expensive almost extravagant useless things saved only by their claim to high cultural capital. Thus well designed objects of today are often turning objects into highly desirable elitist artifacts. Ettore Sottsass sought to break this tradition of elitism turning to the creation of more well rounded objects rather than creating indulgent and esoteric high culture designs.

Another example of the appearance of self-indulgent designer’s products is the Juicy Salif created by the designer Philippe Starck. Earlier there was a natural evolution of functional products whose main design vocabulary is that of their ability for utility, how did a completely useless object like the juicy salif come into being and much notoriety in the world of design objects? Starck himself has been known to have said “this is not a very good lemon squeezer: but that’s its not its only function. I had this idea that when a couple gets married it’s the sort of thing they would get as a wedding present” ( Julier, 68) This sheds light on the value of cultural capital; the designer himself has explicitly said that the lemon squeezer has problems with its functionality, but it is viewed almost as an art product, a completely useless artifact that gains public interest because of the intangible.

Despite all these divergent and convergent distinctions in design, we realize that it is nothing but the process of clear articulation and conception of a device that fulfills its objective whether it is to function as an object of utility or pleasure. Mechanical, formal compositional, social and cultural ramifications of objects all filter into the design and help give it its multi-faceted identity. This process of selection and creation with the end user ultimately in mind helps clarify previously distorted, obscure or esoteric knowledge and disciplines into a language that can be understood by everyone. Design is no longer concerned with just the object but with the totality of different infrastructures that surround and contain it. Like a well versed argument well designed objects not only achiever their goals as tangible entities in the world but have far more long lasting ramifications into our social lives, histories and identities for they reflect our rational, ethical and emotional desires. Design is therefore never a compromise between opposite dichotomies but rather a dynamic and pluralistic reflection of our own multifaceted humanity.

Works Cited:

Buchanan, Richard, Margolin, Victor ed. (1986) Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice Design Discourse, University of Ilinois Press

Julier, Guy (2000) The Culture of Design, Sage Publications London

Muthesius, Hermann, Van de Velde, Henry Gorman, Carma ed. (2003) Statements from the Werkbund Conference of 1914. The Industrial Design Reader, Allworth Press

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2005-10-16T21:28:00.000-07:00

Something about too much carbs in supposedly " vegetarian" Ricker Dining