After my last post about crowd sourced design, I rather enjoyed Rob Walker’s Consumed article “Banana Democracy” here in today’s New York Times Magazine. The piece explores Chiquita’s public competition for designs for stickers on its bananas. Arising out of the popularity of a web-based design-your-own sticker tool (some 25,000 people took part, apparently), the company decided to extend it into a competition. Public voting on the 1,355 entries starts tomorrow.

Walker goes on to refer to the “pop” nature of this design framework. DJ Neff, the Chiquita art director for this campaign, is quoted as describing this as the creation of “a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic.” Walker, in turn, suggests that “A big part of being ‘pop’ anything these days is prodding the masses to participate directly.” It is this element of the crowd sourced design competition that makes me wonder about the authenticity of connections between the brand and its audience. My last post queried the ethical nature of these public design frameworks, but Walker identifies another aspect, which is the brand stewards’ desired enhancement of attachment and meaning between a brand and its audience through this sort of interactive contributory evolution. Read the rest of this entry »

The excellent WNYC radio station program, On the Media, recently aired the conversation here between host Bob Garfield and Michael Samson, the co-founder of crowdSPRING.com. The website is a crowd sourcing resource for designers and those seeking design services. The question, which Garfield explores, is whether this is putting established design businesses out of work and exploiting cheap labor or is it advancing the democratization of design, and many other fields of collaborative creativity? Read the rest of this entry »

The astonishing explosion of information in the age of the internet has supposedly sounded the death knell for traditional communication. Information has become democratized, so I’m told. Yet the paradox is that the more information we have, the less that we know. Or rather, the less that we truly know, compared to what we assert that we “know.”

The sacking of Shirley Sherrod, an employee at the US Department of Agriculture, arose out of a media storm that escalated from Andrew Breitbart’s conservative video blog post that was then picked up by Fox and turned into a major news story. The New York Times subsequently pointed out that the video was “misleading and highly edited.” That did not stop a rush to judgment; by Fox News anchors, politicos and, worse, The Secretary of Agriculture who fired Sherrod … then apologetically sought to rehire her once he realized his error.

What the Sherrod incident illustrates is that more information just means less knowledge by comparison. Democracy is now some XXX version of a Disney-like politics; the business of peddling gimmickry and talking head entertainment posing as expertise. How we shall miss journalistic greats like Daniel Schorr. How we miss newspapers that actually employ fact-checkers!

As we learn more about cognitive dissonance, it becomes clearer that we do not develop our beliefs out of a rational, considered review of the facts. We develop the facts according to our beliefs. And with so many beliefs being propagated on the internet, the facts are morphing into any number of interpretations. They are no longer facts, they are some sort of fiction. They are the new ficts.

I’ve been captivated by a blog from an old friend, Lawrence, who with his wife, Anna, works as an artist collaboration. They have been selected to take part in one of four Golden Threads Research Fellowship schemes organized by Delta Arts in England. The Research Fellowship is hosted in Denmark between June 17 – July 10 and, given the nature of Lawrence and Anna’s artistic collaboration, they have taken their two young children with them. They are recording their experiences on their blog: Golden Threads Denmark.

The fundamental nature of their artistic exploration is best explained by them:

Traveling and working as a family is going to be a major part of our experience of Golden Threads. In Copenhagen we have arranged to meet a number of artists who are parents. We have asked them to bring their children along to the meeting and to show us a space, a playground or park or square, which they use as a family. Alongside this playful use of space, we hope to be able to discuss with the artists how they balance parenting with making art, and how this experience effects their approach to their work.

This fascinating opportunity to examine the dynamics between family, the environment in which we live and our how we perceive art and beauty got me thinking: How do I embrace beauty and aesthetic appreciation in my day-to-day life and in my interactions with others? So often we drift through a quotidian existence, focused on tasks, duties, responsibilities and obligations. It can be hard to allow beauty in, or to pause and reflect upon it.

A few years ago in the Colorado mountains, Stan, a friend of mine, pulled his car up to the side of the road with a whoop of excitement. He jumped out, grabbed some gloves and proceeded to drag a deer skeleton, picked clean by scavengers, out of the roadside brush. He strapped it on to the roof and I spent the rest of the trip with the empty sockets of a deer looking at me through the sun roof. Odd? Yes. Oddly beautiful? Absolutely. It is not so much what Stan found to be beautiful, but that he is completely open to embracing unique, personal aesthetic experiences in his daily life.

What I am not talking about are those saccharine clichés exhorting us literally and metaphorically to take time to smell the roses. What I am wondering about is how to open my eyes to a daily life that recognizes the sublime, when all I usually perceive is the mundane.

How many times have days passed you by without any recognition of something beautiful? Worse yet, have you even recognized a lack of aesthetic wonder in your life or your interaction with your environment?

Gravestones are not typically viewed for their design innovation and appeal. They may evoke a sense of solemn reverence, inspire an interest in the life and times of the person being remembered or provoke a fascination in the passing of time and our mortality. They may even be a Wonder of the World, as the Egyptian Great Pyramid of Giza is. But in my favorite American cemetery you will find three examples of stunningly contemporary, unique personal headstones.

The gravestone above is for Walter Paepcke and is to be found marking his grave in Aspen, Colorado. Paepcke, a wealthy Chicago industrialist, is regarded by many as the founder of contemporary Aspen, including the Aspen Institute, Aspen Ski School and Aspen Music Festival and School. Among his most notable friends was acclaimed Bauhaus creative, Herbert Bayer. One of Bayer’s most visible contributions to Aspen was the design of the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Meadows Resort. As well as the building’s architecture, which evinces Bauhaus design principles, the grounds feature earthworks that add to the Bauhaus environment.

More memorable for me, however, are the grave marker designs that Bayer conceived for Walter Paepcke’s monolith, Bayer’s daughter, Julia’s geometric squares and the offset wedding cake style for his mother in law, Mina Loy. Loy herself was a fascinating woman having lived a life of astonishing Bohemian experiences, and deserved such an original, captivating headstone.

So, what design gravestone should I have? Will you submit some suggestions? I look forward with intrigued interest …

I will leave you with a few lines from a favorite poem by Rupert Brooke, to set the scene:

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.”