Bobulate

Calligraphy thinking

Peter Merholz raises new questions about the value of separating “business thinking” from “design thinking:

”[W]hat we must understand is that in this savagely complex world, we need to bring as broad a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to bear on whatever challenges we have in front of us. While it’s wise to question the supremacy of “business thinking,” shifting the focus only to “design thinking” will mean you’re missing out on countless possibilities.

Stretching the argument to the absurd “calligraphy thinking” of Steve Jobs made the case for me.

A philosophical inquiry into “fiasco”

The best definition of when a situation turns from mild “mishap” to more serious “disaster” to utter “fiasco” is still This American Life’s episode 61, Fiasco, aired in April 1997. Here Ira Glass and contributing editor Jack Hitt tell the story about a high school Peter Pan production, explaining when the audience turns from a forgiving one to one whose empathy dissipates. And thus, fiasco sets in.

What’s really interesting about a fiasco is that once it starts to tumble down, the audience wants to push it further along. Now, the reason they’re there is to chronicle these embarrassments.

The whole interview is worth listening to for an understanding of what happens when you leave the normal realm of mishap and cross the breakdown boundary.

The jump rope test

Tom Waits on how to tell whether your craft has become part of culture:

“What you want is for music to love you back. That’s why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. That one day … ” He coughs and regroups. “I used to imagine that making it in music – really making it in music – is if you’re an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That’s the ultimate. You’re in the culture.”

This is true not just of music, but of everything—design, math, science, art, food. If you’ve ever seen a stranger using the thing you made, the feeling is just the same.

Books furnish life

Roger Ebert on how books furnish his life:

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 best-seller by James Could Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read all the way through that year’s list of fiction best sellers and surfaced with a scowl. It and the other books on the list have been rendered obsolete, so that his essay is cruelly dated. But I remember reading the novel late, late into the night when I was 14, stirring restlessly with the desire to be by love possessed.

The ownership of unread books always reminds me of Umberto Eco’s “antilibrary” as explained in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan (emphasis mine):

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others  a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Or perhaps I’m just looking for an excuse to obtain more books.

Seeing yourself see

Beau Lotto on seeing yourself see:

Seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does but even at this simplest level, context is everything. Why is context everything? Because answering that question tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, who we are as a society.

He goes on in an interview with TED to describe how the seeing-yourself-see concept can apply to education and everyday life in an educational program called My School.

The aim of the education program is to create a curriculum in architecture grounded in the idea of seeing yourself see, emphasizing everything that the education system does — what we call the five Cs: compassion, choice, community, creativity and confidence. Seeing yourself see leads to these five Cs.

I like this guy.

Four-letter words

The four-letter word machine by artist D A Therrien.

The 4 LETTER WORD MACHINE, the first installation in the BEAUTIFUL LIGHT series, explores the purity of white light, the mystery of language, the precision of digital codes and the magic of 4 letters – A, C, G, T – representing the DNA code, and consequently, all known life.