…and one stoopit little peeve

I’m sorry, but it drives me up the wall when people post stuff from Speedbird to del.icio.us and its ilk, and tag it “Web 2.0.” (Almost as bad: “usability.”)

For the record: I’ve never written a single word about “Web 2.0.” I’m not even sure, frankly, that I know what “Web 2.0″ means, but I know I haven’t written anything about it, either here or anywhere else. I don’t have all that much to say about the Web, period. It’s just not a domain of interest to me.

Please adjust your tags accordingly. ; . )

Five delights of the moment

- “Dot Dash,” Wire. For all its vaguely foreboding, crypto-Ballardian content, this 1978 single never fails to send me. A two-minute, twenty-five second vessel of irrepressible glee.

- A cup of Kimo Bean Company’s Kimo Primo on waking. 100% Kona Fancy. Yes.

- Jan Chipchase and Craig Mod routinely crank up the jealous by mentioning - in passing, yet! - dawn rides through an all-but-deserted Tokyo. I do have ways of fighting back, though: while it’s been too nasty here lately for me to countenance getting up and out that early, I have been spending a decent amount of time on my still-newish bike. Been really getting into the single-speed thing, too. I blame Mr. Migurski.

- These here Go stones. Black has that great matte-velvet texture, while White is cool and smooth. Satisfying to the touch and when played (and especially so at this price point). I’ll be writing more about how much I’ve been enjoying Go soon.

- Zak Smith’s series of “Drawings From Around the Time I Became a Porn Star,” which we discovered at the Armory Show last weekend. I think there were 139 of them? The closest description I can come up with is dystopian porn manga obsessively executed in ballpoint, and vaguely reminiscent of some of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s output. Not at all my usual cup of tea, but decadent in the best possible way.

Starbucked again

Howard Schultz throws down; Starbucks corporate confirms authenticity. At issue: does experience design scale?

Clip/Stamp: Folded, still unfolding

On to happier news.

Nurri and I squeaked in at the last minute to see the incredible Clip/Stamp/Fold show at Storefront, and dag but I’m glad we did.

Schematically, all the show consists of is a collection of architecture-themed “little magazines” produced between the early 1960s and the moment the last wave of post-’68 inspiration guttered out into exhaustion, dispersion, and corporate postmodernism at the dawn of the unlamented ’80s. That’s all it is. (Heh: “All.”)

Some artifacts just contain so much condensed becoming - even in reproduction, even in goofily appropriate hemispherical Plexiglas vitrines, even forty years down the line - that being exposed to them has the power to spin you silly, you know? I haven’t been this physically torqued up by a show since the original Archigram retrospective at Thread Waxing Space some ten years ago: I wanted to jump off the walls, tear holes in them, make new ones with the debris. Anything to give vent to that incandescent sense of possibility.

Why? Well, consider: in one rather ductile space, absorbed over the course of an hour: the object-oriented provocations of Internationale Situationiste and Clip-Kit. Metabolist stirrings, in Kenchiku Bunka. Architecture Principe, Paul Virilio’s first major platform. The Japanese ARCHITEXT and the Catalonian Arquitecturas Bis. Inevitably, Ron Herron’s redoubtable Walking City, striding jauntily from one cover to another. My beloved Whole Earth Catalog, finally considered in its most appropriate context as generator of specifically archisocial potential. Some of these are near-legendary objects of discourse and even veneration, others have remained obscure, but in varying proportions they all of them contain some of the essence of whatever it is that makes life worth living and cities worth citying.

My only analogies for what all this does to a body are musical ones. The Ramones playing London in ‘76, bringing the Word and setting fire to the long arc of homegrown British punkrock. The Velvet Underground (in Brian Eno’s famous and possibly apocryphal formulation, anyway) only ever selling a hundred records but instilling in every last one of those hundred punters the desire/necessity to start a band of their own.

You tend to forget what optimism looks like, feels like. Well there it was: splayed across Storefront’s walls, for all and any to see and to use. My tremendous respect and gratitute to everyone who made these ‘zines what they were in the first place, to everyone who saved them for a day they might plug into new configurations, and to those who gathered them that they might be discovered anew.

UPDATE: Yes: under the influence, variously, of a long immersion in digital mediation, of not enough caffeine, or of the aforementioned glee, I mistitled this entry “Click/Stamp/Fold,” and not once but twice. D’oh.

Gendered podium, gendered crowd

I ordinarily regard John Gruber of Daring Fireball as someone whose insight has its own unimpeachable authority. He knows what he’s talking about, he minces no words, and he suffers absolutely no fools: my kinda guy.

That’s why I’m so disappointed with this piece of arrant nonsense. The topic is the relatively pronounced lack of female voices at design conferences, which discrepancy Gruber feels is plausibly a “reflection of the disproportionate number of men who are interested and involved in this field.”

Well, that rather depends on what you mean by “this field,” John. If you’re strictly talking about Web nerdery, you may narrowly have something to stand on, and this is why I myself have something close to zero interest in events devoted to such. But have you been to a d-school lately?

I can’t imagine how an assertion that “an overwhelming percentage of the people in the tech/design/web field are men” would be supportable after even a cursory glance around any of the programs I’m familiar with, or for that matter the young design and development practices they feed into. Most days, in fact, my “this field” looks to be composed mostly of women, possessed of sound theoretical grounding and fearsomely talented at working with Flexinol, Arduino, Unix and CNC milling.

Without even breaking a sweat, I could name you fifteen such who know what they’re talking about, mince no words, and suffer no fools - in theory, you could compose an entire conference program with nothing but, and at least locally, the problem would be solved. It’s precisely that John defines - has the power to define - this field as a markup-babbling scrum of geeky XYs that strikes me as blind to reality on the ground. My “tech/design/web” space must almost by definition overlap his, somehow, but at the moment I’m having a hard time seeing just where and how.

I’ll admit that it’s more complicated than that. Last year I defended Mike Kuniavsky’s Sketching in Hardware against Anne Galloway’s similar charge of gender imbalance, because I was privy to Mike’s very early planning, I had seen the original list of invitees, and I know that the issue was of central concern to him. (If I recall correctly, too, Anne’s deeper issue was the more nuanced one that these conferences suffer from a lack of feminist perspectives, which isn’t something that’s necessarily remedied at the level of counting heads.)

In short - and lending some flesh to John Gruber’s otherwise weak assertion that “[i]t seems entirely possible that most of these conference organizers are making an effort at gender diversity” - I had seen that in the real world, even with the issue dead center on your radar, you could literally start out with a list that was 70% female and wind up with a 12:1 preponderance of men.

That would be a far stronger defense against the charge of gender imbalance in conference programming than the lame canard that the “audience” is disproportionately male. Would be, but for the fact that it stretches credulity to assert that this is what’s happening each and every time. It’s clearly not. So I can’t help but conclude that there isn’t really a valid argument in defense of the status quo, and for whatever reason, defending the status quo is what John seems to be doing.

My conclusion is flatly this: that some conference programmers, and more than some commentators - including a few who I otherwise respect enormously - simply don’t get it on this issue. What’s worse is that on some level many of those involved obviously do know there’s a problem, but for whatever reason feel personally attacked when anyone points this out. They react defensively, even dismissively; normally acute observers reach for the weakest and most discredited arguments in an attempt to justify something they deep down know is embarrassingly wrong. I’ve seen it happen more than once.

So. This isn’t about your feelings. There is a status quo, it’s problematic, and frankly it doesn’t deserve the efforts you devote to its defense. Again: this isn’t primarily about headcount. Resolving the situation to anyone’s satisfaction isn’t something that can or should be addressed by (men) inviting a wave of women to the podium, let alone by pandering to perceptions of “what women want.” It’s going to require people - mostly, in this case, male people - being willing to venture beyond the contours of their comfort zones, to rethink which voices they’re listening to. And to reconsider just who it is that they’re willing to grant the power to define their communities.

Verified in field

I’m happy to report that the Yoon presentation at GSAPP last night was everything I thought it would be and more. Notes and reactions forthcoming; for now, dig the metric shitload of pictures I took.

“Everything is permissible as long as it’s fantastic.”

BLDGBLOG on Carlo Mollino’s splendid Alpine monk’s hut, a repurposing of a derelict ski-lift relay station.

First thought: You know what? Lazenby was actually pretty good in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Second thought: Mollino’s off by a single word. The word he’s looking for is “…fabulous.”

Blooming the talk flower, part 2: J. Meejin Yoon

Going to see the way-multitalented Meejin Yoon speak tomorrow, details forthcoming. (Multi- doesn’t really seem adequate for someone whose ambitions sprawl across interactive fashion, lighting design/environmental architecture, and book design. She’s kinda my hero.)

H/t: The Varnelisator.

UPDATE: Talk kicks off tonight at 18.30 EST on the lower level of Columbia’s Avery Hall. See you there? Thanks, Derek.

Life Size: Blooming the talk flower

Wanna rave for a second about the stylish two-volume nonograph from The Living’s David Benjamin and Soo-In Yang, entitled Life Size volumes 1 & 2.

What I love about these slender books is that they instantiate what they document: a rapidly iterative, get-the-thought-out approach to design that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but never risks sloppiness for a moment.

One volume details the methodology Soo-In and David call “flash research,” which they define as an architectural research project with a budget under $1000 and a ninety-day timeline, expected to result in a fully functioning, 1:1 scale prototype. (The rigor is important.)

Where conventional projects proceed from idea to prototype by way of an intermediate series of drawings and rendering, flash research cuts to the chase: an immediate physical prototype, which is used to challenge and further develop the original idea. This is where our digital design and production tools have brought us, they seem to be saying, and what they now allow us to do.

Why not walk through the concept and kick its tires, if we can? This may not be a particularly earthshattering insight in, say, software development - Flickr is in eternal “gamma,” after all - but especially in a domain as besotten with the sexy rendering as architecture, it’s a fundamentally novel way of doing things.

The other book is a quirky but uniformly high-quality assembly of essays, case studies, and koans on the deeper resonances opened up by the flash research methodology, drawn from friends working in domains as heterogeneous as journalism, law, rock’n'roll, and space propulsion (!).

I’ll be honest: this is the kind of thing that usually annoys me, and which I tend to find self-indulgent and/or of comparatively little value. Maybe these guys just have really insightful friends, though, because Life Size is that rare case where the stories really do illuminate and help to get at the design issues, no matter how seemingly far afield they wander. (Another neat wrinkle: though they’re dubbed “1″ and “2″ for the convenience of a quantitative economy, neither volume is anywhere labelled as such. They exist in a gently reciprocal presupposition.)

They’re just suffused with humility, fearlessness, good ol’ punkrock DIY optimism, and the bouquet of laser-cut plywood - how could I not enjoy them? Highly recommended, as a package deal, for anyone whose creative work involves successive approximation to an imagined final product.

P.S. I love the way Life Size very appropriately deploys the phrase in the title, a Korean idiom for passing the time with good conversation. I’m very lucky to be able to say that David and Soo-In will be helping me bloom the talk flower at the 09 April Cooper Union talk. More details as available.

Backloggin’

(…with Karl Hungus.)

Material I have on my desktop, in various stages of completion:
- A relatively eagerly-awaited review of the A-bike microlight folder;
- Some notes from a presentation by Georges Amar of the RATP on the future of urban transportation;
- Maybe something about the closing of the American map;
- Thoughts about the terminal urban activity - scraping, not shopping;
- An appreciation of some of Hannes Wettstein’s watches for Ventura, including a long-term review of his v-Matic.
- A short piece on walkshed-scale activities.

But for the watch thing, these are all startlingly urbanist in focus. I guess I know what I’ve been thinking about for the last few months. At any rate, keep an eye peeled - I want to ship the bulk of these before my next bout of travel kicks in.

And we now know what that travel’s gonna look like, at least in part: I’ll be speaking at HCI2020 in Seville, Spain 14-15 Mar; the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, 27-29 Mar; keynoting Pervasive 2007 in Toronto 13-14 May and hopping straightaway on a plane to Paris to do the same at XTech the next day.

In between (i.e. “April,”), good god, it’d be nice to get some R&R. We’ll see what happens.