Art That Makes You Think

I ran across this quote on John Massengale's blog (New Urbanist architect). He's commenting on the waterfall art installation in NYC.

Eliasson Waterfall at Brooklyn Bridge from rsguskind on Vimeo.

He says, "Art like this is supposed to make you 'think.' I don't think it makes you think anything worth thinking. I wish art schools would go back to teaching the transcendent power of beauty."

Heads up: teaching the transcendent power of beauty, in fact, has migrated to industrial design. It did this midway through the twentieth century. Case in point: Eva Zeisel.

Eva was the first to teach an industrial design approach (design for mass production) for tableware at Pratt in the late 30s. Here she is, above left, with some of her students' work. She arranged for them to design products for the Bay Ridge pottery in New Jersey. The dish on the right is from her "Classic Century" pattern—a combination of two of her most popular designs, "Tomorrow's Classic" and "Century"—now sold by Crate and Barrel.

When she visited Art Center in the 90s, Eva took a tour of our gallery. On the wall in the fine art side was, if I remember, a large crucifix made of what looked like scrap wood. There was also a structure the size of a small hut, built of the same sort of wood. Zeisel is an opinionated woman. She stopped dead in her tracks and demanded an explanation. I told her that I didn't think I had one. I could only observe that it seemed to me that creating something that was accessible, something that an average viewer would find beautiful, was now forbidden in fine art.

Zeisel stood near a display of orange juice squeezers. They were designed by early-term industrial design students in beautiful, curvilinear shapes and vibrant colors. She wondered why it was that here [with a wave of her hand taking in the ID side of the gallery] where there are so many limitations—constraints of technology, function, user need and business realities—was where the beauty lay, and not there [in the fine art gallery] where there were no constraints.

As she has said to me more than once, "That's a very good question!"

The Origins of Kawaii

I have figured out why the Japanese are masters of "Kawaii," or cuteness. Their cats have bigger eyes than ours do. Case in point, above. This is one of Junku's cats, made famous on his hit Flickr set, "Airborne Cats." To quote the photographer, "Junku's five daughters, Rika, Hime, Fuwari, Kin, and Nana jump gracefully, feverishly, and lovably. Their dancing surely makes you feel happy." If you haven't checked this amazing set of photos out, please do. It's time. This Flickr set does indeed, as they say, "make laugh and surprise to the world." And yes, there is a book.

An Ethnographic Interview Primer

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

The Illinois Institute of Technology's Gabe Biller and Kristy Scovel have created a nice introductory video on how to conduct an ethnographic interview. It features Dori Tunstall, who teaches a course called Design Ethnography at the University of Illinois Chicago and Colleen Murray of Jump Associates, along with a host of IIT folks. It's a job well done and well worth watching.

Inclusive Design Toolkit

The i~design research team has developed an Inclusive Design Toolkit, as they say it, "to support designers and those involved in product development, as well as providing a general guide to inclusive design for businesses." This is an image from one of the Impairment Simulators, empathy tools that simulate common vision and hearing impairments, in this case showing the effect of Retinitis Pigmentosa on a consumer's ability to use a vending machine interface. There is an impressive set of resources for product strategy, categorization of users, task analysis and evaluation, for designers and product development managers alike.

Dirt: Matter Out of Place

Dirt, as defined by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, is “matter out of place.” Soil in the garden is "in place," but on the kitchen floor is "out of place," and therefore "dirty." I find this a fascinating topic. When we examine what it is that makes matter “out of place” in a particular culture, we learn more about that culture and its world view.

Take, for example, the clothes in this photo: two pair of pants lying on the sidewalk outside a drug store. There is no one nearby who might be their owner. The clothes are worn, so much so that some might call them rags. Others, however, might see these clothes as still quite wearable, despite the frayed edges and holes. In fact, in the context of a high-priced clothing store, the denim jeans might fetch an exorbitant price.

Here are two pairs of jeans, sold in stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Nieman Marcus. The well-worn pair sells for over $300 and the "lightly distressed" pair is $540. In the experience of West LA culture, women and men spend quite a bit of money for “artfully” worn-out jeans. In their perception, jeans  in this context are worth a great deal.

But not the jeans on the sidewalk. These, because they are abandoned on a curb and not hanging on a hangar in Bergdorf's, are most likely perceived as suspect, associated with societal outliers—the homeless who might have abandoned them there. They might belong to people that West LA culture defines as “out of place,” and so the clothes themselves are out of place. They are dirt. 

But wait—there's more!

Those expensive jeans are "distressed" in factories like this one in Tehuacán, Mexico, which artificially wear the fabric with sandpaper and other abrasives, and bleach them with potassium permanganate.

The untreated waste water is sent directly into an irrigation canal used by local farmers. 

"As well as being blue, it burns the seedlings and sterilises the earth," says one of the local farmers, interviewed by the Guardian's Jo Tuckman, in an article published in August, 2007.

Jeans on a sidewalk; jeans in a store. Jeans in a clandestine Mexican sweatshop; blue waste burning a farmer's field. Dirt: matter out of place. A window into our culture.

Information Revolution

Another great digital ethnography from Michael Wesch at Kansas State University. As he puts it, "This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information." What skills do we need now and in the future to, as Wesch puts it, "harness, evaluate, and create information effectively"?

David Macaulay

David Macaulay has been working on a new book. He gave us a guided tour at Art Center's Serious Play conference a couple of weeks ago. It's another book about how things are built / how things work, but this time it's about the human body. I loved the gentle Prismacolor shading in some of the drawings. From top to bottom, conquering the ascent of the nose, of course, the stomach and intestinal system (complete with trucks hauling away the waste), and finally, the bottom end of the spinal cord being lowered into place in the pelvis. This one promises to be another delight.