15.4.20 Lilas, Germinal, 228; I'm sorry, I don't know, I'll find out and quarantine cooking

Today we celebrate the lilac. There's not much to say this week. I've been beavering away (I also now know what a busy beaver is) at various bits and bobs.

A lot folks say they feel helpless amidst a landscape of grand projects, initiatives and ideas. Looking out on our own media plateau of designers, critics, digital artists and institutions I can empathise. Folks with the social capital to do live-streamed studio talks or big design investigations and interventions are helping us feel that we can do something to hold society together or even become more resilient while the medical scientists, doctors and nurses do the real hard work of keeping us alive. But some folks are just focussed on holding the everyday together.

So, increasingly, the moral position of these projects is rightly checked: Is it right to seize the opportunism of having (literally), captive audiences, intellectual and cultural capital and put it to your use? Is it right to insist that life won't go back to normal and society requires some sort of doctrinal redesign? Is it right to tell people they're existentially responding to crisis incorrectly? (That last one's an easy one.) I'm reminded a little bit of my old musings on Hirschman's Exit, Voice Loyalty as crisis responses; escaping to an alternative, speaking up and advocating change or sticking with it.

Hirschman's framework didn't really allow for just being in crisis. This is forgivable as it was mostly about commercial exchanges but is indicative of a need to categorise and critique response. It's interesting to see this shift a little bit in the media discourse; there's a call to be honest about the uncertainty and that the goalposts will shift and that we aren't ready.

I suspect we're in a sort of honeymoon of generosity; everything's new and challenging and feels powerful (remember 2008?). We've just been given the brief; it's tough and treacherous but there are possibilities, the rules of the Before World are more malleable; yet to ossify into a new pattern of exploitation that capitalises on the generosity of its cultural and creative actors. I hope it's just my cynicism and I hope there are some folks out there working out how to sustain this flurry of activity over the foreseeable future. But how long before some dark pattern-er at Instagram figures out how to turn all these livestreams into a new revenue stream. How long before some big tech firm starts IP trolling all these creative technologists developing open source worlds? We've already got tax breaks for millionaires and punitive abortion laws being pushed through while we're all locked away, why wouldn't you find a way to make money out of all this generosity?

Hell, maybe I'm too cynical. Maybe the network pattern will change, maybe it never ossifies.

My work ethic is centred on the idea that you have to do what's in front of you as best as possible. Most of that isn't glorious or tweetable or exciting. It's just responding to terrified folks with as much comfort as you can offer or finding out who to ask questions of, or making sure boring papaerwork is done so that folks can focus on more important things. Or just being honest that you don't know what will happen and owning that uncertainty. I've written 'I don't know, I'm sorry, but I'll find out' more than any other single sentence in the last few weeks. My busy beaver's own two states 'I don't know' - 'I'll find out.'

Ugh onto cheerier things. I will use some of this meagre platform to promote what other folks are up to a bit more explicitly. I've already been doing this on Instagram more. I love IG stories but do you think I should use the photos for more work stuff or keep with images I find pleasant?

• Fictional Journal are sharing reading lists from folks. Look at this lineup of champions: Tamar Shafrir, Sofia Pia, Matylda  Krzyowski. You'd be a fool not to. It's all available up on their Instagram. 
• Danah Abdullah has started a newsletter; the Pessoptimist. It promises to meter out cynicism which is very groovy. I'm still not turning this into a newsletter unless you tell me to.
• Live Talks From are still going with daily talks from graphic designers. Again, Instagram. 
• Another Instagram. Some very funny, very smart student at Central Saint Martins is putting together a regular flow of memes about student life; GCD memes.
• I missed Natalie Kane's call with Joanne McNeil last night on Dirty Furniture because I had calls of my own to do but they've been bringing together interesting people. Again. Instagram. (The gentle tinkle of financial opportunity.)

Channel Recommendation

And finally. I've been waiting to publish this one. Nat's What I Reckon is a newish small outfit of a comedian doing opinion pieces on various things but he's recently pivoted into cooking during quarantine and they're A+. As usual, hits my sweet spots, educational and entertaining but with a heavier emphasis on the entertaining. Check out how to make leek and potato soup and ' 'Don't be scared of Leeks, I know they look weird but they're just tall onions.'

Love you, bye.

1.4.20 13 Germinal 228; Moths add realism to anything.

Sorry, my French Republican calendar is in my office, where I obviously can't go so I'm having to use a crappy website to guestimate the date. I'm spending my days catching up with my reading and enjoying the peace. I guess it's the thing that's sort of still a bit socially unacceptable; I'm totally fine with social isolation and I'm getting so much done. I spent like a year once not talking to anyone and just playing World of Warcraft so a life behind screens is normal. I haven't been using Zoom (mostly because UAL favours Collaborate and Teams which both work perfectly well). It's sort of selfish of me I suppose to enjoy it. There's a lot of bombastic projects and happenings popping up all the time as folks out of their goodwill seize these times to try and make the best of it and us, especially as many are now in places where their futures look bleaker.

My day pretty much looks like; up at 7 for coffee and some morning exercise, sit in office all day reading, making notes, occasionally dropping in for meetings and bits of UAL work, hit the PlayStation around 5 or 6 (I'm playing Control which I suppose deserves more of a space to write up), cook dinner, eat it, watch YouTube, go to bed. It's great. Next week I'm going to start pulling together all the material for my PhD upgrade from the reading catching up I'm doing. This morning I want to re-do all the tags on my extensive Evernote library which has all the papers, articles and notes of the research in. Before I was going for really specific tags like 'Computation and imagination (future)' but then you get like one thing come up. I found Evernote has the ability to cross-reference so I can change that to three separate tags ('Computation', 'imagination' and 'future') and then just select all three for articles that feature all three. I've then got Mark Hansen's Fast Forward to take a crack at.

Channel Recommendation

Lazy Tutorials for lazy people by lazy people; Blender tutorials by Ian Hubert. There's twenty of them, they're each a minute long, they're pretty funny and they show you some neat technical and stylistic tricks in Blender. If you've got some experience in Blender you can probably use these, just pause them on screenshots to see what he's doing, I definitely got new stuff from them. Anyway, whole playlist is here and here's one about moths. 'Model a moth, moths are pure chaos so don't stress too much... But can we teach them to love?' Even if you're not into Blender they're nice ways of showing you what's possible with objectively quite simple techniques.



Love you, bye.

26.2.20 Violette, Ventôse, 228; Falling through Earth

Hi. This is a short missive. I know I didn't do one last week but time just ran away with me. My sleep pattern has become incredibly erratic. Some nights I get three or four hours sleep, some times I crash out at like 7pm and just sleep straight through 12 hours. A couple of years ago I tried to train myself to need less sleep and just couldn't; I am an 8 hour sleep person and know that the key to good sleep is regularity. This also means I'm trying to drink less, normally I'm out three or four nights a week and I need to cut that down to a maximum of two or at least not drink every night.

I'm just going to post some links up and ahve done with it this week. I haven't read anything (because of the sleep thing) and you already know about the thing on Friday with natalie at the V&A? I learned about the Royal Game of Ur the other day which I guess is the world's oldest and longest-played game. There's a video from Tom Scott here on how the rules were kind of reverse engineered from correspondence hundreds of years after its first engineering.

Channel Recommendation

I already recommended this so it's not necessarily new but here's Standup Maths showing you how it wold take exactly 42 minutes and 10 seconds to fall through any object with the density of Earth, no matter how far you fell through. So weird.


There are so many good science communication channels out there I wonder what design and art have been doing wrong. I suppose 99% Invisible is about as close as you can get to a genuinely accessible and popular thing but it's still an audio podcast about design and there's something about the production values that I sometimes don't like; it's too shiny. I like Standup Maths and others because it's just someone who's really excited about something talking to other people about ideas. Should I do a design vlog?

I've been assembling a list of axioms I go by. I find I have quite a well self-articulated ruleset on how and why I do things which makes my life quicker because I hate prevaricating and waiting.

13.2.20 Lièvre, Pluviôse, 228; Speculative design is still a thing and Warhammer is great.

What if Our World is Their Heaven?

I got around to pulling together the video from 'What if Our World is Their Heaven?' and uploaded it to Vimeo. I also stuck up some images and the text we used in the brief up on the Haunted Machines site. The whole workshop was based around the 'automated production and dissemination of images'; a phrase which, if you've spoken to me in the last month, you would have heard me use a lot. The talk here introduces some of the key ideas of the area and identifies some existing weak signals and indicators that could be used by the students to kick off their thinking.

Coming up

There's a quite a lot going on this month. Not least of which I'm doing a lot of actual teaching which is why this is a day late. I spent a while trying to pull together a Blender workshop for Eevee on Saturday but really couldn't find a way to make it do what I wanted it to do and do it in a way which was easily teachable. It's definitely really promising but at the moment there's just too many hoops to go through for an 'intro to Blender' class. 

Other than that is a bunch of speculative design stuff. I'm teaching MA Service Design students tomorrow with the old Critical Exploits and thanks to my old friend and colleague Radha Mistry have found myself on the jury for the Core 77 design awards for speculative design. The submission are open now until the end of March I think. It'll be interesting to see what people are playing with in the field. I suppose it's a field now.

On 28th February Natalie and I are presenting at Pre-histories and Futures of Machine Vision, an event put together by Joel McKim. Honestly I'm not 100% on what we're talking about yet but we've titled it 'What if Our World was Their Heaven?' again.

Channel recommendation – Warhammer and climate change

So I suppose the commonality about my viewing habits is I like watching people build things. Not in a Grand Designs way but in a really grounded craft-based way. The algorithm has pushed me recently into miniature painting which is very enjoyable to watch mostly for the remarkable amount of skill involved. Anyway, I came across Goobertown Hobbies and really like it. The guy has a good pace and voice in talking about what he's doing. However, about half way through he completely switches, turns out he's a biochemist and he wants to use his platform to engage people in talking about climate change. He talks in this one about becoming confident in who you are and what you believe – in his case that he likes Warhammer (which he was 'closeted' about for a long time) and is really concerned about the lack of public engagement with climate change. It's just a really lovely, non-aggressive, non-ranty way of calling for openness, honesty and meaningful conversation. Loved it. 

Ok. In the words of Mr Buckles: I love you. BYYYYEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

15.1.20 Chat, Nivose, 228; Time has Eaten Me Again but Maybe Some of This Content will Satisfy You.

Is knowledge always a product of its technical constraints? Donald Knuth’s precise mathematical description of the letter ‘S’ owes its existence to the switch to papyrus and wax that enabled early Latin scribes to make curved shapes. Without that switch from carving stones to marking paper; no s, no Knuth on mathematics of typography. So what knowledge was lost because some arbitrary technical decision or necessity was bypassed? You see, I was doing really well at finding time to read articles and do bits of writing in the morning until the first week back at my real job, now I am back to being exhausted and frenetic, unable to concentrate on a single thing.

Common Design Studio

I’ve spoken to some folks about this but I suppose since we got some money it’s worth going a bit public. With my colleague Eva Verhoeven, I’m going to be working on a big design education project this year – Common Design Studio. This is a follow-up to the Global Design Studio that itself was a follow up to Interact, an exchange programme between LCC and some Australian counterparts. Global Design Studio was an online project with 60 students from three institutions around the world all working together for ten days. We wrote up the results of Global Design Studio into a paper and identified that one of the missed opportunities of online projects like this is that they could be done cheaper by maximising the use of resources where they were plentiful and giving more access to others where they weren’t and that they have the possibility to connect folks who may not normally have access to the institution. As a result the Common Design Studio is a proposal for a completely free, open online design learning project run out of LCC that anyone with a phone can join. This makes it sound deceptively simple but there are already hurdles.

Because the project is committed to transparency and freedom we are documenting everything online totally openly. I’m currently using a Trello board for this purpose which you can get to here. It contains all the important documents and will be populated with meeting notes and discussions as the project evolves. I’m not sure if it’s the most suitable thing but it allows for anyone to drop in and check it out which is what we’re aiming for. If you want to help out or have any ideas or references please also shoot them over.

Reading

I decided I don’t like Vanished Kingdoms and stopped reading it. I like my history with a bit of allegory and, frankly, a bit of narrative and the thing was getting quite a slog to read through, for instance in the case of Aragon, over a thousand years of names of Kings and what they did. Also, I didn’t realise when picking it up (despite being on the cover) that it focuses exclusively on European history which I’m already pretty au fait with and I was hoping to learn more about places I didn’t know so much about.

So, beyond revisiting a bunch of design research for the PhD (Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, Cross’ Designerly Ways of Thinking, Frayling’s Research in Art and Design and Design Research Through Practice) I started to read A *New* Program for Graphic Design from David Reinfurt which so far has been brilliant. It's basically a book version of the lecture series and exercises he gives his students but all really well illustrated and paced. Because it's verbatim from a lecture it also has a conversational quality that makes it really engaging. I often thought that I should just write down my talks rather than try to be a smart writer and this one is winning me over. It's broken into three sections; Typography, Gestalt and Interface and these give a super interesting overview of histories and futures of design, computation, social change and psychology.

I also read On Nonscalability by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing recommended by Anab Jain. It gives a remarkably accessible history of the scalability project and its eclipsing of the possibilities of diversity. Tsing draws a logical equivalence between the idea of the ‘pixel’ and something she calls the ‘nonsocial landscape elements’ or, ‘nonsoels.’ These are discrete units that allow for scalability. In her example, slaves from Africa and sugarcane clones. I read Tsing’s book a year or two ago and this paper helpfully includes a short version of that as an example of nonscalability.

Channel Recommendation

I can't stop thinking about how good Disco Elysium was. I can't and won't play it again but a lot of the soundtrack is on YouTube. It was all done by British Sea Power and has a wonderful horrifying melancholy to it. There's very little spoken dialogue in the game so the music sticks with you most.