To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. …. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. …. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture.
Maps can do more than express flat or neatly measured ideas:
[M]apmakers don’t always value precision above all else. Indeed, historically, cartographers have introduced outrageous inaccuracies into their atlases. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. During the Age of Discovery, explorers plotted islands and continents where none existed. First, writers, and later, propagandists, discovered that a fake map can lend legitimacy to wild ideas.
Faking it brought legitimacy to wild ideas. Or perhaps this was just an early version of prototyping.
Malcolm Gladwell discusses one of his “rules of conduct” for people:
[By default] I think everyone’s interesting.
When people are talking about something they know well and do well, they’re almost always interesting. And if they’re not, it’s generally your fault because you’re not asking the right questions and you haven’t made them comfortable. And once I learned that lesson, my journalism became a lot easier.
Everyone is interesting, and getting at interestingness, asking good questions to get people to open up, to reveal it, is what keeps me going. Whether people have natural obsessions revealed by someone else, whether we have to seek stories out, or whether people outright explain a craft they know well, there’s always a story to find.
The entire 60-minute interview covers a great deal of ground and is worth a listen to.
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I began piano lessons at age five. Classical only. Scales. Practicing every evening before dinner was a requirement. In the early ‘80s, weakened by requests, my parents purchased a synthesizer for me. It was an imperative purchase, I felt at the time, for me to continue my creative pursuits as a young musician.
See also:
The New England Synthesizer Museum
Yet with four more sounds to choose from — not just Piano, but Strings, Harpsichord, and Voices — I was all but paralyzed by choice. And special effects like vibrato added exponential confusion. Instead of being freed, I was truly flummoxed.
Baffled by creative block, I remember questioning my mother at the time, “how can individuals be capable of making choices in the face of so much choice?” but my lack of articulation on the topic at that age resulted in no satisfying answer. She just saw this as another lost investment — much like my passing fancy with soccer and the saxophone. The synthesizer gathered dust under the ruffle-skirted bed, as did any sense of hope about mastering freedom.
Regimentation of creativity
See also:
Family legend has it that Switched-On Bach, recorded using Moog synthesizers, was my favorite album by age two
I’d visit friends who’d upgraded their synthesizers to models with more voices, more choice, even fewer constraints. Impressive. But I would think of the simplicity of the Chickering in my living room. While jealous of their ability to produce without constraint, I couldn’t wait to return to the singular purpose of the baby grand.
Decades later, this pattern repeats itself, as choice is a constant undertone in social and professional interactions, and actively inscribed in the culture of cities. Thus, a regimentation of creativity is necessary.
A contract of constraints
To produce something of merit, I adopt a kind of contract of constraints, an unspoken loose ruleset, that marks boundaries by which I must abide when I work. No matter what an outcome, you can limit a pursuit by at least:
a. Time
Limit an activity to a specified amount time. Instead of solving it in eight hours or a period of weeks, solve it in XX, a shorter period of time. Design charrettes are good models. As Kathy Sierra points out, “One of the best ways to be truly creative — breakthrough creative — is to be forced to go fast. Really, really, really fast.”
b. Grammar
Restrict choices to specific constructions or a vernacular that will give the product or solution form. Choose a letter or a stylistic constraint, and solve for that only instead of tackling an entire design system.
c. Material
Choose one or two materials or platforms and only work within those boundaries. Ignore all others. Work only with recycled plastics from your community; decide your website will only have one page. Limit the material to two, or better, one. Some of the most impressive architectures — digital and physical — have been constructed when material constraints were most limited.
These sample contracts are an assurance between you and your work, such that the website, the product, the music, the book you are actively producing is given boundaries. After a while, they feel less formal, and choices rewarding rather than daunting. And the time you’re spending, valuable, resulting in a tempo and sound that will surprise even you.
Most importantly: constraints, once decided upon, should be tested and stretched, but not forgotten. It is, after all, a contract.
Buckminster Fuller on a more human-centered approach to using the prepositions “down” and “up”:
The words “down” and “up”, according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words “in” and “out” should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object’s relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. “I suggest to audiences that they say, “I’m going ‘outstairs’ and ‘instairs.’” At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real “reality.”
I’m starting today.
Spend two weeks next summer studying visual communication with the best typographers in Italy:
Visit the Trajan Column, the Pantheon and the Arch of Titus. Examine inscriptions on Roman buildings and monuments that have long been a typographic ideal. Our workshop in design history, theory and practice is an intensive period of study that enables students to research and analyze the roots of typography, draw type and letters from the classic models while practicing contemporary design with Italian and American designers and design historians. The Masters Workshop fosters multidisciplinary design — through immersion — in architecture, art, literature, and even cuisine. Collaborations with Italian design organizations and businesses will result in unique projects and products.
I’m a staunch supporter of learning by doing (not necessarily this extreme), of immersion, and look at chances such as these as terrific opportunities for growth. Steven Heller and Lita Talarico have masterfully curated an enviable 14 days of doing and learning. Last summer’s workshop sessions are visually documented here.
The most important part of the story is the part you don’t know yet.
Barbara Kingsolver to Kurt Andersen
On a historical word choice of Dave Eggers
Regarding Dave Eggers choosing the word “critic” in advice he gives in a 2000 interview on “selling out:”
I remember wishing he’d used some term other than “a critic” — a term too easily mistaken for a profession, a position — when what he really means is a critical person: the Merriam-Webster 2. definition of critic (“one given to harsh or captious judgment”), rather than either the 1a. (“one who expresses a reasoned opinion” on matters of “value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique”) or 1b. (“one who engages often professionally in the analysis, evaluation, or appreciation” of art). If he meant that last one, all he’d be saying is that he made a spectacularly shitty critic, which is not his point — although he does seem happy to let the lines blur between these things, to let it be inferred that critics are merely critical, just like it says on the label; this is what’s known in the world of not-saying-YES as a “dick move.”
Really what he’s telling in this paragraph is the story of an age cohort, or at least a certain segment of one.
Meanwhile:
[M]eanwhile along come a whole bunch of younger people for whom these issues are not all that vexed or pressing, people who are fluent in irony and sincerity both and don’t need to be told how to love earnestly, people for whom “say YES” is not a profound and meaningful shift in mentalities but just a stitched-sampler reminder of something very, very basic, and maybe in this sense every generation digs a hole and then goes around preaching about the importance of climbing out of it while young people nod politely at them and dig different holes entirely.
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From Portland to New York City, parking lots in the United States are being transitioned from unsightly sprawls to productive urban spaces. All in the name of the coniferous tree:
According to the National Christmas Tree Association, 25-30 million live trees will be sold in the U.S. this year. Some of these will be bought at the farm that grew them, some will be delivered, some will be available at your local big-box department store. But some will be carefully arranged in rows and stacks between candy-cane stripped poles, transforming parking lots and vacant parcels into little pockets of coniferous woodland.
Thought about a different way, the entire country is being organized into a sort of installation:
[S]trip away the commercial purpose, and installation of 25 million trees in hundreds of thousands of ½ acre dioramas — every year — around the country would is an impressive ‘urban installation’ to rival any Agnes Denes Wheatfield or Robert Smithson Non-Site and to dwarf a REBAR ‘Parking Day’.
See also: Park(ing) Day 2009.
A thank you note by David Bowie in reply to his first American fan letter:
When I called in this, my manager’s office, a few moments ago I was handed my very first American fan letter – and it was from you. I was so pleased that I had to sit down and type an immediate reply, even though Ken is shouting at me to get on with a script he badly needs. That can wiat (wi-at? That’s a new English word which means wait).
For anyone who launches a product, who bravely publishes that first book, who records music, who stands up for ideas of any kind — for anyone who performs for an audience without trackable means for people’s happiness — he or she knows the importance of receiving feedback. And a fan letter, invaluable.
The fan of note was Sandra Dodd, so moved, that she started a fan club on Bowie’s behalf. I find it charming that a 20-year-old Bowie turned around a thank you note immediately.
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Susan Sontag. Photographer: Peter Hujar. “One can’t possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.” Later via Viktor Shktlovsky, “New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral forms.” —On Photography [thx Rob]
There’s no getting around it:
If a friend is someone who laughs at our stories, then a good friend is one who enjoys them even the second time around. But anyone who gasps with delight on hearing a story for the third time is faking it.
Psychologists have long paid attention to varieties of memory: short-term, long-term, explicit (like for faces and vocabulary), implicit (like for driving skills), autobiographical memory, false memory, and source memory (ability to recall where a fact was learned).
But “destination memory?”
[T]hey have paid little, if any, attention to … destination memory: about whose ears information has landed on. While the source of remembered information can be crucially important (Did I read that in The Onion or the daily newspaper?), so is its destination. Our stories, our jokes, our gossip form an important part of our social identity, psychologists say. Repeating oneself is not only embarrassing; it can be damaging, for diplomats, liars or anyone else trying to guard secrets, personal or professional.
I immediately wondered how physical engagement might change the study. Would eye contact, facial expression, or physical contact affect destination memory? Would Erving Goffman’s face engagement, as defined back in the ‘60s, bring focus to the memory?
When two persons are mutually present and hence engaged together in some degree of unfocused interaction, the mutual proffering of civil inattention — a significant form of unfocused interaction — is not the only way they can relate to one another. They can proceed from there to engage one another in focused interaction, the unit of which I shall refer to as a face engagement or an encounter.
Emily Post, of course, had her own opinion on the dangers of repeating oneself, in Chapter VII of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, 1922:
Try not to repeat yourself; either by telling the same story again and again or by going back over details of your narrative that seemed especially to interest or amuse your hearer. Many things are of interest when briefly told and for the first time; nothing interests when too long dwelt upon; little interests that is told a second time.
Not quite steeped in scientific research. But then, she somewhat surprisingly, continues later with something quite profound:
Above all, stop and think what you are saying! This is really the first, last and only rule. If you “stop” you can’t chatter or expound or flounder ceaselessly, and if you think, you will find a topic and a manner of presenting your topic so that your neighbor will be interested rather than long-suffering.
Almost 90 years later, sound advice on remembering the destination.