On Compost and Rose

Much of what my grandmother knew instinctively-- and taught us all instinctively--our culture suddenly realizes it must rediscover. She was not a naturalist or a flower-child, just a normal person, a normal woman of her era who understood where she fit in. Everything was a part of everything else. The compost fed the rose. She treated Nature in the same way that she treated people. They had their ups and downs, just like relationships with people do, but it was a relationship based on respect. That's just the way she thought, and how the people who had reared her had thought. Was she radical? No. Just measured--just related to her surroundings.

I recently came upon the work of Murray Bookchin, a wild-eyed eco-revolutionary of the Rachel Carson era. “The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital," said Bookchin. His argument was that most of the activities that consume energy and destroy the environment are senseless because they contribute little to quality of life and well being. Is this radical? Thought to be. So radical that these ideas split the American Green Movement right in half.

But the plunder of the spirit being tied to the plunder of the earth was completely obvious--wordlessly obvious-- to my grandmother, whose own grandfather (now we're going back to before the American Civil War) was known around Gaffney for letting a third of his land lie fallow every growing season. He didn't believe in using the new fertilizers, he didn't believe in beating the soil into submission and for this reason he missed out on a third more revenue every summer. Radically stick-in-the-mud? Or forward thinking?

Bookchin, the radical Marxist, said that the function of work is to legitimize, even create, hierarchy. He believed that understanding the transformation of organic into hierarchical societies is crucial to finding a way forward. I'd say that understanding that transformation is crucial to finding our way backward--back to the cyclic rather than the one-off, back to the sustainable rather than the pillaged-- back to the dreams of the lover rather than those of the rapist.

Goodbye to the Art Ball

Since the inception of design, the myth of the black-clad, chain-smoking, heavy drinking, overworked designer has been the Romantic ideal. Where I went to school, these slumped, hung-over, chain-smoking designers perched on studio stools all over the design building. We called them Art Balls. Gender didn't factor in. Sometimes a studio looked like it had been taken over by these black blobs with four metal legs.

Designers-- graphic, game, motion, apparel, architectural, or interior-- have amazingly sensitive antennae that pick up the smallest social indications about what they should act like, what they should emulate and how they want to be perceived. In response, they become semiotic semaphores, signaling their hipster-ness, their nonconformism, their sensitivity or, alternatively, their conservative modernism, their neo-modernism or their eclecticism through their clothing and their actions.

Is it a left-over pose from the myth of the Romantic Hero-- the wild-eyed painter swashing away at his "Liberty Leading the People?" Is it a feint at the garb of shamanism? At dividing oneself from the "average" person in order to retain mystic connection to powers greater than Self? Is it a hangover from the avant-garde of 100 years ago, a monk-like resistance to the luxury and lures of the comfortable bourgeoisie? Or is it the stance of the basement guitar hero who knows, deep inside, that no girls will ever scream for him?

Embracing and living the Art Ball life of chain-smoking, energy-drinks and alcohol may be a pleasant way to form an identity at 19, but if you're living that way at thirty you're going to have all the mental freshness of a Goodwill sofa. By 40 you'll be enjoying a Thorazine highball daily between managing hacking cough-spasms and auto-dialing your ex, begging for permission to see the kids. Rock stars don't need to come up with new ideas all the time. Like restaurant chefs, they perfect perhaps 40 standard recipes and spend their lives repeating them to different audiences. Not so the designer. Every pancake is a new pancake; every song a new song, sung once.

So here's an idea. Design could start to value the idea of the happy, balanced designer. I know. It sounds so wrong. The entire structure of design is against happiness and balance in its practitioners. What would we talk about if we didn't talk about how tired we were, how overworked, how busy, how stressed? Imagine knowing a designer that wasn't hurting himself in some way. Such a designer would turn the whole mythology of design on its head. Which needs to happen. Because, let's face it, if a designer does not understand what it takes to sustain Self and spirit, do you really want his taking on designing sustainable things? For sustainable things, at this point, are really the only interesting design things.

Sustainable design must start with teaching designers to sustain their own lives, their heart. It's time we say goodbye to the Art Ball.

More on the Place at the Table

I so appreciate the continuing comments on "Why No Place at the Table," which was mentioned by DesignObserver recently. Many of the comments I've received put the blame for American designers' being functionally illiterate squarely on the shoulders of the public school system.Two things come to my mind here.

First, I went to public school in California--Terra Linda High School: a big, sprawling place that, at the time I was there, enrolled more than 2000 students. I am sure that plenty of people came out of that school functionally illiterate. But if they took writing with Patrick Skinner, they came out writing well, no matter how poorly they had written when they came to his class. It takes one motivating teacher and one semester of weekly writing assignments to train a person to write well.

I'm not saying that that person will be "a writer," but she will know where to put a comma, when it is "it's" and when it is "its," and all the rules of writing that my students do not know. Like drawing, writing is a skill, and anyone can learn the basics.

Second, because a person did not learn to write in high school does not mean he is doomed to drag himself through his life as a designer not knowing how to argue on paper, nor does it mean that he wants to do so. As I said, learning to write takes one semester. Of all the students I have encountered, not one has told me that writing is unimportant. I have never had a student tell me that she is not interested in learning to write well. I have never had a student tell me writing is valueless. Most students look sheepish when they turn in their papers. They feel inadequate to the task. But they are not uninterested. In fact, they look a bit desperate for help.

Perhaps I run into especially motivated students. Or maybe they fear me and feign interest. ( I can hope.) But I think we do students a disservice when we assume that they do not want to write. I think we need to teach them. We need to expect it of them-- and of ourselves.

The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers from Around the Globe

I forgot to mention here that Stefan Bucher's new book is out. He and the publisher had a big party for it in L.A. but I had the flu and couldn't budge. This was annoying for I imagine that they did things right.

The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers From Around the Globe is the perfect present for your design friends this year. And add one in for yourself. Stefan's stringent editing and thought-through book design make this the object with which to collapse into a big leather chair after holiday preparations have taken their toll. The photos are so revivifying that soon you'll be humming "It's Cold Outside" and warming up the hot buttered rum.

Ernesto Aparicio on Design Competitions

"...Designers who win awards for edgy design they did for a friend's business-- with a print run of one hundred or something like that? They've got no art director, no creative director, no client's representative, no agency person. Where's the obstacle to good design there? But take something like a cheese. When I see a really good package for a cheese-- I know what that designer went through to get there. It makes me want to fall on my knees and kiss that designer's feet, that cheese."

Ernesto Aparicio

Douglass Scott: teacher sublime

When I was an undergrad, I had a professor ( Sr. Nicholas Maltman O.P., PhD.) who started each day by studying archaic Italian for a full hour. My uncle Nicholas Boratynski, held as the family genius, used to start his day at the office by solving a fresh mathematical problem posed to him by his colleagues.

Now I have found what I would do had I their perspicacity and mental drive. I would start each day first thing with a lecture by Douglass Scott. Hard to pull off, since he lives in Boston and I in Seattle. But worth it should one have the opportunity. Blows the carbon right out of the engine. All those gorgeous examples of type and image and color and texture, his deep knowledge and great love of his subject-- by each lecture's end you're ready to tear out the door and attack your own work.

In a design world so often dominated by "personalities," by people who can be harsh or patronizing about student efforts, Scott's dynamic yet even-keel approach makes a place where students can open up and absorb and create without risking life and limb. Of greater value hath no teacher.

More on Basel, Ornament, Complexity

"Ornament und Bildentwurf," (Ornament and Design Process) is the book created at the Imagelab Workshop at Basel where pattern and ornament and complexity were recently explored. If you can get your hands on it, it's really worth reading. Signals a big change. And may be a response to the interests of the students, a sort of bottom-up reverse osmosis. Which would also be a new thing at Basel.

Here's a quote by Orlando Budelacci, a contributor:

"Ornament is not only adornment, decorative accessory and luxurious decoration: above all, it is no crime."

The walls are closing in. Everything I know to be true is being challenged. I must lie down.