Absurdity

"But above all, [youth] is a haste to live that borders on waste."

"There are races born for pride and life."

"The contrary of a civilized nation is a creative nation."

"To feel one's attachment to a certain region, one's love for a certain group of men, to kow that there is always a spot where one's heart will feel at peace - these are many certainties for a single human life."

"Everything that exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

I renewed my love for Albert Camus a couple of nights ago in the train, reading the essay he wrote "Summer in Algiers." I was without a pen, a found myself dog-earing the book (which I never do) to point to the beginnings of what I would have underlined, eventually resorting to underlinin with my fingernails, knowing how easily this kind of marking gets lost or the technique forgotten. But I couldn't just go on reading without putting some kind of mark in the book to show my enthusiasm. It is beautiful philosophy, existentialism, it sometimes seems bleak, and is commonly the philosophy of suicidal people, believing there is no meaning to life. But Camus' argues that this life is just so beautiful, there may be no meaning, but this life is so beautiful because of it.

This is where I stand. Life is just so damn beautiful, enjoy it!

Ode to Spencer

"The world fascinates me."

This has to be my favorite thing ever said in the history of mankind. My brother said this one day as a reasoning why he likes pretty much any christmas present he gets, and why he is so easy to shop for. He's the kind of guy you think of when you see that ever so cool, moderately useless gizmo sitting on the shelf.

He died two weeks after he said this, it's something I can appreciate because if he hadn't died, we wouldn't have spent hours and hours discussing him, and I would have never remembered that he said this. We had a great childhood together, and I can't regret anything about his life because I learned so much from him, it's actually difficult to talk about myself, my favorite things, and my interests without creating a connection to him, because he is such a big part of me.

So, now this will be my motto for life. To take his curiosity, and excitement about everything in the world, everything he taught me and keep it alive in myself.

Design for Life, and the Taxonomy of Experience

To design for an experience one must know it. The experience of using a personal timepiece.

The Design for Life project, run by a guest professor, Ian Coxon, from the University of Western Sydney, Australia, was my first project at KISD, and so far my favorite. The main goal was to choose an experience and study it so fully, to learn it's specific vocabulary, and intricacies, in order to better design for it. I chose to study the Experience of Using a Personal Timepiece. The course was focussed around philosophical concepts from Heidegger, and Gadamer, about how to understand and categorize experiences. From this philosopy Ian created a process which he called the Taxonomy of Experience.

The Process
We were first to experience our chosen experience ourselves, and document that experience as well as possible including as many nit-picky details as possible. I think I learned the most from this step, just inspecting my own behavior was very interesting to me. We were then to use our learned vocabulary for the experience to interview about, and inspect the experiences of others. This ended up for me being about 15 written pages of notes, and plenty of tiny scribbled notes all through my notebooks such as "the lecture no longer interests me, I check my watch." From these documentations we pulled out all the bits of the experience and categorized them under subsets of senses, positive/negative, cognitive, and emotional factors. This was quite a bit of work for me since I ended up with more than 1000 bits.
We then assigned each bit a theme, that was more specific, for example under Sense of Touch I used categories such as cold, heavy, and sweaty. Each bit was then interpretted, in order to document whatever information might be hidden behind the simple words of the text.
We then began narrowing down the information to the essential elements. Cutting my list down to 1/10 of what it was, cutting out overly repetitive elements, and things that did not seem to be essential to the experience.
The most difficult step came next, finding the extraordinary parts of the experience. We chose from the essential elements, the bits that had some surprising aspect to them. We were encouraged to leave behind information on form, and function, and to focus on only the super-ordinary aspects such as feelings, and philosophical ideas. We then gave each of these super-ordinary aspects a title, and sorted them accordingly. This led very quickly to the end product, about 4 words with which you could summarize the experience.
I was extremely excited and pleased to reach the end stage, after having droned through so many bits of information to finally have reached the nucleus of the experience. But I wasn't really surprised by any of the words I had found, because at that point I was so deep inside the experience that they all seemed so applicable to me.

5 Summarizing words
Emotional Attachment
People grow a huge personal attachment to their watch. First, because as a concept, it is a trusted source of information that is important to them. Second, as an object. The watch can represent something about it's past, such as it's former owner, or being a gift celebrating a big achievement. The watch can also become a symbol of you. Because it is a piece that you wear almost every day, it can come to represent your style, showing yourself through a piece of jewelry.

Coordination
Time has become a kind of grid work for the world, a fourth dimension. Just like streets, latitude, longitude and even country borders, are systems humans have created, and implemented to coordinate ourselves with the first 3 dimensions of the world. Watches and clocks are simply establishing a common framework to organize this fourth dimension. We use time to coordinate the flow of our day with those of the people in our society, in creating appointments, such as opening hours, friendly meetings, even train schedules. It's a way for us to coordinate our moments, and in doing so, consolidate our time so that we can get more done with what we have available.

Craving
The need for an answer to the question of "what time it is" can sometimes be very casual, and unimportant, but more often it is urgent, and pressing. It can control you, and cause stress and anxiety just by having the question in your head. This is the reason for having a wrist watch in the first place, a quick and simple satiation to our craving to know the time. It is always there, and can be depended on as a source of the necessary information.

Exactness
Because our own personal interpretation of lengths of time is so weak, the system of measuring and dividing common time has been set into place. The amazing thing about time is that according to our experience it is so inexact. 1 minute can seem to last a lifetime, and an hour can seem to fly by in just a couple minutes. I find it amazing that sometimes a 10 minute exactness is plenty, and at times it is necessary to be exact down to the fraction of a second. But the system of time is designed to function like this, dividable down to the second, every division of time is applicable to measuring different kinds of activities.

Homeostasis
One main aspect of using a personal timepiece is homeostasis. No matter what the form, be it carrying a personal watch, using a cell phone, or even outside sources for the time the user becomes acquainted to, and comfortable with this resource. This can be a physical comfort, in which the watch becomes like a part of the body. Or mental comfort, where you grow a dependance on the watch as a source for the time. After you have grown a homeostatic connecting with your watch an expectation grows, you expect for the watch to be there on your wrist, or not, depending on which side you are on. And when your expectations are wrong, it is always a bit of a surprise, sometimes good, and sometimes disappointing.


Making a Design
Finally we turned our results into a design. Because of time restraints we weren't supposed to make something practical, but more to capture the essence of the experience into a product, or design.

I based the concept for my final product, on the word craving. Quickly put, a watch is a way to strap our the satiation to our craving for time to our wrists. My product is then just a strap, with which one can strap their own personal craving to their wrist. The "cravings" shown in the example are more conceptual than practical, I found however that had I then studied what people currently "crave" a strap-on version of this could have been designed as a more practical application.

Things to add to the ends of words to make them automatically sound cool

-omatic
-omat
-tron

for example:
nerdtron
poopomatic
looseromat

Haha, I'm the postal drone

Core77 blog made a quick reference to one of their message board threads about what you did as a pre-designer. I was very amused to realize that he was talking about me when he said some of us had our former lives as postal drones... Very amusing. I kind of feel famous! Ha ha

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/yo_c77_board_alert_life_before_design_7589.asp

Baby Stroller

Wouldn't it be convenient to have a baby stroller that could lock up like a bicycle, The body could close up to make a kind of locker, or it could just fold and lock for storing on the streets.

CD Covers

A german friend of mine wanted me to share some American Rock music with him, so I picked him out some of my favorites but when I was done I had 4 hours of music, and only some of it was actually rock. So I cut it down to 2 cd's one of the full of almost purely american rock. And the other with a bunch of other songs that no-one knows about, but I love.

The best part was making the CD covers. For the Amerikanischer Rock CD, I played on the language difference, in German a rock is a skirt, so I did a picture of me wearing a true American rock for the cover. And on the inside wrote the song list, including not just the song title, and the band, but why I picked the song. When I went to print it out I ran into trouble - My printer was out of ink. But the result turned out pretty dang cool. Happy mistake (note: the file color was mostly brown).

I almost gave up in making a sleeve for the other one cause of the ink predicament, but I decided I can't have one with a really cool sleeve and the other with nothing, so I did it by hand. I took the liberty of using my in-the-process-of-being-developed-font, in a gold pencil. Which gives a nice subtle shiny effect, and then for the back, copied off from my person list writing/designing technique, by filling the whole page, and switching handwriting "fonts" constantly. I'm pretty pleased with the result, only problem is, I don't want to give it away now!


Front

Inside

Back

Front

Inside

Back

Getting through to them

"Although a message is recieved by an individual, the "room" is very crowded. Messages are designed and launched from a social and cultural stage full of actors. Even if one little message manages to best the competition and reach the ears or eyes of one individual, the person must understand, believe, weigh, and interpret the words and images in the context of her own personal, complex psychology."

Julia B. Corbet in "Communicating Nature"

Biomimicry

While visitng Goblin Valley, about a year and a half ago, I was enthralled by the rock forms, and the geological history of the site. The rocks were formed over thousands of years of rain fall, and wind which eroded the red sandstone. While hiking through one part, I could just imagine pools of water forming in the indentations, and little rivers running across the formations. And then I just wished it would rain, because it all looked like an elaborate, and incredibly enticing waterpark. Sliding through caves, over the bumpy landscape. If I ever design a waterpark this will be the concept for it. The red rocks of southern utah.

My Kind of Bookstore

I love bookstores, I feel at home seeing all of the books on the shelf, all kinds of information stored in the shelves. But at the same time I feel a bit uncomfortable because all the books are pristine, the books that aren't are the display books which have been leafed through, and looked at. But they are the books that don't get bought, and the pristine books beckon me to open their pages, but I feel guilty in making a sellable book into a non-sellable book just by looking through it. Many bookstores, probably first was Barnes and Noble have reading couches, and encourage you to stay and look at the books, but very few people do it, I think because of this sellable to non-sellable factor.

Another thing I love about books is used books, especially those with markings. I love that these books have a history in themselves, the person who read the book has put themselves into the book, and they have also been influenced by the ideas contained in the pages. Probably because I have such a great attachment to the books I read, and I assume that everyone else does too.

So what if bookstores were a mix, between library and bookstore. If you could open a book, and sit and read the whole book through, crack the spine, mark the pages and not feel guilty, but then buy a clean pristine copy of the book if you liked as well. There would be two parts then to my bookstore, not physically separate, but in concept, every book in the store would be accompanied by a readers edition. One you could sit with in the store and absorb. There would be cozy corners to sit in, coffee and tea to drink right there while you read. You could and would actually be encouraged to interact with the book, change it physically. Some might say if people can read the book in the store they won't buy it, but I think if you get the opportunity to change and be changed by a book you are more likely to buy it, because it has become a part of you.

I would love to have such a store, not just to create this new kind of environment, but to have the books that get read. Because the owner of the store would also be the owner of these most precious editions which hold the history of all their readers.

Weather, and Time

It was an amazing day in Cologne, quite untypical for this time of year, and you can see the people absorbing it in, because they know that it could be the last beautiful day for months. So when my roommate, Manuela, a geography major, invited me to go to the rhine to study, although I had nothing specific to study, I agreed to go along. At some point we stopped chatting and got working while we were sitting there in the shade near the river, and at some point broke the silence and said, "I just can't get my head around this," explaining " I know what the words say, but it's so incomprehensible." She began explaining the concept that some of the stars in our sky are thousands of light years away, so the fact that we can see them today means that they existed thousand of years ago. It is a huge concept, to imagine that something is so far away, and the travel of light which we assume as instantaneous, is slow enough that it can take thousands of years to arrive in our sight.

I think it's rather cool though, and I told her this, our sun, which on the universal scale can be taken as a representation for us, and the life on this earth. Because we live from the sun, and it feeds us. And we are (probably) the only living creatures growing from this sun. Our planet my very well end, life may end, and the planet may disintegrate. But in thousands or millions of years, there may be life living on a planet that is thousands or millions of lightyears away, they will see out star, our sun, and they may not know that it represents us, but it is still one way that we exist, essentially through these waves of light that it is sending off into the universe.

It's so huge, and hard to understand, and even explain. But that's the beauty of our life, that it is so tiny, but part of something so huge that we can't even understand it. So I told her this and I said "You know, don't feel bad that you can't understand your homework, because not being able to comprehend it is the beauty of the world. So your frustration, is actually why the world is so amazing.

Typefaces

I love typography, it was one the most evocative aspects of the design when I started my interest in it. Even before I was interested in design I have different fonts of handwriting and I was always (and still am) twisting and changing the shapes of the letters that I wrote. I was writing lists with different "fonts" for headers, and body copy.

But one of the interesting concept of typography, when you are designing with type you have another person's work within your design, the font design that they created has now become a part of your work, and will live on. I used to tell a then-boyfriend of mine that I want to design the next helvetica, and he (a non-designer) then forward called me the font nerd. He couldn't understand why I would want to design a font, although it is used all over the world, no-one knows who designed it, and you seem to be a non-entity once the font gets release to designers. But that is the key, your font lives on as your own, it's not important if people know who created it, because you are in the font, and every time your font is used, you are there on the page.

Childhood

I had a very magical childhood with my brother, I cannot count all of the playhouses we had, because we built so many, one in the attic of our garage, one dug out of the empty spot of land next to our house, and one built in a tree in an empty field about 15 minutes away from our house, that once we finished building, we never actually visited again. It's actually a funny story, I found out later that a friend of mine did play in that treehouse, and they never knew who built it, and were always worried that we would come back and kick them out.

I sometimes feel that now that I am grown up my apartment has become my playhouse, but it's not the same, it's just home, and the excitement of visiting in free time is lost. I would love to have an adult playhouse somewhere, where I could read, and enjoy myself, just get out of the house. In the book Walden I think that Henry David Thoreau got to this, and his playhouse, a cabin he built near Walden Pond, gave him the opportunity to inspect life, and escape from the buy more, and work more feelings of everyday life. He wrote the book during the experience and the insights and ideas he has in this playhouse is unbelievable, what could this do for me, or us as a people?

Loose Parts

The more loose parts a child has to play with, the more creative, and capable they are of problem solving. This is called the loose parts theory. It implies that the design of toys should allow for loose parts. This could be applied in two ways, first by making sets more complicated and extensive but because of recent, and very applicable movement of environmental design, one of the best things we can do is reduce. This is where the second application comes in, not making more things, but making things that are more compatible with what we already have. This idea was applied in my "Bildy" design, a fort building system which provides the tools for kids to build forts from found objects. In what other kind of toys could this be applied, perhaps on a smaller scale?

It amazed me when inspecting my own childhood, that I don't remember a lot of specific toys being used for their functions, we used everyday things to build bigger world, to create the toys we wanted. We didn't even need toys really, but just the freedom to play with everything in the house.

Who is this man?

I love the mystery that I associate with this image. I found it on the dirty, dust covered stairs up the attic of my last apartment building where lines are hung for drying clothes. I love his smile, and his face, his beard, his outfit. I think this picture must be important to someone, and wonder who, and what story lies behind this picture, what kind of personality is locked into the emulsion of the photograph?

Beautiful Map

I found this map at the Cologne Flea Market, I love way the different colors are made out of few inks by cross-hatching, and the hand-lettered names. It's printed on a beautiful thin tissue-like paper, it's an absolutely beautiful piece of paper.

Designer Nachos

This is one of those moments when you think "Hey I'm a designer, I've got a solution for this!" I was making nachos, and trying to make sure I got cheese on every chip.

The power of previous owners

"This bracelet exchange was not motivated by desire for fine jewelry; it was an expression of allegiance; a way of giving shape and substance to the intersection of three kindred women. My bracelet grounds me in an invisible social firmament, where Irene and Irma are stars in the constellations of descent and affinity. I fel their reassuring presence when the weight of the bracelet is on my wrist and I understand what it means to wear your wealth."

an essay by Irene Castle McLaughlin in "Evocative Objects Things We Think With"

Obsessed

"I enjoyed my work but something was missing. I didn't feel the same level of intellectual excitement that I had in college. I had lost contact with my obsession. I began to recognize the importance of having obsessions."
Mitchel Resnick in his essay Stars for th book "Evocative Objects Things We Think With"

I think obsessions are extremely important, that's why I'm building this blog, and website, to help myself become curious, creative, and obsessed with design again. But the problem with obsessions is that they are so easy to lose when we "grow up" and start working in the real world. Part of the reason we become obsessed is because we want to learn a lot about a specific topic, and frankly, once we get into a field we know enough not to need to be curious anymore.

Foreigners

"If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners."
Julia Kristeva "Strangers to Ourselves"

If we can at times do things that surprise us, and have feelings that seem uncharacteristic for us, then we can better understand the actions and feelings of those who are different than us. This could be the key concept to erradicating hate, but the problem is, uncharacteristic actions or feelings aren't something you can force on a person. But it may be interesting to design a campaign around this concept, to help people who have had "foreign" feelings understand it in this way.