Another link collection as I rev up to write my grad project proposal for the semester. I have a temporarily-broken computer, a hefty pile of library books at home to work through, plus an ever-expanding sprawl of links, ideas, video, images, and moral systems which relate to my project and which somehow all have to fit into one proposal with 3 lines of inquiry.
In our first class of the semester, my professor talked a little about designing for empathy. So here we have Amanda Spielman’s Island of New Ephemera, created for Stefan Sagmeister’s “Can Design Touch Someone’s Heart?” class or assignment (not sure which… the Metropolis mag post which a bunch of people had linked to has been hidden behind a paywall.) I think this is a very successful and funny little project. Otherwise insightful people often respond to such an assignment by taking the most pedantic, overwrought or just plain sledgehammering method to touching someone’s heart. We’ve had similar assignments at ECI. Spielman’s project works by inspiring, not demanding, a response. This is the sort of thing I aspire to.
Another inspiring little bit-of-something which I recently added to my collection: the phrase “an inverse Odyssey in which the islands themselves do all the travelling” from this post which has very little to do with the topic of the post but gave me some interesting experience-concepts to ponder. The Odyssey (I recommend the Fagles translation) has always been a source of inspiration for me, a kind of metaphorical tool that I use to examine life. The Odyssey is concerned with Odysseus’s journey towards his home, which he continually reminisces about and pines for. But a home is, after all, an experience more than a physical location. Reading the above phrase from BLDGBlog* made me imagine being stuck in one geographical location while the “place,” better described as an experience or context (but that’s really what makes a place itself) wanders around and you keep trying to pull it towards you… it gets closer but then is snatched away. I feel like this is the way a lot of people relate to the idea of “home.” Ithaca keeps floating towards Odysseus and getting blown away again, while he stays in one place: lost, that is.
A little writeup and some good images of Tate Modern’s Global Cities project. Check out those graphs! The original Tate website is now linked in the sidebar. It is becoming a really important resource for me, in terms of information and also methodology.
Another really important resource is… science fiction! I am re-reading a bunch of William Gibson’s novels to look at possible textures and emotional tenors for social spaces. He has an excellent sense of the way objects, clothing, music and architecture all affect our perceptions of a certain person, place or experience. I also found this post about overcrowding and dystopia in sci-fi to be very interesting. The author argues that we should get over our patholog(ical/izing) fear of human density and embrace it as positive or at least not an inevitably negative force (the argument that I am also making in my project). Much of 70’s “golden-era” sci-fi was predicated on the what-if of massively dense human settlements. Living in one seemed to lead, inevitably, to psychotic behaviour. Gibson seems to have a different opinion about density; for example, with the Golden Gate Bridge settlement in his novel Virtual Light: it is an overcrowded, marginalized and anarchic community but the residents prefer it to a sterile panopticized existence (yes, I’m also brushing up on my Foucault). Gibson glorifies dense spaces, and the interdependencies and macgyverisms that allow them to function. I want to avoid romanticizing “slums,” but at the same time I don’t want to see them bulldozed (see Jane Jacobs for the negative consequences of that… it directly relates to panopticizing society and the criminalization of poverty).
The dabbawallahs of Mumbai have an extremely effective organizational system without a central leader or inventor; the system arose through a large number of people attempting to maximize efficiency on a very small budget. They are astoundingly good at what they do. The system itself cannot be exported, but apparently their methodology is of interest to business leaders.
It will certainly be interesting to distill all this down into one something.
*I have a complete blog-crush on BLDGBlog.
