Writing Design Criticism

Ffffantastic Bookmarking, Redux

2008-01-08T22:09:16Z

I posted a rebuttal to my recent piece on ffffound, over at Scintillating Bullshit, my personal blog. I thought I’d point it out here, as it has engendered a rather interesting discussion of the popular sites’ dark side.

Also, happy belated new year to all!

-fish

Ffffantastic Bookmarking

2007-10-18T21:19:32Z

This review of Ffffound was originally published on SpeakUp. Thanks to Mr. Vit for the edits and feedback.

Graphic design might not work in the white cube, but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: the random-curated-other-peoples’-images-white-background site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK (among countless others) all offer designers and design afficianados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com — allegedly, but unconfirmed, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura.

I started using ffffound last week, and it’s quite a fascinating place, really. The idea is that you bookmark images. Yup, that’s pretty much it. Like flickr, your account on ffffound consists primarily of a series of images, presented in chronological order with regards to their post date. Unlike flickr, which is geared towards sharing personal photographs, ffffound users share images they find anywhere on the web.

The layout ffffound employs looks simple, but the bookmarking technique is eyebrow-raisingly sophisticated: The site furnishes you with a bookmarklet which will highlight all of the images on a page with a blue border. You click the one you want, and it is then replaced by an amusing graphic that says “FFFFOUND!” in amphetaminic chalkboardesqe handwriting.

Steps 1 (click the bookmarklet) and 2 (click the image you want) for bookmarking to ffffound.

Ffffounds’ bookmarklet only highlights images that are within a predetermined range of scales; this prevents you from accedentally posting 5-pixel-square site navigation images. The whole bookmarking process is remarkably unobtrusive, because you aren’t whisked back to ffffound, and you can keep using the site you are on.

All of the stuff you post ends up on your page. Each image has three other images associated with it, randomly, chosen from the images you (and anyone else who has posted that image, as identified by a hash of the URL) has already posted. This results in a constant churn of new visual shit, both for users of the site and for casual browsers. At the time of writing, ffffound is awash with designy stuff: type samples, color studies, abstract form, diagrammatic architectural illustrations, crazy visualizations, posters, photographs of old equipment… I have not witnessed such a collaborative confluence of design-oriented material in one place.

A sampling of images from ffffound.

At first brush, ffffound’s paradigm looks to be based on your typical “Web 2.0” socially-networked navelgazery, because ffffound users have “favorite users” and “followers”. There are a lot of key differences however… You can’t tag anything, you can’t comment on anything, or write testimonials about people. You don’t even control the social network; you gather “fans”, or become one yourself, based on who bookmarks images that someone else bookmarked before you.

Furthermore, there is no RESTful API, no XML, no JSON, no pingbacks… Aside from pretty vanilla RSS syndication, ffffound offers none of the oft-vaunted programmatic interfaces that characterize “Web 2.0” sites. It’s reassuring to note, however, that the lack of these things is not an impediment to the site. It is closed and one can only join by an invitation from existing users (who can only invite three people), and therefore self-curating — I would imagine that the quality of the images in general (which right now is pretty fucking high, at least if you’re a type-nerd, designer-face like me) would degrade rapidly if anyone could join. That’s not a very democratic statement, I know; but design plus democracy equals drop shadows and other X-TREME photoshop filters, and the lack of ‘democracy’ in the case of ffffound is in line with its stealth anti-Web 2.0 ethos.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a bit of blogging and tagging myself. Really, being able to tag and comment and manage and share and reorganize your thingies, alongside other peoples’ thingies, in all sorts of ways in a coherent and intuitive fashion, et cetera, is why flickr and its ilk are at once both excellent resources and useful tools. But your flickr account is YOUR SHIT, specifically, implicitly, as indicated by its integrated creative commons licensing and general nomenclature (e.g., images you upload are specifically labeled “your photos”). Ffffound, on the other hand, is implicitly SOMEONE ELSE’S SHIT, which is a verrrry sensitive issue, even with all the happy-go-lucky “sharing” rhetoric that characterizes “Web 2.0” discussions. Ffffound goes out of its way to remind you of this: All images are headlined with the title of the page from which they are “quoted” (as ffffound has it), with links back to their sources. Ffffound’s lack of other typical user controls allows it to maintain that crucial distinction: By removing your voice, ffffound does exactly what it claims to do, which is grant you the capacity to bookmark images.

The de-emphasis of the user’s voice has a very interesting effect on ffffound’s content. User voice is such a cornerstone of “Web 2.0” malarkey, where many business models are variants of the idea that you, the user, shoot your mouth off so someone else can get AdSense money. As such, the action ffffound affords you is the ability to sycophantically declare that you like something, by bookmarking it. These things then get posted to your account, and if other people like them, they voice their approval in kind. You can’t really use ffffound to hate things, or otherwise. Contrastingly, I frequently use del.icio.us to hate things (note the comment by ‘fishea’ on this link); del.icio.us remains gorgeously minimal, but your tags and comments combine with the links you post to provide people looking at your account page with a general composite viewport into your tastes.

Ffffound, on the other hand, can only illustrate your particular sensibility in the arena of graphic awesomeness. Perhaps this is why so many of the images on ffffound are typographic: Images of type are the best way to directly say something within the confines of ffffound’s system. If I was getting a degree in “postmodern anthropology”, or somesuch, I would say that ffffound is like a “distributed digital Cabinet of Wonders”, or maybe a “data-driven Exquisite Corpse, fashioned into an endless möbius strip”… but no, I’m getting an MFA in graphic design, and at the end of the day, I’m here for the type. I would say to you that ffffound is quite an interesting gem, and I’d add that the exclusivity isn’t as off-putting as it might sound… I was happy with visiting the site before an invitation serendipitously came my way. Do have a look… at the very least, you might find some crazy color palette to rip off or otherwise inspire you. Indeed!

Intellectual Property, Ripoffs, And What Have You

2007-05-18T02:08:43Z

This is another piece originally published on SpeakUp, on intellectual property and a recent project of mine.

In 2003, the pop auteur Mellowdrone released an album called “A Demonstration of Intellectual Property”. None of the lyrics addressed the notion of intellectual property directly; the album’s name refers to the fact that Mellowdrone initially gave away the album as unrestricted MP3 files on his website, before offering it for sale as a retail CD.

I, personally, had never heard of Mellowdrone before this. But a friend of mine, who had seen him open up for Johnny Mar, directed me to his web site. I downloaded his music, and indeed, it was catchy enough to stay in my rotation (which is more than I can say for most of the free MP3s one finds online). As such, Mellowdrone effectively wagered his talent against both his royalty proposition and the music industry’s conventional wisdom.

I can say that his bet payed off, at least in my case: I have since bought his full-length album from Amazon. He has apparently been quite successful since then in many ways. One of the songs from “A Demonstration of Intellectual Property” was later used as non-diegetic background music in an episode of Six Feet Under, which could be considered a sort of pop canonization, of sorts.

I am interested in the notion of “intellectual property”, in large part because the term itself is rather oxymoronic: how can you own an idea? If I give you my sandwich, I’ll be hungry, but if I give you my idea, I still have the idea. We both win, n’est ce pas? Ideas don’t behave like physical property.

I wanted to have my own intellectual property demonstration, to see how the concept might operate in the field of graphic design. I assembled an exhibition of posters at a student gallery here at RISD. The show, called “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF”, consisted completely of from-scratrch recreations of notable typographically-oriented examples from graphic design and conceptual art. In each recreated work, I substituted the words “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF, _” with the blank filled in with the author or artists’ name in each case. I ripped off a very wide range of practitioners in this fashion, from Wim Crouwel, to John Baldessari, to M/M Paris. I also included two of my ex-girlfriends, both of whom are practicing graphic designers.

In some ways, this approach is the opposite of what Mellowdrone was doing. Instead of giving away the fruits of my hard labors, it could be argued that I was standing on the shoulders of giants in a bid for attention, which is, like, the ultimate currency in graphic design.

Nonetheless, the act of ripping everyone off was a very revealing one, I found. The verb phrase “to rip off” here is important. I was not “precisely emulating” my subjects, nor was I “loosely borrowing”. When you rip someone off, you are adapting their trademark style to your own ends. This is something that we do all the time, as graphic designers. I will freely admit that in the past, I have adapted some idea I saw executed by some far more established practitioner, and passed it off without so much as a footnote. My early website designs, for example, were more or less reassembled components filched from The Designers’ Republic; for a while after that, I thought I could ride on Mr. Müller-Brockmann’s coattails by making everything I did some sort of geometric abstraction with Aksidenz-Grotesk on top.

It was therefore fantastically refreshing to rip everyone off so blatantly and unapologetically. I could devote my time and effort to marshalling the rip-offs towards an emulation of the original technique as much as possible, without having to invest effort in diluting the spirit of the original to make the work seem more “mine”, which is typical in the in the normal, day-to-day course of ripping someone off.

But even still, the results were not perfect, by any measure. I know this definitively, because for the last phase of the project, I sent copies of each rip-off back to the rip-offee. I included, along with each rip-off, a “receipt” for rip-offee’s intellectual property, which consisted of a deliberately nonsensical but precise-looking tabulation of their ideas. This proved to be rather amusing to compile, in each case. When I ripped off Phillippe Apeloig, for example, I could not rightly attribute all of the modular typographical ideas in his posters solely to him; clearly, he was basing his character sets on work originally pioneered by Wim Crouwel. I stated this in the receipt.

At the moment, I have only received a handful of replies to these thought-crime dispatches, but the few I have received have been quite astounding. Peter Bil’ak wrote me back within five minutes, stating that I had ripped him off incorrectly. To rip him off, I had adapted his type-grid stamp design for the Dutch Royal TPG. I had not been aware of the fact that the stamps’ grid was based directly on Fedra’s metric tables, and as such, the rip-offs’ grid included padding between the character and the grid cell boundary that wasn’t present in the original. Mr. Bil’ak even sent me a PDF mockup of the stamp with the phrase “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF MR. BIL’AK” rendered in a manner he deemed more correct.

Fascinatingly, the other replies have been in line with this sentiment. The original authors and artists who have felt compelled to address the project have done so to say, “you haven’t ripped me off well enough!” I thought it especially funny to have received a reply like this from Mieke Gerrizten. I mean, isn’t everyone supposed to be a designer? I supposed that doesn’t make us all equal as designers, but hey.

My reply to this sentiment, incidentally, hinges on the definition of “rip-off” falling somewhat short of “exact emulation”. In each ripoff, I considered the precision of the original designer’s work, and used that as a loose guideline. For example, I am pretty sure I nailed the Wim Crouwell piece, but I did not seek the same sort of rigor when ripping off, say, 178 Aardige Ontwerpers, because I don’t see an analogous kind of anality in their work.

I had expected at least a smidgen of outrage from those I pilfered from. This kind of reaction is not without precedent: on April 17, 2006, the New York Observer published an article by Simon Doonan, entitled “How Did I become the Typhoid Mary of the Art World?” Mr. Doonan is a designer based in New York, and for decades, he has crafted window displays at retail shops like Barney’s, using found type from junkyards. In his article, he hilariously details an incedent where the art-world luminary Jack Pierson came to town for a show, and saw a high degree of similarity between his art and the work Mr. Doonan had been doing for decades. So similar was the work, in Mr. Pierson’s eye, that the only possible option was for him to sue Mr. Doonan for infringing on his intellectual property.

This was the sort of response I was gearing myself up for. I have seen otherwise reasonable people, in both the wide-open professional realm and the pressure-cooker of graduate school, who try to claim eminent domain over, say, a typeface, or a printing technique, or what have you. “How dare you use Gridnik! That one’s mine!” It sounds ridiculous, but it happens. Since I was explicit as possible about my method and intentions regarding the intellectual property of those I ripped off, it is possible that my victims have been playing along, and don’t actually see the project as a direct threat to their established aesthetics (and therefore their professional identities).

Because this, I fear, is the trap that the notion of “intellectual property” sets up. The unfortunate corollary to the investment of time and effort that one expends to build up a unique style is the ease by which such a style can be adapted by someone else. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. It becomes bad when your identity as a designer-author is irrevocably bound up in that style. It means your identity can be stolen outright, by anyone with the wherewithal, the tools, and the patience to do so.

Fortunately, we are smarter than that. By experimenting with the more topical aspects of style, we can create an identity that is greater than the sum of the parts of our aesthetics. By resisting the lure of a single aesthetic in favor of a broad-spectrum approach, the bodies of work we craft will inevitably maintain subtle but instrumental common threads, which will add up to a certain je ne sais quoi that observers will no doubt begin to recognize, over time. (In my last article, I described this as having a ™.)

It’s a very tricky proposition, to be sure. Neither my demonstration of intellectual property, nor Mellowdrones’, nor any other object lesson on the subject, in any way implies a blanket, prescriptive approach to dealing with ideas as things*. People should be able to come up with interesting ideas, and use those ideas as the basis for getting paid. That is what copyright law, patent law, and trademark law all seek to address, however disparately (and, some would say, ineffectively). But issues related to “intellectual property” are causing greater and greater convulsions throughout everyday life, from software patent problems to the availability of generic medicines in third-world countries. It’s a bloody mess. But most importantly, it is an unresolved mess, and as such, we’ll have to continue to experiment until we figure it all out.

It’s more fun this way, anyway. I mean, totally.

* I realize that this statement (and in fact any discussion of intellectual property) implies a gargantuan breadth of issues, well beyond the scope of this pithy document. I would recommend “The Ecstasy of Influence”, an essay by Jonathan Lethem for the February 2007 issue of Harpers’ magazine, to those interested in an omnibus analysis of the subject.

On "Just", Awesomeness, and ™

2007-05-08T03:37:47Z

This piece was originally published on the ineffable SpeakUp. Mr. Vit elected to cut the E-Prime preamble; the unedited version is here in full.

I decided, recently, to have a go at excising the word “just” from my vocabulary. Not in the adjectival usage (“just” as in “justice”) nor in the noun (“just” as in “a large-bellied pot with handles”, according to the OED) but as an adverb. Oh, you know, I’ll just write this article on language minutia and graphic design. That’s what I mean. I use it all the time, in that casually dismissive sense. So do most of my peers and contemporaries; it’s almost as common as the plague of “likes” with which my generation is constantly upsetting our more grammar-conscious elders.

I’m not worried about offending them, though, or anyone else. By eliminating the dismissive adverbial form of “just” from my vocabulary, I’m trying to hack my own brain.

In 1965, a linguist named D. David Bourland, Jr, proposed the idea of E-Prime. E-Prime was put forth as a modified version of the English language that basically eliminated the verb ‘to be’. You couldn’t say “I’m tired” in E-Prime, for example. You’d have to say something like “I feel tired” or “I’m constantly closing my eyes because of a dearth of sleep” or somesuch. The fundamental assertion of E-Prime is that, by forcing yourself to have to jump through this absurd linguistic hoop, you have to carefully choose your words. As such, the sentences you come up with are supposedly less ambiguous. Is a rose red? I suppose I don’t know. I do know, however, that a rose appears red to me.

E-Prime has had its share of criticism from prominent linguists, but the idea remains enticing. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a pivotal linguistic idea, says that there is an inherent and immutable relationship between the grammar of the language a person speaks, and the nature of that persons’ thoughts. This idea is generally accepted as true, although people still bicker about how exactly it works. Walter Ong wrote extensively about written language as a technology that structures the consciousness of those who utilize it in Orality and Literacy. The idea also permeates popular fiction, particularly science-fiction: consider Newspeak, the abbreviated form of English proposed by Orwell in 1984. Many of Borges’ short stories also employ bizarre theoretical languages, into which behavior and ethics have been tellingly encoded.

These are fascinating object lessons in the interplay of form and content, really, but they’re of little practical use. Even E-Prime, with its enticing simplicity, is more of a mindfuck than anything else; once you find yourself rephrasing “You’re disgusting” as “I seem disgusted by you”, you realize that the mental overhead of ablating to be from your speech may not be worth it.

But a simpler challenge, I believe, can yield potent results. Perhaps “just” isn’t the symptom of a problematic institutionalized dismissiveness, but the cause (as some takes on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggest).

On the surface, this seems to be somewhat true. If you say “I just have to design these four posters, and just work out the type treatment for the whole series” to yourself out loud, your eye-rolling is somehow implicit. You just have to do these things; they’re not even worthy of discussion, really. But the same sentence without the “just” sounds far more monumental: “I have to design four posters, and work out the type treatment for the whole series.” That sounds like a far more serious endeavor to me.

The reason this is particularly important to me, a graphic designer, is that this inherently dismissive attitude can short-circuit the iterative processes that we use to make things awesome. For the purposes of this essay, I would define awesomeness as a state characterized by a rich holistic intertwining of style, content, and meaning. An awesome graphic work is the sort that you might stare at for a few tense moments, upon first seeing it, before quietly uttering “fuck yeah!” under your breath.

Consider, for example, 2x4’s entry in the Urban Forest Project’s poster contest. The buttons on this page that allow visitors to download the poster or order a totebag printed with it are laughable, as the poster is a blank white sheet of nothing. Ostensibly, this poster is “about the space between the trees”. Is this cute in a snarky, in-joke sort of way? Perhaps. Is it awesome? I would say no.

There are many posters on the Alan Dye and Petter Ringbom. These are awesome, as are many others. Some of the less complex posters are no less awesome; consider the entries by David Reinfurt or Nikki Chung.

I would consider some of the entries that fall back on default modes to be generally less awesome. Whether the default mode in question is unique to the designer’s house style (see Paula Scher’s) or specific to the means of graphic production (see COMA’s), these posters invariably end up as one-liners. You read or see them, and that’s it, you’re done.

But the 2x4 example epitomizes anti-awesomeness in the most thorough fashion. It is, I would submit, the ultimate product of the mentality fostered by the overuse of “just”. You can readily imagine the smirk on the author’s face when he or she decided to send in a blank PDF file, knowing full well that their authority as an agent of a highly regarded design firm would guarantee the blind acceptance of their imbecilic pun into the projects’ pantheon.

I don’t mean to single out the Urban Forest Project, but the fact that it collects such a wide range of designer-authors under one aegis makes it an ideal context in which to compare awesomeness, and test for the evidence of “just” default-mode thinking. If you’re familiar enough with a given aesthetic, you can spot the “just” stuff easily, in any portfolio. Experimental Jetset, the Amsterdam-based design collective, has practically made a career of “just” employing default typefaces, monotonous color palettes, and other such deadpan decisions.

I want to point out at this point that “just” design is not necessarily bad design, and awesome design is not necessarily good. Awesomeness can suck you in, but the design in question must hang together as a whole, or it will lose you, and the awesomeness will have been wasted. And sometimes the “just” move is the right move, as the signature type treatments of iconic artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbra Kruger indicate. In these cases, the simplistic repetition of the default type style in question becomes synonymous with the persona of the artist, and so encapsulates their message. (In design, we call this “branding.”)

I propose that there is a perfect fulcrum between the opposing forces of absolute “just” and absolute awesomeness. At this point, the rote application of a default approach is harmoniously tempered by the rigors and context-dependant overtures that characterize awesomeness. Artists and designers who have reached this magic singularity in their practices can be said to have a ™.

A fine example of a ™ practitioner is M/M Paris, the French design studio chaired by Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustniak. M/M Paris’ aesthetic is highly distinctive and contiguous throughout their work, but they completely eschew the bog-standard default styles, having created their own sort of “just” approach using the methodology of awesomeness. Many of their posters contain hand-drawn type, and the letterforms themselves often have line weights, contrast values, and other parameters that are notably common to many of M/M Paris’ works. But in each case, these letterforms are manifest for their given context, and their given context only.

We can refer to this hybridized approach as M/M Paris™. It is a systematic default style that can be applied in a veneer, but a veneer that can only be concocted (and summarily decocted) by M/M Paris themselves, as only they retain the distinct strains of awesome that are essential for the styles’ formulation.

Many of the established upper echelons of graphic designs’ canon are ™ practitioners. The likes of Ogilvy™, Landor™, Wieden+Kennedy™, Pentagram™, Vignelli Associates™, and their ilk, continue to land lucrative contracts. They have the same appeal to their clients as does a company like Ford™, or Charles Schwab™, or Maytag™… the breath and scope of their respective histories have achieved the critical mass necessary to sustain their ™ equilibrium. Likewise, relatively younger independent entities such as Fons Hickmann™, Tomato™, Aesthetic Apparatus™, Graphic Thought Facility™, Harmen Liemburg™, et cetera, all are nimble enough to maintain the trappings of ™ness at small sizes.

At both ends of the spectrum, their work is both serially recognizable and utterly distinctive. It is important to note, however, that these luminaries™, as well as their up-and-coming subordinates™ with less name-brand recognition, have all historically been delivered to the nirvana of the ™ state through paths lined with hard-earned awesomeness. The dichotomy of “just” and awesome is an inequitable one, and the spiraling gravitic arms surrounding the ™ state only spin in one direction.

This is the primary reason I want to purge the actual word “just” from my speech. As Orwell postulated, if I can’t think it, I can’t do it. And so it will go. This act will constitute but a tiny fraction of the journey down Awesome Street, but it’s high time I got going. I just have to fix my brain first, and I’ll be right there.

The 2006 National Design Triennial: Junk Drawer Curation

2007-03-15T06:44:04Z

It’s quite fashionable, indeed, to talk about DESIGN LIFE NOW, this year’s National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and we’re nothing if not fashionable here at WDC. This piece will appear in the forthcoming June 2007 issue of 2+3D, in Polish translation, with an English summary.

If you’re a student in any sort of design school today, you are probably sick to death of hearing people ask “What is design?”¹ Foundation-year art school instructors will frequently trot this one out to kickstart discussions. Arbitrary definitions (“Graphic design is essentially typographic!”) will doubtlessly follow, which will be countered by contradictory edge-case refutations (“Oh yeah? What about Tomato and Ed Ruscha, then?”) … From there, the conversation will invariably devolve into pointlessly circuitous bickering and the wanton splitting of argumentative hairs, which is great if you’re trying to avoid doing any actual design work. The truth is that the nature of design is tautological: design is what you get when you design².

The rather slipshod arrangement of work at the National Design Triennial, currently up at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York, is like a physical manifestation of the classic “What is design?” conversation. It has the same basic ethos: a bunch of circumlocutions that, while entertaining, fail to assert any useful conclusion. The individuals whose work is on display have produced things of fantastic value, wonder, and scope, but the show incoherently fails to bring them together them in any meaningful way.

The show is called “DESIGN LIFE NOW”, with the emphasis squarely on “LIFE”. In writing her catalog essay, “Intelligent Design”, Barbra Bloemnik goes to great lengths to prove that design equals life, to the point where she compromises basic scientific facts³, as well as her own authority: Bloemnik’s starry-eyed praise for the iPod is unflinchingly sycophantic, and the subsequent comparison of the market systems surrounding the iPod to a living organism comes off as a stretch.

Many of the items on display are similarly overreaching in their context: one of the Triennials’ entries is Apple itself. It is not specifically the iPod that has been honored with inclusion; nor Jonathan Ive, the oft-lauded designer of the iconic music player; nor the iPod’s distinctive advertising campaign. It’s just Apple. Apple has been installed down the hall from a few prints of elaborate compositions that Joshua Davis, designer and programmer, had a computer generate for him. Davis’ images are rather unremarkable; to judge from the accompanying copy, they were included primarily to illustrate the stochastic processes Davis harnessed in his code. On their own, they are confusingly bland and meandering, and as such they rely on their accompanying texts to connect them back to “DESIGN” and “LIFE”. The Apple display is similarly confounding, as its broad scope weakens the link to the Triennials’ ostensible theme. I would hazard that these displays would benefit from inversion: simply showing us the iPod (rather than an invocation of the entirety of Apple Computer), and an installation with Davis’ software at work (instead of flaccid prints), would make more sense.

Figures 1 and 2 (from left). iPod Nano, Apple Computer, 2005; “022 – Coast of Kanagawa”, Joshua Davis, 2005.

The same thing is true about most of the specific selections that comprise this Triennial: a little nudging would considerably reduce the “WTF?” factor. Some of the elements are truly important, like Ben Fry’s Processing, the display of which was handled quite well at the show. A product of the MIT Media Lab, Processing is an open-source programming environment, created with artists and designers in mind. The inclusion of a codified framework that gives rise to specific instances of design work was a smart curatorial move. Processing itself needs little introduction, and it easily fits into the show’s conceit. Its presence actively broadens the scope of what a gallery show can call “design”, and its inclusion naturally extends to the rather fantastic schmorgasbord of visualization work which Fry and his contemporaries have done with the system. The nature of the system itself encapsulates the potency of open-source and collaborative education as forces in contemporary design.

Figure 3. Articulate (detail), Casey Reas, 2005. Reas rendered this image using Processing code; infuriatingly, this is the only example the museum has furnished to illustrate Processing.

Unfortunately, most of the other entries don’t betray this sort of consideration. What is worse is that the entries themselves don’t readily speak to one another. That’s theoretically OK, as many an interesting story has been concocted from disparate parts. But there is no story here. The show reads like a junk drawer; little apparent curatorial regard shows through for the overarching relationships between the panoply of items on display… relationships that could have been coaxed out and leveraged. Samples of high-tech building materials appear next to some interesting artisanal glasswork, which is next to yet another paean to Chip Kidd’s book covers. There is a robotic lobster, and there are cartoons that teach you science pragma, and there is an assuredly comfortable chair (DO NOT TOUCH!), and there is a model of a building that looks interesting. But so what? There are no thematic groups or subgroups at all. The Army’s million-dollar AI soldier simulation⁴, for example, is across the room and down the hall a bit from Nicholas Blechman’s self-published war-themed book of satirical illustrations. These two are not close enough to be engagingly dissonant, nor are they far enough away from each other to create a sense of spectrum. Generally, you’re left with more questions than answers: why is this kayak suspended in the room tiled with intricate microprisms? Why are these proposal boards for an unbuilt super-sustainable laboratory complex in the same room as this flagrantly maximalist chandelier? Why are there 10,000 or so⁵ random entries related to OMA, who are based in Rotterdam?⁶

Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7 (Clockwise from top). Basket office furniture, David Ritch and Mark Saffell (for Hermann Miller), 2004; ICT Leaders Project, University of Southern California (for the US Army), 2006; Scintilla wall paneling, Abhinand Lath / SensiTile, 2005; Empire (Nozone IX), Nicholas Blechman, 2004

The show’s curators and shepherds have attempted to preempt such questions with a bunch of ex-post-facto lexical handwaving. Aside from Bloemnik’s aforementioned catalog essay (which screams “LIFE!”), Brooke Hodge (“CRAFT!”), Ellen Lupton (“HUMANS!”), and Matilda McQuaid (“TECHNOLOGY!”) all weigh in with an essay of their own, in which they each attempt to shoehorn the show’s participants into a specific big idea. Each tract glosses over a fact here and a fact there, in an effort to pull together a cogent theme. Preceding these, an introduction by Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, explains away the inclusion of international starchitects as a strike against the “artificiality” of a curation program focused on American design⁷. That’s funny, because that “artificiality” is encoded in the Cooper-Hewitt’s stated mandate as “the preeminent museum and educational authority for the study of design in the United States”⁸, to say nothing of its history.

The denial of the museums’ past is further echoed in the exhibit’s complete and willing disregard for its formal context: hardly any of the work has been integrated into the Cooper-Hewitt’s ornate Georgian interiors. The book’s first and last four spreads, together with the covers, are all glossy full-bleed amateur-grade photographs of various designers in their workspaces. This works out a lot better than it does at the show proper, where the same images are blown up to super-human size and hung on panels in the museum’s front hallway. Unlike the 2003 Triennial, where printed patterns were hung so as to be consciously framed by the baroque moldings, the massive image panels scorn the walls on which they hang, suborning their visible history with the anti-aesthetic of the generic white-box gallery. Most of the individual exhibit installs follow suit in their lack of engagement with their environs. There are a handful of notable exceptions, of which the most visible is Electroland’s reconfiguration of the museums’ central staircase into a digital xylophone. The few standouts fail to alleviate the sense that the show is at odds with the museum that contains it, which in turn exacerbates the pervasive cacophony.

Irritatingly, the Triennial seems to want to compensate in attitude for what it lacks in vision. The haphazard treatment of the subject matter, further drawn and quartered (as it were) by the curators’ essays, allows for the easy weaponization of the loose theme of “DESIGN LIFE NOW” against would-be critics. “But, that’s what LIFE is all about!”, the Triennial seems to shout. “LIFE is random! LIFE doesn’t make sense, and so neither should we! Evolution, not revolution!” Yes, perhaps, but that sounds like an argument I’ve heard before, back when I was an undergrad.

Footnotes:
1. … Or, indeed, any of its variants: “Yeah, but what is design, anyway?” and “What’s the difference between art and design?” and “What are the boundaries of contemporary design practice?” are all equally rubbish. [back]

2. As Grace Lee, art director for Conde Nasts’ erstwhile Portfolio magazine, put it to a friend of mine, “design is design is design. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.” [back]

3. The authors’ assertion that “Full-scale cloning of small animals using DNA to recreate new DNA has become a familiar occurrence” is demonstrably false in several ways. First of all, there is no “full scale cloning of small animals”. Perhaps the author meant to say “breeding”. Regardless, it’s important to note that you can’t just create an animal from a DNA sequence. Dolly the sheep, for example, was cloned through a process in which the entire nucleus of a cell was transplanted. The cell nucleus is a highly organized and complex structure, with millions of specific proteins bound to precise locations across the genetic material. This comment rather disingenuously implies that you could, say, email your dog’s genome to your local molecular biologist whenever the poor bugger runs into traffic and you need to clone up a new one. [back]

4. Incidentally, this thing failed the Turing test right out of the box. The setup consisted of a rear-projected realtime rendering of a convincingly 3D-modeled American soldier, and a microphone you could speak into, ostensibly to ask questions for the soldier to answer. I had this conversation with him:

ME: “Are you self-aware?”
AI: “You’ll have to use less big words and ask again.”
ME: “Do you know who you are?”
AI: “You’re asking about something beyond my jurisdictional boundaries. I can’t answer that.”

… afterwhich I gave up. He was exceptionally rude, and nonfunctional to boot. [back]

5. This is an estimate; I lost count at some point. [back]

6. Perhaps the line of thinking here was that the championing of the underdog a very American trope, and everyone wanted to see what might happen if this unknown, shy little-architecture-firm-that-could finally had a shot at the limelight. [back]

7. I’m not slavishly committed to a US-centric agenda or anything. But American capitalism frequently subjugates art and design to the whim of market forces (as compared to, say, the Netherlands, where design has been institutionalized as a de facto benefit to the society in which it is couched) and so I think it’s an important (nay, ballsy) decision to run a cultural institution with an American focus. Because American design practices are predicated on market-subjugation, American design institutions, like the Cooper-Hewitt, are essential in providing much-needed circumspection in the discipline. That’s why I find the decision to break curatorial form in order to include OMA rather troublesome. It seems like the curators were pandering to the name-brand recognition Koolhaas’ studio brings, rather than attempt to unearth influential local practitioners. I would be less riled by a decision to override the museums’ mandate if it didn’t smack of a marketing ploy. Was it worth giving the likes of Nader Tehrani and Michael Maltzan the finger in order to laud a firm that has laurels to spare? I can’t say, really, but I do wonder.

The issues invoked in this note are rather beyond the scope of a review of the Triennial, so I will redirect you to Michael Rock’s “Mad Dutch Disease”, which discusses American capitalism in the context of the design world. I will return to the subject in an appropriate forum, should the opportunity arise. [back]

8. Quoted from the museum’s own copy. [back]

Barnbrook Saved Adbusters

2007-02-15T12:00:57Z

This is a review of last fall’s art/design issue of AdBusters. Despite it’s tardiness….Jonathan Barnbrook is still the man.

Somewhere along the way AdBusters fell off. It got confused, had a major identity crisis and now struggles to redefine itself into a form of greater relevance.

The hands of Jonathan Barnbrook, and his talented staff, have brought a small amount of saving grace to the struggling publication. Barnbrook has worked with AdBusters in the past, but never has he taken such commanding presence, (he guest art directed the whole issue.) In my most humble opinion, Barnbrook conveys AdBusters what it truly is, was, and is meant to be. That being, a sociopolitical work that comes directly out of the worlds of fashion, design, and art (visual culture.)

Barnbrook has recently returned to a state of vogue. He’s received a steady growth of press as he prepares his big show at the Design Museum, stitches together a giant monograph, and packages a mega-launch of a 32-face type family Bourgeois. With this return has come a new sensibility that reflects maturity. His typographic excellence has been matched with equally compelling execution of works displayed in his anti-North Korean show Tomorrow’s Truth. While maintaining his non-familiar early-ninties “digital” composition, Barnbrook has adopted a much brighter and punchier palette. This is especially evident in his work with the latest AdBusters, (I suspect this could be the handy work of young-gun Pedro Inoue who has been credited as co-conspiritor.)

The design of this issue revitalizes the increasingly poor design and even poorer production of this magazine. It’s glossy pages on cheap paper stock are revitalized with, the oh so scary word, style. But it is not senseless style. And it is the proper balance of style and communication that makes Barnbrook’s handling of AdBusters so honest. The over-stylization brings the publication back down to a level that doesn’t purport to be informative, manipulative, or even subversive. Rather, it is just bold. It’s there.

The greatest design moment is how the two designers handled Natalya Ilyn’s article on Modernism. The opening spread has gray type on a muted gray background. As the article describes Mies Van Der Rohe’s and Modernism’s momentum, the background flairs with magenta, and pretty much explodes at the end.

It’s a shame that we have to admit that AdBusters probably has run out of steam. But maybe Barnbrook’s studio can help it reposition itself.

Influences: A Crossmodal Trainwreck

2007-01-29T22:02:19Z

This piece will appear in the forthcoming June 2007 issue of 2+3D, in Polish translation, with an English summary. The book in question, Influences, is available here.

When Anna Gerber and Anja Lutz, of Shift!, presented Influences at a lecture at RISD last year, they focused on the unique database application they had concocted¹. At first brush, Influences wasn’t even a book, it was a wiki-esque compendium of design-oriented footnotes and citations. The content they went through ranged from the personal anecdotes of A- and B-list designers², to somewhat more rigorous explications³. Practicing designers, artists, and others who personally knew Anna and Anja had been doled out login credentials to their database, where they could expound on any design-related topic that they chose.

I was convinced that Influences was a website until halfway through the presentation, when Anna and Anja revealed that they had commissioned a tool that could transform the content of the entire database into an InDesign file, rendering a print version of the sites’ dynamic content with the click of a button. This, they described, was how they would produce Influences, the book, as the output of the database “would provide an excellent starting point” for such a project.

What they did not show was how the elaborate cross-linking of the all the database entries would be handled, but I assumed they would come up with a wonderful and marvelous typographic footnoting system, or some such thing. To me, this was the exciting kernel of such an ambitious project. How would such renowned and intelligent designers manage to condense and distill the dynamic power of a modern database system into a book?

How, indeed. Upon first perusing Influences in its final form, I was dismayed to see that nearly every page looked like the raw output of the transformation program Anna and Anja had demonstrated. It's a straightforward two-column layout, with room at the top for thumbnail images. Leafing through, I found only eight or so spreads within the 268-page primary “lexicon” that broke away from this format.

That would be fine, really, if the information in the book was of any use. It’s hard, I will grant, to translate hypertextual information into a legible print system⁴. But Influences fails at the task.

Terms that refer to other terms within Influences are underlined, and preceded with an arrow symbol (→). This makes →most of the text very →difficult to →scan, as you →might →imagine. Furthermore, the actual location of the referent information itself is left as an exercise to the reader; the links tell you to go elsewhere, but they don't tell you specifically where. (The book is alphabetized, which I suppose eases this kind of ad-hoc navigation.)

The linked items themselves are hardly consistent, as well. Consider an entry such as the one for “Grid Systems in Graphic Design”, on page 105. This entry contains seven link callouts, three of which are within a quote. The quotee in this case, one Nik Thoenen, is not himself an Influences referent, so neophyte designers such as myself have to look this Nik person up the old-fashioned way, using reference systems outside of Influences, like Google or Nexis⁵.

This leads me to wonder: is the whole thing a big in-joke? Only friends of the authors could contribute to the database, and the whole thing is impossible to even view online, at the time of writing. In fact, I only know about Influences’ data backend because I attended the lecture. Not only does the book fail to explain this rather critical aspect of its authorship in any way, it explains nothing about itself whatsoever. There is no introduction, no foreword, no “how to use this book” type thing. We are only offered some maddeningly vague, self-congratulatory bullshit that appears in the endpapers:

“Who’s Who” style books are quite the rage throughout most design disciplines. Alice Twemlow put one out last summer⁶ after surveying a broad range of contemporary practitioners. Phaidon has given us their mammoth Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture⁷, and the AIGA regularly pumps out annuals and compendiums that are equally at home on a designer’s shelf or a coffeetable in a Wallpaper* photoshoot. It is therefore hard to understand why Anna and Anja would painstakingly create a system that could set their work apart from the others — their database — and then subsequently use it so poorly. Perhaps they will eventually release the fruits of their contributors’ labors to the public, and create a resource that is truly “cumulative, but always in flux”, as the endpapers say. Until then, Influences will likely suffer a fate similar to Life Style⁸: largely unread by those who conspicuously display it on their bookshelves.

Footnotes:
1. Or, more likely, one that they had commissioned from a technically-minded subordinate. [back]

2. See the entries for “book reviews” and “grandmother” in Influences, on pages 33 and 102, respectively, for examples of this sort of thing. [back]

3. See “internal structures” in Influences, on page 122 (although as with content from Wikipedia and such sources, the veracity and rigor is debatable.) [back]

4. God knows, many have tried, including myself. In my own work, when I had to cite URLs, I used a special footnote symbol, with its own color, to denote a URL. I then listed the URL itself in the margin, and I reproduced a URL index at the end of the book, for maximum clarity.

... To be sure, that’s not the only way to do it. My goal was to give the reader the most information on the cite without disrupting the flow. [back]

5. As far as I could divine, Influences does not include any sort of system for citing references outside of itself. [back]

6. Twemlow, Alice: What is Graphic Design For? Rotovision SA, 2006. [back]

7. Phaidon Press (Editors): The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Phaidon, 2005. [back]

8. Mau, Bruce (Editor): Life Style. Phaidon, 2000. See previous WDC article here. [back]

James Chae on Art, Design, and Fashion

2007-01-25T01:18:01Z

Please welcome James Chae, RISD GD ‘06, to Writing Design Criticism. James works at Tank, in Boston, MA. He has something to say.

image via style.com. This dress was also on display this summer at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, NL.

The exhibition world is a flood with “style” and “fashion.” In the past year there have been major fashion-based exhibits held at very unlikely institutions. This new found interest in design and style marks a shift in focus within the museum world. Is there a new young breed with a more “inclusive” vision of art?

An interior shot of the Fashion DNA show.

I first encountered this inclusion of fashion in Amsterdam this past summer. The Fashion DNA show ran for a couple months in the center of the cannibus cavern. It was housed in a cathedral, the Nieuwe Kerk. This is an important detail because it venerates fashion in a most appropriate setting. It also fit extremely well with current trends in design. You might deny it right now, but 2006 was all about extravagance and indulgence. Designers played that shit out till it’s well deserved end. The show was designed by Italian architect/designer Italo Rota. Overall, it was an impressive show that was very well executed. The curation exhibited work in a historical manner organizing content in terms of desires. It thoroughly investigated the need and desire for dress. But the most striking thing about the exhibition was its backing. This was a Rijks Museum show, a national organization, that was very much about the now and vogue. But hey….it was Europe and it was in a city where design and fashion thrive.

Little did I know that in the same summer the Met had it’s own little catwalk. Anglomania was a thorough retrospective of British fashion in last quarter century. It was an exhibition that was treated with respectul, historical grace. I didn’t go so I can only trust her opinion. Again, a major institution that upholds a reputation for historical perspective holds a show leading into the now about a subject that is constantly moving in a progressive motion.

Image courtesy of style.com. This piece was also on display at MFA’s Fashion Show.

This leads me to Fashion Show, MFA’s straightforward attempt at getting on the fashion bandwagon. I give them credit for not guising it in a more self-righteous manner. The show was very upfront about its intentions. In this respect, it is the most honest of all three exhibitions. But for that reason it is the most shallow, and poorly executed. Some have praised it for its simplicity, but it all comes off as obvious and lazy. They took the latest lines from the most commonly known designers and just put them in a black room. The displays were cheap, the exhibition typography lazy, and it was painfully plain. This, I suppose, is to be expected of an institution like the MFA. Overall, it made one feel ripped off because you walked away having gained absolutely nothing. To add insult to injury, they so markedly placed a new store at the end of the exhibition with nice designer goods and taste-making books. For all its honesty, the MFA’s show was as cheap as a dishonest second-hand car salesman.

But is this sudden interest in fashion a good thing? I may argue that yes it is because it is trying to elevate design. Maybe this will mean there will be a new design consciousness being bread in America. More importantly I think it marks a change in how museums want to present themselves. As a generation that is becoming well versed in all levels of culture museums are trying to come back down to our level. The new ICA in Boston is trying to transform itself with its new building into a community-oriented institution. Nick Currie comments on how the Tate is trying to make a similar shift. If this is all true, then fashion is a topic that everyone can easily embrace and understand. But in doing so curators need to bring something new to the table. Exhibitions don’t always have to be didactic, but if it isn’t please lower the goddamn price and be true to your mission of presenting a more accessible museum show!

Public Relations: Mind Your Mouth

2006-11-10T20:24:12Z

David Sokol is the acting news editor at Architectural Record, and has written for ID magazine, Metropolis, and others. This article will appear in the forthcoming Public Relations, RISD architecture’s new annual.

Let me tell you a secret. I don’t drink the Kool-Aid known as archi-babble. Really, you care. As an editor and writer, I scout for emerging architects and new designs to publish. And I may pass you by if you’re more prattle than substance.

But this point is so well trodden that I’ve asked the gods to send me a press release, a media kit, something, that states my case better than I could articulate it myself.

Et voila, without tactlessly naming names, here’s an invitation for the final performances of a site-specific work. Let’s choose a few opening excerpts about the artist: “…She challenges the traditional notion of facade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside.”

Neat. Our subject will one-up Vito Acconci by pleasuring herself in a doorjamb, or straddling a windowsill, in full public view.

“Her live performances reflect the tension between art and architecture as a conflict between what is aesthetically pleasing (the seduction of surfaces, facades or the face itself) and the realization that our experience of space is circumscribed and curtailed by the very structures we inhabit.”

Um, all right, perhaps she’s masturbating some Bulthaup cabinets while wearing a prison uniform. Perhaps a copy of Discipline and Punish sits on the counter, representing the shade of Foucault as he blithely takes in the scene.

Well, it turns out that our subject will be strapped in a metal chair, with varying instruments prodding, pulling, and stretching her face into a series of excruciating contortions. What this has to do with our premise, I quote: “The face is rendered empty like an architectural element open to interaction and dialog. At the same time, it also appears immobile [sic] a grimace, a mask. Surprisingly, the fusion of mobile and immobile elements causes the architecture of the face to move and facial expressions to dissolve.” I’ll rephrase my question. WTF?

While our subject is an artist, her esoteric lexicon and garbled-masquerading-as-intellectual syntax has infiltrated architecture. Could the democratization of design have inspired such pretension — that the profession is resorting to fancy language to place itself above the Wallpaper* reader?

This much I do know. Self-torture is almost too juicy to resist. But let’s face it, I’m a member of the media. I mediate. I have to assume my audience wants to understand what I write, and I may not have the time or prowess to weave clarity from our largely incomprehensible art performance.

Public Relations: Bullshit

2006-11-08T05:37:43Z

This piece will appear, in more or less this form, in the forthcoming magazine Public Relations from the RISD architecture department. Many thanks to Dana Ganssle, and her crew, for the edits. Yes!

People often think that bullshitting is the same as lying. This can’t be the case, though… at your last critique, was that long-winded rant you received about “interstitial dualities” or “recontextualization” a lie? Not necessarily. If you got out a dictionary and dutifully parsed out all the branching convoluted sentences, you might find that the nonsense people concoct at these things is actually factually correct. The strain of bullshit that percolates in schools like ours is more about confusion than it is about outright deception.

You can, of course, use bullshit to obfuscate a lie. When James Frey, the now-infamous Oprah-anointed memoirist, was recently found to have fabricated his shady past to make himself seem more interesting, that was a lie. But when called on by Larry King, he said things like “95 percent of my book is true” and “all memoirs are subjective”, citing numerous examples. These things were arguably true, but they were also total bullshit.

I started systematically studying bullshit at RISD shortly after I arrived in the graduate graphic design program. I would be at a crit, and someone would say “Yes, I’m fascinated and inspired by the notion of interconnected linear elements.” Why couldn’t they just say “I like lines” and be done with it? And moreover, how could a rational (and most likely talented) human being say such a thing with a straight face?

My first project was to compile all the bullshit words and phrases I could find into a bullshit dictionary. This was easy and fun; by including commentary, I could finally say what I really thought about such vapid terms like “innovation” or “emergent behavior”. The book is shaping up to be a decent field guide to navigating some of the nonsense we’re exposed to daily in art and design circles.

It became clear, however, that the bullshit goes far deeper than mere words and phrases. There are more complex patterns of obfuscating nonsense at work, and they vary greatly between departments and subjects. For example, one of the first things the RISD graphic design curriculum beats out of its new members is the use of most subjective descriptive terms, like “beautiful” or “disgusting.” So you end up with GD students making bizarrely pseudoscientific proclamations like “This generates a fantastic visceral response.”

That’s just in GD, though. I wouldn’t suggest trotting out such speech-pattern chestnuts over in the BEB. In architecture, you’ll want to talk of systematized spatial logic, of mutant typologies, and of sympathetic abstraction, with maybe a few Italian vocab words like pallazo thrown in to seal the deal. And both of these bullshit methods are entirely different from your average discussion in textiles, where the use of the word “beautiful” is not only permitted but pervasive.

It’s a bloody mess. But it’s our mess, indeed, and I want to help. I’m gathering data like this by visiting critiques in as many departments as I can. I record these critiques on tape, and then transcribe them, allowing the patterns of speech to emerge on paper. The book I end up with from this material will provide a direct window into the bizarro-world of linguistic alchemy that we seem to be brewing.

A Diamond in the Wharf

2006-07-06T21:56:40Z

The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art redefines itself through architecture, becoming a gem among asphalt and salt water.

Come for the art, stay for the view. As the new Institute of Contemporary Art building nears completion on the Fan Pier of South Boston, the bar for provocative architecture is being raised. Designed by the avant-garde team of Diller + Scofidio + Renfo, the new ICA is the largest commission to date for the firm. There are a lot of firsts for this project: the first new building for the ICA, the first project for the redevelopment of Fan Pier, and the first standalone building for the architects. And much like a first time, it left this reviewer feeling anxious, thrilled, and a little let down. On a cool spring afternoon I joined a work-in-progress tour of the museum with several eager journalists. Due to open on September 17, the museum is in a frantic home stretch to deadline; construction noise nearly drowned out presentations by ICA Director Jill Medvedow and architect Liz Diller. But even behind the scaffolding and caution tape, there was clearly a spectacle nearing completion. And even at this early stage, the new museum feels surprisingly one-sided. Approaching the site from the harbor walk presents a visually stunning work of contemporary architecture. Imagine a pliable wooden boardwalk breaking free from the ground to shift and form spaces, stairs, and a giant shelf. An exterior staircase, beginning at the water’s edge, winds upward from the pedestrian path and passes through a glass wall. This path then continues upward to create an indoor theater on the second level. The form eventually doubles on itself, returning toward the water as a heroic cantilevered box. The gallery spaces reside within this floating cube. For all of this dynamic energy occurring on the water’s edge, the museum’s entrance is located on the flatter, city-facing elevation. Something begins to fade.

One has to traverse a sea of parking-lot asphalt to enter the lobby. Inside, the museum experience begins with what will be a glass-enclosed lobby where the ceiling slowly dips toward the water’s edge: It coordinates with the slope of the theater seating on the second level and the exterior stair along the harbor walk. At the triangular crevice where the ceiling and the floor meet, the lobby dips down four feet to house a future bookstore and gift shop. To the right of the lobby, a passage leads to the learning center for children, a restaurant, and an open shaft for a giant glass elevator, which will transport patrons to the galleries and theater housed on the upper floors.

Entering the top floor of the ICA, the vastness of the galleries comes into focus. Taking advantage of steel super-trusses quietly tucked behind plaster walls, the two galleries are columnless. Multiple rows of zigzag skylights are somewhat reminiscent of an airplane hangar. Walking toward the doorway that hovers over the riverfront, an immense glass-walled hallway, stretching the width of the building, comes into view. This corridor connects the two galleries that are separated by the elevator/stair core, and it acts as a smaller, light-filled third gallery space.

The highlight of the top floor is an anteroom behind the glass-walled corridor, dubbed the mediatheque. This room is actually a bump-out in the building’s cantilever that creates six tiers of stadium seating looking down to a tilted window. Due to the pitch of the floor and the angle of the glass, a horizonless view of water fills the window frame. This surreal room will include laptops to access museum archives and video installations.

What inspired this unique building form? Diller explained that she and her colleagues drew the typology as an extrusion of the harbor walk; the voids between this wooden path become interior space such as the lobby and theater. Since the harbor walk inspired the architects as a form generator, it seems ironic to find the museum lobby’s only entrance on the city side of the building. The future restaurant will spill out on the harbor walk with a series of sliding doors, but this is not intended for museum access.

With its relocation to the sparsely occupied South Boston wharf, the ICA must become a destination in itself, without the aid of an active urban street. In time, the remaining open spaces of Fan Pier will be developed into a mixed-use neighborhood of businesses and residences. Creating a dynamic street presence prior to an actual street is a tough assignment. The comparatively dull ‘rear’ entrance of the ICA leaves the urban definition to future buildings, and it feels like a missed opportunity. In some ways this parallels the problem of single-family American homes, where one enters the house through a cluttered and unfinished garage rather than through the symbolic front door.

This discrepancy between the symbolic orientation of the new ICA versus the reality of public access is the weakest link in an otherwise uplifting architectural experience. Diller + Scofidio + Renfro have the talent to create beautiful, contemplative spaces. If we could briefly turn their gaze from the water’s edge back to the city, we might get a building that works as a dynamic space on all fronts.

Please Do Not Touch (the Myth of Moss)

2006-05-11T04:43:04Z

What separates Moss consumers from the masses is that they are paying for more than just ownership of designer housewares. They are paying for the right to experience them.

‘Please Do Not Touch.’ That’s the slogan Murray Moss has adopted for his chic SoHo design store, Moss. In style points, Murray wins. Moss has been at the cutting edge of household hip since its inception in 1994. Over the years Murray and his enterprise have gained international renown for their discerning selection and presentation of highly designed ‘everyday’ objects and furnishings. Amidst a stark white backdrop of lacquered platforms and polished glass cases, designer household products are elevated to the level of art in Murray’s museum-like setting.

Printed signs stating, ‘Please Do Not Touch,’ are affixed to each display and continue the age-old museum tradition of disallowing physical contact with the work. The omnipresence of smartly-suited salespeople wards off the wandering hand, in case the metal guardrails don’t do the job for them. Whereas museums discourage touching to prevent the degradation of delicate artworks, Murray Moss has imposed this system of separation in a retail store for household furnishings, products that in their essence are meant to be purchased and used. While over time, touching might degrade that Noguchi sofa, or leave smudges on a Jacobsen teapot, the real impetus behind the ‘Please Do Not Touch’ campaign resides in the depths of the human psyche.

The purpose behind separating people from objects is to nurture the desire that Murray Moss sees inherent in all of us. In denying the basic human instinct to reach out and grab that which is visually appealing, Murray and his team promote an inner tug-of-war of longing and frustration, thereby increasing the value of the unattainable. Lacking a tactile perception of the object, we are left in a mental and emotional frenzy to wonder about its experiential aspects. Enter Murray as our counselor and personal guide.

As Moss shows, inaccessibility does wonders for social value. By emulating the standards and practices of the modern museum, the Moss ethos blends culture and shopping while unabashedly cultivating desire, the hook that keeps design professionals, celebrities, students, and even tourists at its door. What separates Moss consumers from the masses is that they are paying for more than just ownership of designer housewares. They are paying for the right to experience them.

On a warm Saturday in spring, I wandered down to SoHo to check out the scene. Moss had just opened its new arm, Moss Gallery, one year ago in order to provide a dedicated arena for highly curated collections of limited editions and prototypes. In only a year, the distinction between the gallery and the store is becoming thinner and thinner. Michael, a salesperson of six years, informed me that these days, both sides of the business are based on themed exhibitions curated by Murray Moss. Objects that have been displayed in the gallery may certainly later appear in the store, with their retained exhibition history as added social value.

Within the store I was dazzled by case after case of pristine cutlery and kitchenware, as the lingering aroma of leather upholstery tantalized my senses. While walking through this designed wonderland, I began to wonder if indeed these objects retained the chronicle of their past lives as art, once removed from the glass vitrine and taken from the context of Moss. Moss was sleek. It was sexy. And amidst its minted spectacle I felt slightly intimidated. I left without touching anything, and the allure of Moss persisted.

At home I turned to the Moss website, and that’s where I discovered the ‘Gifts Under $100’ corner. In the store I had completely dismissed the idea that affordability could even exist in the presence of $17,000 seating. It seemed almost indecent. But according to the Moss website, it was possible to enter Moss and witness for instance, ‘a Hella Jongerius embroidered ceramic pot next to a stainless steel Fisher space pen next to an Edra pink leather Flap sofa.’ It was in this sentence that I laid my best hopes. That was no ordinary pen. It was a highly covetable Chrome Bullet Fisher Space Pen, advertised in the under $100 section of the Moss website as being able to, ‘write upside down, under water, over grease, in freezing cold, boiling heat, and in outer space.’ I imagined it sitting pretty behind the glass case at Moss, surrounded by other more expensive but equally enticing wares. From there, I might not ever know if the space pen could indeed live up to its lofty advertising. In the vitrine it existed as no more than a desirable shiny object, but the fact that both NASA and Murray Moss had endorsed it made its polished chrome-plated brass seem all that much shinier.

One week and $50 later, a drab gray-brown cardboard box landed on my doorstep. Measuring in at 10” x 12” x 8,” the box had endured a significant amount of abuse in the exchange between couriers and handlers. I maneuvered my way through layers of tape to reveal an endless shroud of brown craft paper. Nestled within its folds lay my treasure, neatly encased in a candy-bar sized plastic snap-box and surrounded by a thin cardboard sheath. With $50 I had acquired more than just a fancy new pen, I had partaken in the aura of Moss.

The casing was smooth, adorned with the glossy image of an astronaut standing beside his roving moon-lander while a brightly colored American flag floats proudly in the gravity-free vacuum of space. From our vantage point on the moon, we see a glowing blue Earth in the background beyond the craters. Sliding the case from its packaging revealed the simple black and white Moss decal self-consciously branded to the cardboard’s interior. Only now, it was mine, and I could do whatever I wanted with it. A small printed leaflet offered a guarantee of the space pen’s abilities and 1960’s advertising information about the merits of its sealed-pressurized ink cartridge. Words like ‘precision’, ‘thixotropic’, and ‘tungsten-carbide,’ wrenched the space pen from its stature as art object and immediately thrust it into the realm of science and use. My gut reaction was to tear the pen from its felted plastic crater bed and lick it before running rampant around the city, terrorizing every bathroom wall and bus window in sight with bad poetry.

Once in my hands, the first thing I noticed was a giant smear on the space pen’s formerly flawless casing where my fingers had touched it. My heart sank a little, the way it does when spaghetti sauce falls on a new shirt. Perhaps Murray Moss had it right. And like that the myth was shattered.

There is an inherent disappointment that comes with purchasing at Moss. While there is an initial elation of having received a shiny new object, this momentary euphoria can never compete with the imminent descent of an object from art, to the levels of human use and abuse. The space pen writes like a dream, and I imagine the Verner Panton cradles the human figure just as well. After subjecting the pen to the cold depths of my freezer, and a pot of boiling hot water, it still wrote (even upside down). Without venturing into space, I was satisfied with the Fisher Space Pen’s ability to withstand the most extreme environmental conditions I could fabricate. At the conclusion of my testing, the chrome-plated casing had lost its luster, and was scratched from the ill-effects of capping the lid to the back of the pen. Even so, at one point the space pen was the very object of my desire from where it sat under Murray’s guidance at Moss. Through shifting the balance between function and style Murray Moss once again holds a captive audience in wait of the next best thing to appear on his horizon.

2| eBooks in Wonderland

2006-05-10T12:40:05Z

Today I purchased my first eBook. And it wasn’t the slightest bit painful.

I’m not sure why I’m so distrusting of the digital age, but here I am again, surprised at the ease with which a person can feel comfortable with a new electronic solution. It’s happened to me before. I was a late-comer to cell phone ownership, and was given both pda and digital camera as gifts long after they were popular. I received them all with raised eyebrows but was quickly won over by each. I admit that I was as hesitant with eBooks, and I probably wouldn’t have even bothered with it if not for this article.

Apparently, I’m not alone in my skepticism. I did an informal survey of a random sampling of my friends and family and found that the majority who answered, 24 out of 28, had never downloaded an eBook. The individuals I surveyed were a mixed crowd, who range between 25 and 60 years old, have varying educational levels, but are all computer literate (at least enough to answer the eSurvey). Of the 4 who admitted to eBook involvement, three had downloaded non-fiction (manuals and academic texts) and the fourth, a friend’s story which had won an award. Not one person downloaded a novel to read in their spare time.

When I asked why the surveyed hadn’t ‘caught the eBook wave,’ the answers were consistent: I spend too much time staring at a computer screen already; I appreciate the physicality of books; I had no idea that eBooks even existed. When asked whether they saw a future for eBooks, the responses were mixed: some felt dreaded inevitability and some thought they had no future at all.

The most common comment, however, was that eBooks will only become popular if better hardware is created to read it. This seems to be a delusion that many non-eBookers have. Because all recent ventures into eBook-specific hardware have failed, we’re left with laptops or pdas for our eBook-reading pleasure. Amazingly, this doesn’t seem to be an issue among actual eBook buyers. A survey conducted by the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) in 2006 found that 88% of eBook readers rated their hardware average or better for reading, and a whopping 96% said they found eBook portability better than that of paper books. While there’s definitely interest amongst eBook readers in enlarged screen size and resolution, the current hardware isn’t stopping the previously converted.

The big complaints amongst regular eBook readers are more focused on software, websites and legal issues. They’re frustrated with the lack of pre-purchase browsable excerpts, as well as the still-substantial cost of purchasing them (approximately 0 - 25% less than the paper equivalent). One interesting point in the whole eBook debate is that with the industry still in an infant stage, not only are few books available, but the genre is limited as well. I looked up books that typically have a plethora of visuals (like comic books, and books on graphic design), and there wasn’t anything. Adobe .pdfs are definitely advanced enough to deal with graphics, so why is it so uncommon at this point?

It seems that the eBook industry faces a difficult binary market. On the one hand they have the non-eBook readers, who clearly have some biases and misperceptions, just as I did. On the other hand, they have their current users; publishers, retailers, and electronics producers are being asked to make advancements in the software, websites, hardware in order to retain their current customer base. It’s complicated, but I see a future for eBooks, whether dreaded or not.

1| eBooks 2006: Reality or Science Fiction?

2006-05-10T12:37:26Z

As an avid book collector, I felt a mixture of both excitement and alarm when, in the early 1990s, the imminent future of the electronic book was announced. At the time, I was working at a bookstore where I was lugging heavy volumes around, watching the number of published books rise exponentially to fill our little store, and creating a personal collection that made my shelves and floors sag. While these books gave me a backache, they also provided great pleasure and still do today. Part of the appeal of paper books for me, and for many, is the physicality of them – the feel of good paper, the virgin opening of a new volume, the details of the type, the potential for note-taking and marking favorite passages. Could any benefits of an electronic collection of books outweigh these pleasurable moments?

Apparently this question is still unanswered by the consumer masses: the eBook industry continues to teeter, trying to decide if it’s on the same track as the DVD or Betamax.

While I have no friends who have ever bought, or even considered buying an eBook (and they are a relatively educated crowd), the eBook industry websites certainly make this market sound like it has legs. The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), a trade and standards organization dedicated to the development and promotion of electronic publishing, recently released statistics that an impressive 1.6 million eBook units were sold in 2005, with almost $12 million in sales revenues. Of course, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.3 billion printed books sold each year.

The eBook industry has a number new concerns that they can’t appropriate from the paper publishing industry: what hardware an eBook will be read on, what software it will be read with, what format it will be read in, how a reader will purchase an eBook, and finally who will publish or provide the eBooks for purchase. The kinks in all of these areas are still being worked out, but with some effort and time, those kinks are definitely starting to straighten.

While the early speculation for eBook hardware was bibliocentric – imagine a computer the same size and weight as a book, which would open up with the sound of pages turning at appropriate times – the transforming vision for eBook format is now slightly different. There have been several attempts to create a book-like computer, and a few hang on even now, but the inclination of designers has mostly been to format eBooks to hardware many of us already have: our Mac, PC or pda. There are still some complaints about these formats being either too small or too large, unwieldy, and heavy, but at least they don’t require the additional cost of new hardware.

Once you have picked your hardware, buying eBooks is actually a relatively easy thing. Currently there are three common formats to buy your eBook in: Adobe .pdf format for Mac or PC, Mobipocket format for your pda or Pocket PC, or Microsoft Reader for your PC. All of these require some sort of free reader software, which can be upgraded at a slight price, and which are relatively user friendly. There are many websites that provide ebook services and all it takes is a quick search and a credit card to download your reading material. One website, eBooks.com, boasts a selection of over 52,000 popular, professional and academic books, all of which usually run at a slightly lower cost than paper books. One downfall is that it’s likely that you’ll only find a limited number of your favorites online, much like you might with audiobooks, but keep in mind that despite only typically offering bestsellers, the audiobook industry is still thriving.

In addition, some thoughtful individuals might be concerned with copyright and authorial authority issues in regards to the growing eBook availability. Don’t worry – the publishing industry is on top of this one, carefully protecting author’s rights (and their profits) by creating all kinds of rules and regulations to govern eBook usage. For example, in most formats, there is a limited number of times you can save and move your file, and copying and printing the text is prohibited. With those rules in place, publishing companies haven’t hesitated to enter into this industry; mega-publishers like HarperCollins, RandomHouse, and Penguin all have eBook sections on their consumer websites. After all, as one saavy commentator said “Publishers who put their titles online risk having their electronic versions stolen, but publishers who stay offline aren’t safe either. Pirates can cheaply scan paper bestsellers into their computers.” (1)

Ultimately, it is clear that eBooks are here to stay in some fashion, if only for bumbling novice authors to offer free copies of their most recent imaginings. The industry has yet determine what kind of force it will be beyond that, and we’ll just have to wait and see.

Next: more in depth reviews of various hardware, software and eBook websites.
]]> (1) http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/eBook.htm

A Diamond in the Warf

2006-05-10T07:13:46Z

The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art takes a bold step to redefine itself through architecture

By: BRYAN BIESER

Come for the art; stay for the view. As the new ICA museum building nears completion on the Fan Pier of South Boston, the bar for provocative architecture is being raised. Designed by the avant-garde team of Diller + Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfo) the new ICA is the largest commission to date for the firm. There are a lot of firsts for this project; the first new building for the ICA, the first project for the redevelopment of Fan Pier and the first stand alone building for Diller + Scofidio. And much like a first time, it left this reviewer feeling anxious, thrilled and a little let down.

On a cool spring afternoon I joined a works-in-progress tour of the museum with several eagerly awaiting journalists. Due to open on September 17th of this year, the frantic pace to meet the autumn deadline was strikingly clear; the construction noise nearly drowned out presentations by ICA Director Jill Medvedow and architect Liz Diller. And behind the scaffolding and caution tape what was developing on that cold, windswept pier? In terms of the basic aspirations for the new ICA, I would say that yes, this building is quite spectacular.

Approaching the site from the harbor walk presents a visually stunning work of contemporary architecture. Imagine a pliable wooden boardwalk breaking free from the ground to shift and form spaces, stairs and a giant shelf. An exterior staircase beginning at the water’s edge moves up from the pedestrian path and passes through a glass wall. This path then continues upward to create an indoor theater on the second level. The form eventually doubles on itself, returning towards the water as a heroic cantilevered box. The gallery spaces reside within this floating cube. And yet for all of this dynamic energy occurring on the water’s edge, something begins to fade on the city side of the structure. Moving away from the river walk the new museum feels surprisingly one sided.

Upon entering the museum the experience begins with a yet-to-be glass enclosed lobby where the ceiling slowly dips down towards the waters edge. The ceiling mimics the slope of the theater seating on the second level and the exterior stair along the harbor walk. At the triangular crevice where the ceiling and the floor meet, the lobby floor dips down four feet to house a future bookstore and gift shop. To the right of the lobby is a passage to the learning center for children, a restaurant and an open shaft to house a future glass elevator. With the galleries and theater housed on the upper floors of the museum, logic dictated that a large lift would best transport patrons to the “beginning” of the collection.

Entering the top floor of the ICA, the vastness of the galleries comes into focus. Taking advantage of steel super-trusses quietly tucked behind plaster walls, the two galleries are columnless. Multiple rows of zigzag skylights are somewhat reminiscent of an airplane hanger. Walking towards the doorway along the water’s edge, an immense glass-walled hallway stretches the width of the building. This corridor connects the two galleries separate from the elevator/stair hallway and acts as a smaller, light filled third gallery space.

The highlight of the top floor, hands down, is an anteroom behind the glass walled corridor titled the “mediatheque.” This room is actually a bump out in the building’s cantilever that creates six tiers of stadium seating looking down to a tilted window. Due to the pitch of the floor and the angle of the glass, a horizonless view of water fills the window frame. This surreal room will have laptops on counters to access museum archives and video installations.

With such bold geometries, the question arises of where this unique building form comes from. As explained by Diller + Scofidio, the form is drawn from an extrusion of the harbor walk. The voids between this wooden path become interior space such as the lobby and theater. Since the harbor walk inspired the architects as a form generator it seems ironic to find no entrance to the museum lobby from the water’s edge. The future restaurant will spill out on the harbor walk with a series of sliding doors, but this opening is not intended for museum access. Though the structural footprint is modest, it feels counterintuitive walking to the “reverse” side of the museum to reach the entrance.

Diller + Scofidio also use a folding technique to create prescribed views of Boston Harbor. In fact, any other view but those directed by the architects are almost visually prohibitive. One enters the lobby heading towards the water. The theater space looks over the water. The principle passage between the galleries looks over the water. At its best, this emphasis on the forced view can create a beautiful reflective space such as the mediatheque. At its worst, the view begins to feel like an architectural one liner; especially if the spaces are passed through in quick succession.

With its relocation to the sparsely occupied South Boston wharf, the ICA must become a destination in of itself without the aid of an active urban street. In time, the remaining open spaces of Fan Pier will be developed into a mixed use neighborhood of businesses and residences. Creating a dynamic street presence prior to an actual street is a tough assignment; but leaving the urban definition to future buildings feels like a missed opportunity. This dilemma is highlighted by the discrepancy of the entrance. If patrons are required to enter the building from the city side then why is this façade so flat? In some ways this is parallel the problem of single family American homes where one enters the house through a cluttered and unfinished garage rather than through the symbolic front door.

This discrepancy between the symbolic orientation of the new ICA vs. the reality of public access to the museum is the weakest link in an otherwise uplifting architectural experience. Diller + Scofidio have the talent to create beautiful, contemplative spaces; if we could briefly turn their gaze from the water’s edge back to the city we might get a building that works as a dynamic space on all fronts.