Curated Fruits

“Fresh” fruit sold in a posh Tokyo Midtown supermarket. Brilliant symmetries and perfections and curious delicate packing. Sorted and curated specimens. At dinner that night, I was told that Japan basically imports all of its fruit, so it becomes rather like something precious. Perhaps the plastic/foam packaging implies this delicate character of the fruit, as much as it likely serves to protect the fruit from bruising during shipment from more tropical climates. Any proper farmer’s market will quickly remind you that fruit does not look like this at all. It is often quite unsymmetrical and quite more “natural” colors — not looking like a sample of Pantone process inks. The only thing fresh about this fruit, I’m fairly certain, is that it’s just ripened after a hop over from, say, the Philippines.

In the midst of a world-wide food crisis — hoarding, plain lack, prices adjusted upward to account for increasing transportation/fuel costs — such staples as fruit may likely become even more precious than what this image suggests. Soylent Green anybody?

Design Processes

A worthwhile challenge for designers — learn how to learn. Self-evident, but I’m just sayin’. Learning the particulars of the mechanics, engineering, materials — what is often waved-off as “technology” — of the objects designed has more value than one might think at first. It’s a bit brutal at times, and daunting, and confusing. Just when you think you understand what the implications are of displays that use TFT, you realize you’ve got it all backwards. In the end, though, it gets figured out.

The advantages are that questions and parameters integral to one’s own perspective on the design get highlighted and discussed. Perhaps even new processes are introduced, even new approaches to creating the “technology”, merely based on a different perspective that engineers, marketers and others had never really considered relevant.

Here, above, the motivation for this design process thought. Our languages about display parameters initially stuck to the usual categories. In particular, we talked about “contrast.” The engineers had an existing, instrumental and mathematical perspective on what contrast is — a dynamic range between white and black. This is correct, of course. Duncan added a new parameter — “punchiness.” A new bit of language to the conversation about displays. Less instrumental, but valid because, in a way, perhaps unexpectedly, he was referring to the perception that people who have to use the display might have of the display’s characteristics. Something more people oriented than even “contrast.”

Why do I blog this? I’m curious about what happens when different practice communities come together. How does their thinking shift? How is language and gesture deployed to explain ideas and idioms that are not shared?

For example, during this get-together, the room was shared by designers, technical managers, engineers — six of us all together. There were three formal languages spoken — German, English and Japanese. There were several technical languages spoken, some specific and articulate, others broken and pidgin — materials technology, optics, electrical engineering, manufacturing technology, industrial manufacturing, industrial design, chemistry, ecology. There were some interesting extended hand gestures to indicate processes, actions and activities, all in the interest of sharing ideas and developing insights and learning and breaking down the usual disciplinary boundaries to find new vantage points from which to create new things. Part of that means, learning at least a bit about what these various languages have to say about and contribute to the design process. Design without a depth of knowledge about the materials/processes/histories one is designing with is the definition of disadvantage. To the degree that knowledge is shallow, or nonexistent is equal to the degree of disadvantage one has. (Really, time spent on the assembly line, in the design studio, in the materials lab, the clean rooms, hearing about failures — all of this is necessary to attain that depth, and the consequent advantage to design processes.)

It should be expected (if it isn’t already) that it’s not enough for a designer to pay attention only to surface and appearance. Part of the robustness of design comes from understanding the possibilities of new materials, new processes, new processors, or having the language, practice skills and moxy to suggest new possible engineering (say) processes or whole new technologies based on a unique insight that runs not just broad, but deep. As I once told students, it’s not easy, or fast, or possible to do so from day one after graduating. It’s a lifetime process to develop a breadth and depth of knowledge and practice that can make new things. That means patience, a keen eye, eager will and an aspiration to learn in every context, not just the classroom. The best thing you can get for your educational dollar is to learn how to learn.

Nokia Design Needs You

The Service and UI Design within Nokia Design – is expanding, and they’ve got jobs going in Palo Alto and Helsinki/Espoo for both visual and interaction designers. You’d be working directly with Chris, Adam, Younghee and Raph, and just along the org chart from Jan and myself and the rest of the Design Strategic Projects studio. I just saw the org chart the other day; you’d be in a pretty sweet neck of the woods, frankly. Something’s going on at Nokia, or some kind of celestial bodies are lining up. Whatever the case, it’s a great opportunity for the right sort of designers.

There are six openings. You’ll need to apply through the Nokia recruitment site. The jobs to search for are:

Interaction designers, Espoo: ESP0000022U, ESP0000022T

Comms designer, Espoo: ESP0000022V

Interaction designers, Palo Alto: SAN000000BQ, SAN000000BP

Comms designer, Palo Alto: SAN000000BV

Action-Implications

While in Japan and discussing design and the implications it can create around action and thought. Nothing mystical, but maybe..For example, the Zero Waste charger scooting around the Design Strategic Projects studio. The design of the activation button which starts a charge

Peculiar Practices

Here in Venice, where there is a tight housing market (but not unaffected by the current deep downturn), if you want to knock down the ugly old and put up your new janga-box architectural, but don’t want to hassle with the permissions to do a new construction, you can leave one wall standing and call the project a remodel. Incredibly open loop-hole,

Eats In Context

It’s curious to think about eateries in time-context rather than categories of food types. In this case late night workers, people out after bar-hopping, people who just don’t cook at home and have midnight cravings. The neighborhood here is somewhat borderline in terms of its geography. It’s several blocks from a university and a designated buffer zone of historical significance — the West Adams

Undisciplinarity.

What I’m coming to understand is the relationship between art, technology and design as one in which the different idioms of very distinct and displinary practices can be brought together..or not. My insights are not as thorough as yours and more driven by intuition and insight through process and projects. My own descriptions of these experiences are that “interdisciplinary” means multiple disciplines engaged in a pile-up, a knot of jumbled ideas and perspectives. Lots of different languages and vocabularies and principles, and especially ways of “completing things” — processes — that feels quite a bit like a bunch of different driving habits converging on a busy freeway.

I prefer the term “undisciplinary” because it wants nothing to do with playing the usual games, according to the usual logics (doing things to serve a specific mode of capital accumulation and capital production — whether knowledge-as-property, culture-as-commodity, objects or other materializations that can be sold for profit.) It’s not “interdisciplinary” — which I bought into once. Neither is it transdisciplinary, which I admittedly don’t know that much about, but suspect it’s a bit of an over-theorized alternative to “interdisciplinary”

“Undisciplinarity” is as much a way of doing work as it is a departure from ways of doing work, even what “counts” as work. It is a work habit and approach to creating and circulating culture that can go its own way, without worrying about working outside of what histories-of-disciplines say is “proper” work. It’s “undisciplined” and not willing or even able to operate within the realm of consumer capitalism and capital accumulation. You can’t be wrong — or have old-timers tell you how to do what you want to do. This is a good thing, it means new knowledge is created rather than incremental contributions to a body of existing knowledge. It means new ways of working, new practices, new unexpected processes and projects come to be, almost by definition. It’s not for everyone. Many if not most people need to be told how to do what they do. They need discipline and boundaries and steps and rules. They need to know what’s good, and what’s bad. They need to know what the boundaries are and where the limits of the discipline lie. And this makes sure that the creation of specific, sensible knowledge is created.

Why is this important? Why “undisciplinarity”? Because we need more playful and habitable worlds that the old forms of knowledge production are ill-equipped to produce. It’s an epistemological shift, not (only) new ways of fixing the problems the old disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices created in the first place. If these old practices are lap dogs to consumer capitalism how quickly can they learn the desperately needed new tricks to fix the crisis-level challenges the world faces?

New Forms of Organization — Digital Bohemia

Honm Friebe is an economist and journalist and one of the managing directors of Zentralen Intelligenz Agentur in Berlin.

Holm Friebe’s book, Wir nennen es Arbeit (”We call it work”) is a bestseller in Germany, describing how to work creatively and with integrity in “the hedonistic company.”

Seven or So Rules for Collaborating Professionally and Still Staying Friends

Rule 1, The 7 Nos - No office. No employees. No fixed costs. No pitches. No exclusivity (company doesn’t own your life). No working hours (results only). No bullshit.