Hugh Graham Creative

Riverside has been dying for a long time.

One of the first cemeteries in the american west designed as a park, with paths for carriages, and trees for shade, and roses, for a generation or so Riverside served as the resting place of the pillars of society, territorial governors and mayors and pioneers and publishers. It was filled with statuary and civil war heroes and abolitionists and shady characters and mothers who died in childbirth, and lots of children who died too young.

But it was downstream from the city, in an industrial area near the city of commerce, and it ended up on the wrong side of the tracks. Even before the Railway line came through, the wealthy had moved on to another part of town. Riverside was left to the working men and the working women, to immigrants and laborers and indigents.

And so there began a long, slow decline, the slow death of a place honoring the dead, exacerbated by the western thirst for water. It’s too far gone now, in many ways. Trees have died, and roses, and there will never again be kentucky blue grass between the graves. In the end, the old resting place will settle back into the dusty plains, as we’ll all settle into oblivion.

There is something profoundly human about the desire to immortalize ourselves with a mark in time. Perhaps it explains the creative impulse, the desire to say “I was here, now.” Or to commemorate a loved one with as generous a statement as you can afford.

In the early days of the american frontier, the cemetery was a primary form of expression, perhaps the only way for most people to say, I was here. I loved. I made my mark. And there is sadness in the realization that of all the monuments, each one for someone who lived and loved an died, so few stories survive.

There is an austere beauty to the prairie, and at Riverside it’s poignant given the location between the smelter and the refineries. It’s not a traditional beauty, not fecund and rich and fertile, but more elusive and fleeting and dry. Like the west, the prairie scene doesn’t give away it’s secrets. They are too valuable to waste on the unobservant.

Times change; the cemetery is no longer the tradition it once was. Burial is now the exception rather than the rule. Still, there’s something to looking to the past, something to gain from saving what’s left of this history.

For a while at least. Until oblivion.

Will.i.am of the black eyed peas produced this music video with the help of numerous musicians and hollywood types. The celebrity component is a bit superfluous (I’m not sure what Scarlett Johanssen is doing in there), but all in all it’s pretty compelling.

Tomorrow, I will be caucusing for Barack Obama.

Should designers work toward the end of aspirational consumer culture? Can the design industry, broadly defined, reposition and reinvent itself to provide value and sustainability while still creating desire?

When I was at Northwestern, I took some classes from a Professor of Philosophy, David Michael Levin, who once asked us whether having a choice was important in our lives. Specifically, he was asking about the difference between choice and the appearance of choice. For instance, he asked, is it important to be able to choose between Crest and Colgate?

I think of Professor Levin from time to time, and often when I’m walking down the personal care aisle of the supermarket. Looking at all the variations of toothpaste and related products (Whitestrips, anyone?), I wonder whether it’s possible that our society in general may have gone just a bit too far, and that the designers and product managers and marketers are spending too much of their creative resources on selling products with limited value and without any real differentiation.

I’m not arguing that there isn’t valuable product innovation going on, but I tend to doubt the big change involves one of the 50 swirly paste/gel combos on every American supermarket aisle. Think of the improved efficiencies we’ll see just as soon as all the rest of you realize that Tom’s of Maine Peppermint is plenty good enough for everyone.

Innovation, or Variation?

Okay, that’s probably not going to be happening any time soon. And, if there were only one kind of toothpaste, I’d likely never gotten the chance to try out Tom’s products, or the cool toothpaste that combines gel, paste, and some crazy sparkly bits. I do love the crazy sparkly bits.

I’m not recommending some sort of centralized control of the means of production; it wouldn’t work anyhow, not in the fast moving consumer goods market, and certainly not in the broader markets. But there’s still something decadent and even unethical about the way we sell the aspirational in consumer goods.

Of course, if people didn’t want it, we wouldn’t sell it, and the invisible hand of the market will ultimately level everything out, right? Well, maybe.

The toothpaste reference is pretty trivial, but it points to a bigger question about designer culture. Designer culture is still about the aspirational, and it’s well established in mainstream markets.

Rob Horning wrote an article on Pop Matters called The Design Imperative. In it, he considers both the historical underpinnings and the current nature of our consumer culture. Historically,

the consumer revolution depended on the sudden availability of things, which allowed ordinary people to buy ready-made objects that once were inherited or self-produced.

and in our current world,

We are consigned to communicating through design, but it’s an impoverished language that can only say one thing: “That’s cool.” Design ceases to serve our needs, and the superficial qualities of useful things end up cannibalizing their functionality.

The problem ultimately is that all this consumption fills some sort of void in our lives, at least temporarily. And by feeding the void in our lives, designers are providing the stimulus that keeps the modern economy moving.

It’s the economy, stupid

According to the news reports I’ve been reading, the economy of the United States has a pretty good chance of heading into a recession for most if not all of 2008. One of the primary causes, resulting in part from the rocking of the financial markets due to sub-prime lending, is decreased consumer spending. Consumer spending, which accounts for two thirds of economic activity, weakened in the month of December.

But for those of us who would like to see a decrease in consumption, is this necessarily bad news?

After the terrorist attacks in 2001, I remember being slightly horrified by Bush the 43rd admonishing the people of America to ‘go shopping’ to fight back against terrorism. Of course, there was an important idea in there somewhere, that we shouldn’t allow our lives to be controlled by a few fundamentalist wackos. But I found it hard to believe that a trip to wal-mart was the best way to fight back against Osama bin Laden. It’s a long way from the Victory Gardens our grandparents planted to help win World War II.

I was thinking about this when I came across an excellent article by Madeleine Bunting, published in the Guardian, called “Eat, drink and be miserable: the true cost of our addiction to shopping”.

As Ms. Bunting points out:

We have a political system built on economic growth as measured by gross domestic product, and that is driven by ever-rising consumer spending. Economic growth is needed to service public debt and pay for the welfare state. If people stopped shopping, the economy would ultimately collapse. No wonder, then, that one of the politicians’ tasks after a terrorist outrage is to reassure the public and urge them to keep shopping (as both George Bush and Ken Livingstone did). Advertising and marketing, huge sectors of the economy, are entirely devoted to ensuring that we keep shopping and that our children follow in our footsteps.

The question that I have been wrestling with regarding this question is how we can both decrease our rampant disposable consumerism while still continuing to have a reasonably robust economy. How am I supposed to continue pushing the economy forward while cutting my carbon footprint by 60 percent?

Happy Now?

In her article, Ms. Bunting discusses the work of Tim Kasser, an American Psychologist concerned with materialism, values, and goals. Kasser has created an aspirational index which helps to distinguish between two types of goals:

Extrinsic, materialistic goals (e.g., financial success, image, popularity) are those focused on attaining rewards and praise, and are usually means to some other end. Intrinsic goals (e.g., personal growth, affiliation, community feeling) are, in contrast, more focused on pursuits that are supportive of intrinsic need satisfaction.

According to Kasser, he would like to “help individuals and society move away from materialism & consumerism and towards more intrinsically satisfying pursuits that promote personal well-being, social justice, and ecological sustainability.”

Personally, I’m not quite sure where I fall on the Aspirational Index.

I try to be mindful of what I’m consuming, where it comes from, and where it ends up. Still, I have a couple pair of shoes that I bought on a whim, and a jacket I didn’t wear more than a few times. I don’t get a whole lot of joy out of going shopping, whether for clothes or anything else, but I’m sure there are many, many ways I could do more with less.

It occurs to me that there needs to be a new paradigm of consumption, one that will work for business, community, and environment. I don’t know what form this new paradigm will take, but I believe it has something to do with learning to appreciate the real value of things and their place in our world.

Designers have an opportunity to engage in this paradigm shift. Part of the story lies in creating products that have intrinsic and lasting value, products that I like to call artisanal. And part of the story lies in better communicating the value of the artisanal. I believe that designers have an ethical duty to work toward the end of disposable culture. Of course, this isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to happen in vacuum. But it is going to happen, whether we choose to be a part of the process or not. Better to engage the future rather than have it thrust upon us.

Toward a Moral Equivalent of Consumerism

The subtitle of Madeleine Bunting’s Guardian article is “Today it seems politically unpalatable, but soon the state will have to turn to rationing to halt hyper-frantic consumerism”. She speaks to the inevitability of changing our behaviors, and believes that the change will not happen without intervention from the state. Whether it is rationing, or taxes, or other means, the change, ultimately, will have to come.

But change is never easy or simple. In The Moral Equivalent of War (1906), William James explained the difficulties of advocating pacifism:

So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.

War, like consumer capitalism, offers a way of getting people motivated and organized. Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations”, argues that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest.” Self interest is a strong motivational force, and unless and until there is a “Moral Equivalent of Consumerism” it may well be impossible to create an alternative solution.

It will likely be necessary for government to engage in rationing or taxation to decrease our impact on the environment. But there is also an important component that should not be ignored, and one that can and should be engaged in by the designers of our products and communications. A new aspiration, perhaps focused on the intrinsic and self-transcendent as Tim Kasser explains. A aspiration toward what is valuable, an experience where less is truly more.

In “The Moral Equivalent of War”, James argues that:

Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy.

In seeking a moral equivalent of consumerism it is our challenge to use our capabilities to awaken the higher ranges of each person’s spiritual energy, and to produce objects and communications that are filled with value.

Should designers work toward the end of aspirational consumer culture? Ultimately, I’m not sure there is any other choice.

Hadley did this illustration for an article written by Sam Lipsyte and published by the New York Times. The article is called The Gift and it’s a tough read, but probably most appropriate during the time of year when we consider what really matters in our lives.

In the story, Sam recalls the time he spent caring for his mother as she was dying of cancer, and spends time expressing regret over the time he lost, and perhaps, in his own way, committing himself to caring more in the future.

I think hadley’s piece catches the sprit of this most precious realization, and beautifully ties it to shortest days of the year. Time is the most valuable gift any of us has, and what we do with that time is the most important choice any of us make.

Happy new year.

1. The Night Sky

Mankind is proceeding to envelope itself in a luminous fog
- Italian astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano

Kipple drives out nonkipple… No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick, 1968
(via 43 folders)

Pierantonio Cinzano’s 2001 atlas of artificial night sky brightness estimated that two-thirds of the U.S. population, and one-fifth of the world population, can no longer see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

Perhaps Cinzano’s luminous fog has been transported into our minds. In the connected world there is a wealth of information and a dearth of wisdom. In my own life I resist, more or less successfully, attraction and distraction from the latest email or blog or website or television show or other diversions, always rushing from virtual place-to-place, willy-nilly and busy-busy.

What is this luminous fog? The extraneous, the kipple (as described by Philip K. Dick), the extra bits of detritus that pile up and distract us from what matters. All those ways of filling the day, so much to be done, so many avenues to explore.

But how to keep the current in perspective with the important? How to balance the emerging with the essential? Which is kipple and which nonkipple? With limited time and energy, something has to go, and soon enough the latest episode of Project Runway replaces Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Soon enough the ephemeral stars of hollywood replace the dimming stars in the night sky.

2. The Daily News

I read the news most every morning. My newspapers come from all over the world, and are neatly segmented by my RSS news reader, netnewswire, into various categories. I get the headlines from the New York Times, and the BBC, and El Pais. I get design news from Core 77 and Unbeige, and Swiss Miss, and Web 2.0 updates from techcrunch and techmeme and boing boing and wired. Environmental news comes from worldchanging and open the future, words from the virtual thesaurus, and local info from denver infill and coloradopols.com and westword. And that’s only the beginning.

It comes through email too; I get news stories sent to me from friends and acquaintances; this past week Tim Roessler sent me a link about John Thackera, director of Doors of Perception. Mike Reddick sent a note about Open ID. Ed Hickok sent a news item on how kangaroo farts may help with global warming. All great news stories.

I have a friend, David Callaway, who is managing editor for Marketwatch.com, the online financial news service. Recently he wrote a column marking the tenth anniversary of Marketwatch where he argued that “Content isn’t king. News is king.” It may be king. But is it enough?

When I posed the question of of timeliness to a panel of design bloggers, including Alissa Walker of unbeige and Allan Chocinov of Core 77, at the AIGA Next conference in October, both Alissa and Allan stated their desire to be first, to get the scoop. As Liz Danzico said in her notes posted on unbeige, “if a day goes by, the topic is gone. So timing is everything.”

Absolutely vital and correct, if you’re in the news business, and perhaps if you are in the business of tracking the industry full-time. But for a casual reader seeking insights into what matters in the our world, it’s simply overwhelming. The pink noise of our environment drowns out all perspective.

Sure, RSS feeds offer some control, but what can be done about people like Tina at swissmiss or the crew at joshspear? These people are insane with all their postings. Clearly they is trying to ruin my life, condemning me to do nothing but click through a relentlessly updated directory of beautiful distractions. Something must be done.

3. Terminally Hip

The truth is that I really like staying up on what’s happening. I’m definitely not as hip as I was when I was younger – I like to think that the perspective of age offers some buffer to the slower synapses that accompany it – but I’m still reading and listening to music and following the arts and learning to use technology. This is a great world for the curious, but a confusing one too.

Our connected world provides a virtually unlimited number of information sources, and each has the potential to lead to any number of detours and distractions. Without self-discipline, days go by, and months, without measurable progress. Without clear focus, life devolves into little more than survival and self-deception.

Moments of self-awareness, and the discipline and drive that come with them, are followed by a confusing array of stimuli, carefully arranged to provide the delusion of progress. Meetings and emails and the last episode of extras and here comes another technical innovation or gadget or object or bit of news, perhaps containing a nugget of truth, with anxiety inducing consequences. What if I miss the next big thing? What if there is a wave coming, a tsunami, and this particular bit is its harbinger?

4. Something Must Be Done

The biggest question then, is how to prioritize without turning into some kind of militaristic asshole (with all due respect to the militaristic assholes out there). First of all, there have to be limits. And there has to be some sort of time management. So, here’s the plan:

I am working toward (but have not yet achieved) an empty email inbox (or inbox zero as they call it at 43 folders. In a perfect world, each email is looked at exactly once, then acted upon (responded to, filed, or deleted). Just like in the old days with real mail. Also, I’ve switched from checking email every ten minutes to every half an hour (though I sometimes check in between), and I sometimes turn off email when I’m working on a project. Currently I’m at 73 emails in my inbox. Hey, it’s progress.

News, blogs, RSS feeds, and the like are only checked at prescribed times during the day (first thing in the morning, with coffee), and meetings are only used when necessary (lunch). Objectives are prioritized, and what has to be done gets done (more or less) based on this plan. Meetings are designed for efficiency, and work is structured to allow for clear delineation between different projects. Feedback loops are encouraged, and iterative modeling and prototyping are applied with dizzying effect.

At least that’s the plan.

5. Learning to Listen

A little over a year ago on this site I mentioned a story I’d heard about Norman Schwarzkopf and how he handled time management. His approach focused on achieving the single most important thing he had to get done each day – after that everything else fell in place. There’s something to that idea, but it’s just one part of the puzzle.

In the past year I’ve posted about 90 articles on this site, roughly one every 4 days or so. Some are brief, some more considered. Some that I would have liked to have posted have disappeared from memory, and there are some that I wish I hadn’t wasted the bandwidth on. I’ve tried to be respectful in what I post, not adding to the noise of the world. It’s one person’s perspective, but at least it’s measured.

For me, seeing through the luminous fog has more to do with listening than talking. Taking the time not to rush through the day, really spending the time understanding an idea deeply, less quantity and more quality. The breathing, the stretching, the awareness of space and time.

It’s not the four hour work week, but it’s a start.

When the weather starts getting colder, there’s nothing better than some homemade onion soup. It requires chopping a lot of onions.

In “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius“, Dave Eggers talks about how best to chop an onion. I was never quite sure what method he and “Toph” decided was the best. I have my own way of chopping an onion, though probably not the best way. I nip off the top and the bottom skin, and then cut the onion in two pieces from top to bottom. After removing the remaining skin, I slice each half as thinly as possible from end to end. It works well enough.

Dave was just awarded one of the TED prizes for 2008, along with physicist Neil Turok and religious historian Karen Armstrong. Seems pretty well deserved, between his work with McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia, and the Voices of Witness oral history program. I don’t know if he still has much time for chopping onions. Hopefully so. Chopping onions is good for your soul.

When I was nine or ten years old, I used to watch the Galloping Gourmet (Graham Kerr) on TV. I don’t remember much of the show, except that he always seemed to have a good time and man could he chop onions. I couldn’t figure out how he chopped so fast without losing a finger.

According to (possibly apocryphal) stories, Jack Kerouac died while watching the Galloping Gourmet on television. It was 1969, he was 47 years old, and I was 8 or 9. Now it’s 2007, and I’m 47 years old. I like to think we were watching the program at the same time.

Now the onions make my eyes water. Maybe it’s the onions.

Onion and Potato Soup, based loosely off a recipe from Family Oven (which isn’t a half bad recipe site).

6 onions, sliced in your preferred way
4 cloves garlic, crushed
Olive oil
6 small or 3 medium potatoes, in small cubes
1 cup sherry
8 cups vegetable stock
Fresh thyme
Bay leaf
1 tsp. Paprika or other savory spice
salt, black pepper, red pepper, as desired

Using a heavy soup pot, sauté the onions over medium heat and until they are translucent. Add the garlic, spices, potatoes, and continue cooking and keep cooking until the potatoes soften.

The onions and potatoes will stick to the pot; just use a wooden spoon to stir the browned bits back in.

Add the sherry and deglaze the pan.

Add the stock and simmer for another half hour or so.

To make it a ‘french onion soup’ top with some gruyere and a crouton.

Eat.

I was talking to a couple of writer friends the other day, and they asked me about the value of blogging, and more specifically the value of blogging for writers. I mentioned that there had been an article on the subject on the visual thesaurus website.

It turns out that neither of my two writer friends had ever heard of the visual thesaurus. And that’s a shame. The visual thesaurus is one of the best websites in existence. It’s right up there with metacritic, which is high praise indeed. Though if you’re a writer, I’m not sure how valuable it is to know that Hot Fuzz got an 81 (personally, I thought it was pretty good but no “Shaun of the Dead”).

When thinkmap produced the first version of the visual thesaurus tool I thought it was cool, but a little toward the clever-but-not-so-useful end of the spectrum.

Since that time the site has expanded to include a rich and enjoyable set of regular features on writing, vocabulary, and the history of language. For instance, the word of the day theme for today is ‘big guns’, and the word is dreadnought. And there’s a great article in the language lounge on the be-words: Bewitched, Bedazzled, and Bewildered (and others).

jhh and I watched “Casino Royale” last week. The verdict? Daniel Craig makes a decent James Bond. The movie got incredibly boring once they started playing poker. And the opening scene was one of the best action sequences I’ve seen in a movie in a long time.

It turns out that the opening sequence is performed by a french fellow named Sébastien Foucan, in an activity he calls ‘freerunning’, and freerunning is similar to Parkour. All this is fleshed out in some detail in the April 16th issue of The New Yorker (No Obstacles, by Alec Wilkinson). The article meanders a bit, but (as reported on the westword blog) there is a substantial Colorado contingent of ‘traceurs’, led by Ryan Ford. This video shows some of the craziness, and there’s more on their website at coloradoparkour.com.

Friend and former denverite John Cuneo has a book out called nEuROTIC; It’s published by Fantagraphics, and is comprised of a collection of sketches from his notebooks. Of course, John’s notebooks are legendary; the content is unabashadly filthy, but what makes them compelling is the insight into John’s psyche.

There is a ’short interview’ with John up on the comics reporter site; he throws out props to his illustrator friends, including Tim Bower, Joe Ciardiello, Mark Ulricksen, and Jill Hadley Hooper (of course).

Give it a read if you are interested in learning more about John’s (twisted?) creative process and how he acts as glue for the illustration community. We had the chance to go up to Woodstock for John’s surprise 50th birthday in January, and it was amazing. One well-placed neutron bomb and the New Yorker would now be using photography for cover art.

What more could you want? This site has all the wisdom in the world, and provides a great way to waste an hour too.

I came across this site today called Basic Philosophy as I was doing some research (some days I do a lot of research). This one is a project done by a self-described ‘retired canadian former bridge-builder’ named Phil. It’s the history of philosophy wrapped in a dialectic hidden in an aphorism. More to the point, this page is a classic way to burn through a lunch hour.

Consider, for example, argument number 20 (out of 581):
______________________________

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

IS FRIENDSHIP THE HIGHEST LOVE?

You can’t love what you don’t know.

but

We only know someone through friendship. (St. Augustine)

and

The bond of companionship, both in marriage and friendship,
is conversation. (Oscar Wilde)

______________________________

Don’t like that one? Don’t worry, there are 580 more.

Phil’s biggest efforts seem to go into advocating for a universal basic income. He says the following:

Capitalism is based on the principle of competition. People must work hard in order to succeed. But many people, through no fault of their own, are ill-equipped to live in such a competitive world. If we think it wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, creed or colour, why do we tolerate economic discrimination on the basis of energy, academic aptitude, or the motivating desire for wealth? It’s up to the victims of our economy, and their sympathizers in the middle class, to point to the obvious injustice in much of modern economic practice, as well as to the historic change underway in the nature of work. Though it may be delayed the day is coming when our society will agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘Everybody should be guaranteed a decent basic income. A rich country…can well afford to keep everybody out of poverty.’

There’s something I like about this guy…