Words.

brand worship 7/100

Merit gained by looking at sacred objects— the future of advertising? Blessed into the next life of digital preservation?

Words scrolled upward faster than she could speak, almost faster than she could read. The quiet intonations she had been chanting became less sensical, tongue tripping over lip, her jaw moving in small halting motions. Only when the final lines faded away and a warm glow filled her vision did she stop. An image appeared, it was a white sneaker with colorful streaks. She stared, unblinking, eyes scanning from left to right, trying to embed every detail in her memory.

Nike.
Nike.
Nike.
Ni kee.
Nii kee.
Nih keeh.
Nye keeh.
Nike.

She spoke the word out loud, over and over until it seemed a familiar stranger on her tongue. Finally even this image faded and the anticipated chime rang. A successful tone, releasing her from her morning ritual.

When she gestured, swiping the glowing screen away, it faded off, turning into her blank wall once more. Soft voices from the kitchen let her know her roommates were also awake, finished with their own morning rituals.

“We’re out of the Poppyums, so don’t bother looking.” Michael muttered from behind his mug. His stare was somewhat vacant, eyes reading something in a distance that wasn’t there. “Also it looks like Addidas might be performing better in the market, you might want to switch your deity.”

“Michael, don’t be mean. Pakpao isn’t so finicle as you. She’s whorhiped Nike for years.” Nikki rebuked him before Pakpao had a chance to defend her decision.

“Oh you’re just saying that because you’re also a Nike-ite. And so what if I switch? I’m just diversifying my chances, who knows the direction a company might go in a hundred years from now, eternity is a long time.”

“It’s too early for this.” Pakpao spoke light heartedly, trying to diffuse any tension before her two roommates before it could start. Rummaging in the drawer next to the sink, she pulled out a Nestle breakfast pack and added water. She shook the paper package until the contents inside began to solidify. “I mean, honestly I think part of me just does the Nike rituals because it’s easier to say in the morning. Besides, I like their colors more.” She re-opened the package, reaching in to grab the semi solidified food. A chalky after taste clung to top of her mouth, and she had to use her tongue to scrape the globs off and swallow. She was never able to really get the meal to look or taste like what it showed on the box.

“Did you see in the news yesterday about the young retiree?” Nikki cheerfully asked, only slightly changing the subject. “He retired at 35! Isn’t that crazy? So young!”

“How the hell did he pull that off?” Michael skeptically asked, his attention now fully on the two of them, and no longer reading his feed.

“Well, apparently his parents got in on the whole thing early.”

“So they were rich. They just bought his time?”

“No! That’s the thing, he’s the youngest from the middle-middle-median-lower class to retire so young. It’s never happened before.” Nikki stated confidently while pulling up her long, coarse brown hair up into a high bun.

“But how does that math even work out? Even if his parents started him at the age of two…” Michael’s voice trailed off, as his eyes darted to do the calculations.

“That’s all he did, his whole life. He was hooked up to feeding tubes.” Pakpao spoke around the lump of food-like substance, a few pieces spitting out on to the table. She had watched the video yesterday, seen the cheery reporter who had tried to put a positive spin on the story. “His parents started him on it as soon as he could talk, and he only ever slept five hours a night. They like, home schooled him, but instead of learning anything he just worshipped the brands. The last ten years he was just hooked up to iv’s and feeding tubes, never left the room, never stopped.”

“Steve Jobs, that’s not a life.” A look of disgust scrunched up Michael’s face.

“Yeah, well, now he can be uploaded into the Everlife and do whatever he wants. Apple was holding him up as a lead influencer, they’re like, trying to make him a saint or something. He didn’t just pray a lot, like he was really able to gain followers and create influence for the brands. He was an online missionary to certain parts of the web.” Her voice trailed off, as she thought about what a life devoted to promoting the brands instead of experiencing them would be like.

“Fuck, I’ll be praying until I die at this rate.” He stood up abruptly, collecting his mug and taking it to the sink. “At least I’m getting to really live though. I feel like actually using some of these brands, it’ll pay off eventually. It’s gotta be worth more than just reciting them, right?”

Nikki nodded, Pakpao shrugged.

Last night I attended a Speculative Futures Meetup, a small gathering of the curious— both of what a speculative future is, and the possibilities they hold.  “Should Everyone be a Futurist?”, was the provocative title of the talk by Elliott Montgomery.  He touched on some of the more common models of futurism from the cone of possibility to the Delphi method. Everyone can imagine futures, whether it’s tomorrow’s dinner or the next century’s transportation vehicles. But where do these futures we imagine come from?

Montgomery introduced the theory of the “tragedy of the commons”. Basically, each person acts in their own best interest, even in a large group. If each person acts in their own self-interest, and separately, then the thought would go that each can imagine their own futures. These futures would have infinite varieties. However, each person does not imagine their own unique future. Because of many shared cultural narratives, our futures in fact have already been colonized, and if our futures are limited by our imaginations, then they are not infinite, but actually a finite shared resource.  This shared source of futures is mostly being replenished by the culture of the US, and even more so— California. Whether by the futurist studies of RAND developed in the 50s to handle futures at massive scales, or the  vibrant narratives that come from Hollywood, to today’s Silicon Valley technology— a lot of futures have already been told by one place in the planet.

Ecosystems thrive because of biological diversity, there is resiliency in systems that are adaptive. I believe the cultures that influence our thoughts of the future should also be a vibrant reflection of the diversity of the people on our planet. This necessitates even more for participatory ways of engaging people to practice foresight, and tell the stories of the futures they can imagine. That was the general conclusion of Montgomery’s talk, that although not everyone should necessarily take on the work of being a ‘futurist’, we should all practice foresight and the cultures we draw on should be more diverse.

There is often a tension between the top-down and bottom-up visioning of futures. People often imagine futures filled with  omnipresent governments and corporations. Given how much large tech companies and governments seem to be funding most of the foresight work, and their cultural dominance, this is hardly a surprise.

Here are a few things missing from the talk that I think would be interesting to further explore:

• Viewing our past as a source of inspiration of the future. This one may be counter-intuitive, but understanding historical events gives perspective on the ways people behave and the things that shape us.  
  
• Escaping the influence of the Western perspective in futurism is hard— the mass export of culture has already biased us, and the fact that I’m living here. But it would be more interesting to know and see how other cultures talk approach forecasting and shape future culture. 
  
• Someone’s utopia is going to be another’s dystopia, futures are multiple in both the many ones that could happen, but also in the ways they can be experienced. An uncomfortable truth is that people don’t share universal values, and likely won’t in the future either. Some futures benefit the few at the expense of the many, and even the ones that help the masses might not be the ideal for a selfish few.
  

Socialism as hopeful futures

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy

Designers are makers of the future, whether more immediate—  such as a web feature, or futures further away— such as buildings. We sit at the intersection of technology and society, crafting artifacts and experiences at the junction. Technology has edges to understand, designers see how we can leverage it into new tools, products, and services. Understanding how our designs influence societies is harder, the systems designs live within and who they impact and why not always apparent.

Last weekend I attended Primer Conference, a small, well curated conference focused on the future from a designer’s perspective. This perspective  has often been called speculative or critical design. The talks presented were by those toeing the lines of futurism, design, art, and research. Stuart Candy opened the event with his talk “The Future is a Commons”, at first a retrospective of his work but later a call to action. “Foresight is a right, and it is up to us to use our privilege to pay it forward.” Candy spoke, in one of the most memorable take aways I had from the talk.

The future isn’t only found in an R&D lab funded by giant corporations, it shouldn’t be limited to shiny sterile worlds by Samsung. The future is for us, for anyone able to imagine one. Candy showed the work of a photographer who interviewed young girls in a refugee camp. She asked them sincerely, these least privileged of the underprivileged, what they wanted to be when they grew up. Then she dressed them up and placed them in the working role that they imagined and photographed them as if the girls really were doctors or lawyers or whatever else. She then showed these photos to the girls’ parents, to ask them how they imagined their daughters’ future now. One couple actually cancelled their daughter’s arranged marriage, so powerful had the exercise been.

That was one of the most exciting exercises in futurism I had seen. It’s not the imagined futures of a world with AI, or driverless cars, or algae food, it’s an idea brought to people not corporations.

Which also brings me back to my consideration of Arundhati Roy’s quote. Another world is possible, and we need to imagine what it could be. We need stories, images, views on what a positive future could be. That’s what draws me to socialism— socialists actually imagine a positive future, a better world to live in. They recognize the tragedies of the past, and the broken systems in the present, but they can imagine something better.

I got to blend some of that political speculation with design at the end of the conference, which was a day of workshops. I was lucky enough to attend one lead by Alana Aquilino. Through a series of exercises, and partner collaboration, we crafted a vision of who our great-great-grandchild might be in 150 years. In pairs, we imagined a world our two descendants might live in, and how they might interact with each other. The worlds leaned more towards utopia than dystopia, and I believe that was in part from the more intimate link of family that was inserted into the speculating.

The workshop also offered me an opportunity to imagine a more socialist one, how trends in technology, environment, and society might shift. My partner and I explored less obvious social dynamics and ways of living— ones not always seen in the frequently shiny techno-centric futures.

So if a designer’s role is imagining the future, I implore us to imagine better ones— socialist ones. I want futures where we talk about how much leisure time we have to be with our families, because the need for work is low. I want people to imagine worlds where being sick doesn’t mean poverty. A world where the environment is prioritized over profit. Can we imagine new services and experiences that provide value without exploitation?

I don’t know all the forms this socialist future speculation could take, and I don’t know all the audiences it would be for. I imagine workshops and participation in experiences over designed objects to be more compelling. Top-down visions handed to the commons is not something I’m advocating for. Engaging people with tools to craft their own brilliant futures, and conduits to act, are essential.

It’s weird to start posting here again, a bit. Picking up where I left off, cleaning off some of the digital dust. Although I started this blog in undergrad, I associate it more with grad school. It was there that I moved from collecting and sharing images to writing down my thoughts and processes of the design program I was in.

On Monday I will have friends graduating the same program I did 4 years ago. I’ve been graduated from the program the same amount of time I was in undergrad, and twice the length of the program itself. It’s a weird feeling to have. Some distance, but not a whole lot. I’m closer with current students than I would have thought. This is mostly because a friend is in his first year there.

I’ve enjoyed listening to the current students’ projects and ideas, contributing some advice when I can. They are inspiring and full of energy in a way you don’t see in the day to days of work. 

Since graduating I’ve worked at a few jobs and on quite a lot of projects. I feel it has only been in the last few months that I’m really able to define and get truly comfortable with my own processes and approach to work. I’m at a startup that allows enough independence and resources to do this, but also where we are in cultural alignment to have similar enough ways of working. 

The project begins with understanding goals, and moves towards small sketches and flow diagrams in my own sketchbooks. After that I redraw these screens and flows on large whiteboard painted walls. I walk people through at this large and rough stage, before diving back into paper sketches. These paper UI’s are taped up on the wall again and walked through. I find that working at larger scales affords groups to get involved, for discussion and debate about product to drive the project forward. Back and forth until I move into digital designs, and prototypes, and engaging users on what they think. Rinse, wash, and repeat steps as necessary. But just as you think you are getting near the end, we take a hatchet to all of it in the name of MVP.

It’s a common enough process, but is becoming comfortable personally to lean into.

I remember in school reading about processes and trying different ones out. Being more anxious about finding a “right” one, an “appropriate” one. 

But process is just a way of thinking, just a way to get you to make the work. It changes based more on who’s involved than what is. 

So I’d like to tell my former grad school self that you’ve started to figure out a process. I think she’d like to hear that.

Review of Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction

The artists’ backgrounds were often very different from each other. One growing up in post-war Japan, another born poor in Brooklyn, some from Chicago wealth, some fled as refugees from Europe, others native to South America. But a commonality they all shared was a world that labeled them woman before artist. To consider if the Irascibles photo had not one woman with 14 men, but something more equitable, is to wonder about a world that could consider the art before the artist.

The Museum of Modern Art’s newest exhibition, “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction”, highlights the achievements of women artists after World War II, but before the start of the feminist movement in the seventies. The forces of war and economic growth fostered a time where women gained more independence and education than their predecessors.

In an ideal world, there would be no need for this exhibition: the art would have been on regular public display as it already belongs to MOMA’s permanent collection. The task of separating work from gender becomes almost impossible, and to view the exhibit is to see it with this understanding.

Not all of the featured artists were unknown in their time. Joan Mitchell, who frequently exhibited her paintings in the 50s, and Hedda Stern, who was the only woman photographed in the classic Irascibles group-photo which came to define the Abstract Expressionist movement, both have work represented alongside the other 53 artists. However, nearly all had to fight for their work to be taken as seriously as their male contemporaries’. Lee Krasner was once told her painting was so good, “you’d never know it was done by a woman”.

The first part of the collection represents the Abstract Expressionist movement, paintings with energetic brushstrokes, intimate collages, and abstracted photographs. The careful color study by Etel Adnan greets visitors entering the exhibit, an uneven canvas scrap carefully framed. Large paintings like Lee Krasner’s energetic “Gaea” draw viewers in with vivid color and brush movement. The art here seems mostly detached from gender, these works inspired and influenced from other sources.

Textile and ceramics were traditionally some of the few creative education paths available to women. Anni Albers pushed the medium in new directions by using nontraditional material and form to create large intricate work with modernist sensibilities. Joe Baer’s white squares influenced the Reductive Abstraction movement. Here the artists began to bring order and rationalism into their work. Color is sparser, but strategic, the limits of grids and geometries explored.

The back of the exhibit has the most expressive of all the works. The Eccentric Abstraction was a time when artists experimented with non-traditional material, personality, and the ways form inhabited space. A cranking, clanking noise comes from the corner, drawing passerby’s attention. Feliza Bursztyn’s “Untitled” from the series “Hysterics” is a convoluted metal object on a pedestal, rattling and noise-making for a whole minute before going still. How unlike a woman, it seems to imply, to be the noise-maker in the room. A false bravado of steely material belies the flimsy object that folds in on itself in a pile. By the 60s, these artists had finally found a way to start incorporating their gendered perspective into their work.

The artists’ backgrounds were often very different from each other. One growing up in post-war Japan, another born poor in Brooklyn, some from Chicago wealth, some fled as refugees from Europe, others native to South America. But a commonality they all shared was a world that labeled them woman before artist. To consider if The Irascibles photo had not one woman with 14 men, but something more equitable, is to wonder about a world that could consider the art before the artist.

Ixd 15 Decompression

///The following is only loosely worked into a blog post. I had many ideas leaving the conference, and this is only a slightly edited first draft of what I initially wrote. I think other writing will follow from some of the ideas I touch on here.///

I attended the Interaction Design Conference 2015, my third time going, and the conference’s seventh year. The conference was a collection of talks and workshops put on by practioners in the interaction design community. I found value in some of the talks more than others, and a couple were even deeply inspiring. I saw only a fraction of the events, because the setup was that multiple talks happened at once.

A theme of many of the talks is that the future is desperately in need of designers. Our future holds countless crises in politics, environment, and social disasters that will take a designer’s perspective to navigate through. Few of the speakers however, said exactly what a designers’ role would be or how they could be of help. And fewer still seemed to acknowledge the fact that most designers’ education leaves them woefully unprepared for these complicated issues.

One of the few concrete examples I saw of designers working deftly with complex issues, was Reboot’s efforts on designing in developing worlds. They managed to navigate complex social systems respectfully, and design appropriately for the context. Their speaker seemed incredibly humble, and aware that their role could only extend so far, and that the impact they had was sometimes nebulous at best.

Some of the talks also addressed the story trope of the “designer as hero” (and some seemed to conspicuously ignore it). This particular story-type we tell ourselves is not only out-dated, but dangerous. With the increasing complexity of the world, designer’s should recognize their roles within it. Good ideas will not spring forth solely from the mind of the designer. The best ideas will come from a combination of the work of policy makers, scientists, social workers, technologists, etc. that hopefully the designer is collaborating with. We may have won a seat at the table (this is dubious), but we must be cognizant that it is a large table meant to seat many.

I came to think that there are broadly two roles for designers in the future. The first is the designer as model-maker. Someone who can work collaboratively with the many stakeholders to help model the frameworks of the working systems. Albeit, only if it is useful in moving the project forward, and flexible to allow anyone to modify it. The second are the designers working to design the touch points of the system. These are the ones executing the ideas, and bringing them into tangibility. How much a designer’s role in the project will depend on the complexity and type of problem. But it will not be designers alone solving the problems after being thrown into complexity.

The conference also seemed to ignore the number of superfluous, useless, and worse, harmful startups that continue to flourish, and what designers’ roles are in helping them to succeed. An example might be of the many designers joining Uber (coincidentally, a sponsor of the event). This is a service that profits off of poor city transportation infrastructure. It’s hard to criticize a designer’s choice in joining Uber, a company that provides a good income, and a decent working environment. If a designer wanted to work on designing for San Francisco’s transportation infrastructure, how would they even begin? Would they join Muni or Bart or the local government offices? Do any such roles exist for a designer? Is the work out-sourced to a consultancy, and if so, who? Can the city afford to spend money on designers? Do they stakeholders have incentives to change?They probably already know the problems, and are mired down by many layers of bureaucracy and red tape.

I think the future will need many designers, sure. But well-educated ones. Designers who know that their profession did not end and begin with only influences of the Bauhaus. I think they need liberal arts educated designers. Designers who understand history and human complexity. That there is much to be learned outside of the studio.