.
I just received an e-mail from Daniel Schutzsmith, a design colleague and “web nerd” who I first met at FITC in Toronto in 2007 (we did a video interview together there early one morning which still shows up on Vimeo). Daniel has just created an effective viral piece at http://instantoilspill.com that exhibits “the same disregard for the environment (albeit virtual) that big oil does every day! Why should they have all the fun?”

Create an OIL SPILL on any website! Visit this link, then simply enter the web address of whatever site you’d like to contaminate and watch the spill happen…

Via Ads of the World, here.

Winnipeg, Canada

I’ve always been interested in the oral narratives that are passed on from one generation to another. The launch of INDIGO’s Mother Tongue project provided incentive to begin a series of graphic “copyfree” posters featuring such stories as told by First Peoples. Above are the first two pieces: Two Wolves features the well-known Cherokee tale of the battle between good and evil as told by an elder to his grandson; Turtle includes the Anishinaabe story of how the turtle got its shell, and passes on the knowledge of the 13 large moons and 28 smaller segments that appear on the back of every turtle (many First Nations descendants are taught that the turtle shell represents the perfect depiction of the lunar year—I learned of this from one of our Aboriginal clients).

You can read the stories (or download, distribute, or print these posters) here: Two Wolves (1.2 MB PDF); Turtle (1.3 MB PDF). I’d encourage other designers to make your own contribution to the INDIGO Mother Tongue initiative—you can access the submission information here.

Thanks to Adrian J. K. Shum for your assistance. Credit for the wolf images goes to www.firstpeople.us

On mountains, everywhere

This past weekend, Ev and I enjoyed a short sortie with the Westie out to Riding Mountain National Park to take in the latest of her Manitoba Crafts Council show openings in Wasagaming. We spent a delightful dinner and overnight with old friends Celes and Sue Davar (Celes and I were both partners in Praxis Photographic Workshops some 20 years ago; he now runs Earth Rhythms—Sue is a remarkably talented potter and book-maker, and a longstanding friend of Ev’s). During the course of our conversation, Celes asked me whether I had noticed melt-back on glaciers in the Canadian Rockies in recent years (which of course I have, quite visibly in places like the Columbia Icefield). So it seemed more than a little coincidental that David Breashears’ latest documentary initiative would cross my desk today…

Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya showcases the work of photographer and mountaineer David Breashears, who with Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP), has retraced the steps of renowned mountain photographers of the past century to recapture images of these mountains and their glaciers from exactly the same vantage points. Rivers of Ice displays his recent photographs alongside the corresponding historic images, revealing the alarming loss in ice mass that has taken place over the intervening years. Visit the website (reports, videos, comparative photographs) here.

Above images: Graphic evidence of the loss of glacier mass between 1921 and 2007; the dotted line shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier’s height in 1921, while this 2007 photo freveals a loss of 320 vertical feet (nearly 100m) in ice mass since George Mallory took the same photograph in 1921; the tiny climber (upper right corner) gives scale to the remaining ice pinnacles.

Well worth watching (here), trust me…

The brilliant folks at cognitivemedia took 10 minutes of David Harvey’s marxist analysis of the financial crisis and created this entertaining information visualization. Wow!

Found on Social Design Notes.

Hard to argue with and also in keeping with the heuristic Occam’s razor…

Thanks to Icograda Friend Frederick Burbach for this design quotable today…

Montreal, Canada

Language is not only a product of human life—it is a pre-requisite that humans require to form relationships. As a fundamental form of expression, language binds us together.

But not all languages are spoken. A language can be visual—made up of complex ideas of truth deeply rooted in symbols, custom and imagery. Mother Tongue is about the power of language—verbal and visual, formal and informal. First language. Native language. It honours languages at risk of being lost in our globalising society and those that have survived the forces of colonisation.

Mother Tongue is a healing process—stimulating creative dialogue between indigenous and non-indigenous designers, students of design, poets and writers. Mother Tongue celebrates that underlying our languages, we are the same after all.

Mother Tongue also offers a forum for non-indigenous designers to respond to the position that indigenous language iconography, process and design knowledge can and should play an integral role in contemporary design.

Mother Tongue is a cross-cultural platform to open discussion around the role of contemporary indigenous design. It encourages collaborative projects that deepen our understanding of people’s culture in our visual world of this 21 century. Claude Levi-Strauss said that no one culture is more advanced than another, each is unique and there is much to learn from everyone.

“We need a culture shift. Can design reconcile differences? Does it hold this power? If design has the power to market products and services that make consumers consume, then I am sure it can. Let’s begin a journey of understanding—fostering a new respect for life, nature and the natural world. Let’s value the principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity and kinship.”

—David Lancashire, Melbourne, Australia (from the Mother Tongue brief)

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INDIGO, the International Indigenous Design Network, has launched Mother Tongue, an innovative online exhibition that seeks to capture the power of language—verbal and visual, formal and informal. Intended to stimulate creative dialogue, Mother Tongue offers designers a forum to respond to the position that indigenous language iconography, process and design knowledge can and should play an integral role in contemporary design. This cross-cultural platform will honour languages at risk and encourage collaborative projects that deepen our understanding of people’s culture in our visual world of this 21st century.

Mother Tongue is an open, multi-disciplinary, online exhibition. You may submit multiple entries, but each submission must be a single piece. The form of response is yours to determine—a poster, a photograph, a poem, a product, a piece of architecture— that interprets the spirit of Mother Tongue.

Visit the Mother Tongue project page here. Download the Mother Tongue brief (484 KB PDF) here.

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Imagery: 1907 photograph of an Inuit/Inupiat woman; James Evans’ Cree syllabary developed in Norway House, Manitoba in 1841 (as a blend of Devangari script from India and the phonetic Pitman Shorthand from Britain)—this syllabary was later adapted by Edmund Peck to form the basis for the modern Inuktitut writing system.

Lisbon, Portugal

Today’s issue of Público, Portugal’s daily national newspaper, includes an article by journalist Maria João Lopes, who interviewed me last month in Caldas da Rainha. Maria has collated our pleasant hour-long conversation (sitting in the cool shade of the trees at the ESAD/CR* campus) into a portrait of “the Portuguese persona,” as well as conveying my call to those in the design professions to make a stronger case (with business, with government) re: the powerful role that design can play in shaping culture, improving the quality of everyday life, and creating a better and more sustainable future.

Thanks for your interest, Maria!

You can view or download a screen-resolution PDF (62 KB) of the newspaper article here… if you do, I hope your Portuguese is better than mine.

* My visit to ESAD/CR (which prompted the Público interview) was triggered by the feature article about Portuguese graphic design that I wrote recently for Communication Arts magazine (1.1 MB PDF) here.

The woods of Eastern Manitoba, Canada

In December 1973, at the age of 19, I stepped off a plane into the bitterly cold darkness in Winnipeg, Canada—the temperature was below -30 degrees, cold enough to freeze your breath. While driving across the flat, frozen prairie the next day I experienced the incredible power of the sun beating down from an impossibly clear blue sky—this seeming contradiction between hot and cold made an unforgettable impression on me.

In the following months, I was amazed to discover that almost no-one was building solar-heated structures in this part of the world, seemingly missing the obvious connection between predictable need (for warmth every winter) and ongoing opportunity (a sustainable, clean, endless source of free energy). An AOPEC oil embargo and “energy crisis” was in full swing, the price of fossil fuels was soaring, and futurists were predicting dire consequences for our planet if wasteful consumer attitudes and habits were not curbed. Having been exposed to recent eco-activism in Germany by the precursor to today’s Greens (their efforts to mitigate acid rain and pollution in particular) and seeing how environmental consciousness was gathering momentum in North America as well, it was clear to me that new solutions were called for.

I had been raised and schooled in densely populated urban environments in Germany in Switzerland (accustomed to overcast grey winter skies and smog), followed by a rain-soaked year of college in the U.K.—where I had met my future wife (a small-town girl from the Canadian prairies), ultimately the reason for my leaving Europe.

I had always loved the outdoors and nature, though growing up in cities, this mostly meant visiting groomed parks, weekend bike rides along paved trails, and family camping in summertime (albeit in crowded campgrounds only meters away from the next vacationers). Arriving in the Canadian west, I had landed in a vast frontier, on the very doorstep of untrammeled natural wilderness. Manitoba (a province seven times the size of Portugal but with a human population of just over a million) offered endless virgin forestland and more than 100,000 unspoiled freshwater lakes.

Nature quickly became a dominant force in my life. My wife’s brother, an avid outdoorsman, bow-hunter, and professional taxidermist, taught me survival skills and how to hunt and fish. I bought a canoe, and began “living for the weekends,” spending every available opportunity exploring what Nature had to offer and immersing myself in the compelling quietude that lay beyond where the roads ended. I photographed the four seasons, painted landscapes, illustrated wildlife, and soaked in whatever literature on natural history and ecology I could lay my hands on.

During the next few years, a clear plan took shape. I was passionate about conservation and environmental ethics, and committed to living as simply and sustainably as possible. I dreamed of living in the woods and in close harmony with nature. Having observed how poorly conventional Canadian housing performed given the dramatic seasonal temperature changes (with minimal insulation, therefore requiring constant heating in winter and air-conditioning in summer) I was convinced that low-energy solutions were critical. And of course, the ongoing opportunity of a free solar heat source was just too compelling to pass up.

My own limited financial means, in concert with discouraging conversations with local architects and builders (who mostly expressed resistance to new ideas) made it clear to me that designing and building a sustainable home would become a “do-it-yourself” project. The fact that I was insomniac at the time offered the opportunity for night-time reading, research, and planning. I undertook an extensive literature search of solar and “vernacular” architecture (this was 20 years before Google searches), and I attended meetings of the Solar Energy Society (mostly nerdy engineers enamored with active solar collection and distribution systems). I hungrily absorbed research results from whatever experimental housing was taking place (e.g. the Saskatchewan Conservation House built in 1977 had achieved a 90% energy-use reduction, which I found particularly inspiring). I volunteered my time to help build a few barns, and through this hands-on process, learned basic construction techniques.

In 1979, the opportunity to buy 40 acres (approximately 20 mid-sized soccer fields) of virgin woodland just off the edge of the prairie presented itself—heavily forested sand and gravel ridges that had once comprised the shores of ancient Lake Agassiz, a massive body of water that covered much of western Canada after the glaciers of the last ice age receded. During the first fall and winter, my wife and I carefully cut trees for a road and small clearing. At sunny noon on 21 December (the winter solstice) I sat in the snow in the exact spot where Solace House would later be built, and observed with joy that the sun-angles (over the tops of the deciduous trees) were exactly as predicted. (I should note here that this is not “rocket science.” Thanks to the 23.5 ° tilt of the earth’s axis, the total difference in sun angle for any location on earth during a one-year period is 47 °—a fact taken into account by humans designing solar-power-enhanced shelter for thousands of years).

Building materials were delivered to the wooded site when the snow melted in late April 1980, and thanks to Herculean efforts, my wife and I (often aided on weekends by enthusiastic friends and extended family members) had completed the enclosed structure by July—though putting in windows, building staircases, installing plumbing and electrical, and finishing the interior would stretch out for more than another year.

I have now spent nearly 30 years living here in the woods in the low-energy, passive solar house I designed and built. The energy-saving efforts invested paid off very quickly, as the well-sealed and heavily insulated home is comfortable year-round and requires only about 15% of the annual energy needs of a conventional Canadian home—in fact, the home is so efficient, that no natural gas, oil-powered, or electrical furnace is required for space heating!

I still derive great joy sitting on the warm concrete lower-level floor in the bright sunshine of a clear, -35-degree day. Living here has gone a long way to fulfilling my goals of being close to nature, living simply, acting wisely, and sharing with others—and I’m pleased to say that many other conservation homes and passive-solar-heated homes have been inspired by my little housing/living experiment.

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I recently wrote and illustrated this article for EASI magazine (published by Escola das Artes | Som e Imagem, Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto). I’m sharing the piece here in the interest of promoting sustainable living and the use of passive solar architectural practices.

View or download an enlarged PDF (2.8 MB) of the three illustrated pages above (with much clearer callouts and annotations) by clicking on any one of the images, or here.

I welcome comments and feedback—please contact me here.

Montreal, Canada

INDIGO, the International Indigenous Design Network, is proud to announce that Robert L. Peters has been appointed as an INDIGO ambassador. Rob will bring invaluable design and consulting expertise to INDIGO as well as an extensive international network.

Robert L. Peters, Icograda President 2001-2003, is a designer and principal of Circle, a design consultancy he co-founded in 1976. In addition to practice, he has been actively involved in design education, writing, speaking, advocacy, and professional development for most of his career, including leadership roles within the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC), and the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda).

As Koopman Chair at the School of Art, University of Hartford, Rob worked with Russell Kennedy in 2006 on INDIGO’s inaugural project, MIX06 (Migrant Indigenous Exchange 2006), developed as a collaboration between Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and the University of Hartford in Connecticut, United States.

Rob is active internationally as a consultant and design strategist, policy advisor, writer, juror, and guest lecturer and is based in Winnipeg, Canada.

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INDIGO Ambassadors are individuals committed to creating an awareness of the network, its projects and promoting engagement with designers, stakeholders and the public at large within their communities. INDIGO Ambassadors support the Secretariat in creating a collaborative environment for the exchange of knowledge and ideas. They offer the network local access and insights, help shape projects and initiatives and serve as resources to the network at large.

(reposted from INDIGO news, here) Photo thanks to Ian McCausland.

London, U.K.

As anyone who visits this blog already knows, I hold pacifist views which I am prone to express in posts (as well as fireside conversation, and occasionally street protests) from time to time. I’m also not a fan of the use of nuclear energy in any form, least of all to create bombs and weaponry (as I have posted previously, here, here, and here for example).

That said, it really rankles me to hear the ongoing stream of dishonest and hypocritical rhetoric on this topic emanating from Washington (and Jerusalem, etc.), now leveled at Iran and North Korea—since Iraq can no longer be fingered. Any reasonably objective citizen of our planet can quite clearly see where the real nuclear threats lie. The above illustration (by The Times) underlines graphically, and with little bias (for a change), the real lay of the land as regards current nuclear proliferation.

Click on the image or see an enlarged view here.
Thanks to friend Filip Spagnoli for the source.

Victoria, British Columbia

My friend Emrys Damon Miller (in the low-light photo in front of Casa de las Américas in Havana, above) has shared the “work-in-progress” principles behind Rocketday, where he is the Director. These principles are intended to “offer some insight into why and how” the firm operates—they certainly get a thumbs-up from me…

1. Make your contribution an improvement on the whole system. Healthy ecosystems on this planet. Human rights protected. People living with meaning in their lives, and with physical, mental & emotional health. That is what we want to achieve. Each task, each project at the studio should be in alignment with those goals.

2. Don’t rush, but do work hard. Get off society’s treadmill of hyper-fast activity, as it’s not only unhealthy for individuals, it often encourages unsustainable & unhealthy over-production and over-consumption in society at large. Don’t create short-sighted “band-aid” solutions that are inefficient & often wasteful. Don’t rush. However, do work hard. Do focus. There’s a lot we can do for this world, and we choose to do it with some level of intensity. Be active, engaged, always pushing & building your abilities. But find the right pace so it which allows care, strategy, and enjoyment in the act of creating.

3. Go deep. Care about the project, the audience, the team, all involved.

4. Don’t simulate where you can be authentic. Minimize the occasions when simulations are being used instead of the direct authenticity, as society is beginning to forget what is real. For example, be careful when using linoleum with fake wood imagery on its surface as a stand-in for wood. In visual design, this theme of simulation/authenticity comes up with drop-shadows, beveled buttons, fake weathering & texturing, digital fonts mimicking hand-writing. It is healthy for people to remember what is direct and authentic, and what is contrived and deceptive. Feel free to use simulation as a conscious, post-modern gesture, when you’re inviting the audience to notice the simulation (like Sagmeister’s large op-art navigation buttons or Gerhard Richter’s paintings). But when simulation is not consciously part of the piece, don’t simulate where you can be authentic.

5. Be honest. (Variation on authentic.) Be honest with your clients, your colleagues, and your audiences in all your relations — from honest feedback to colleagues, to honest messages in the marketing campaigns we design.

6. Be direct & transparent with cash. Don’t trick customers into paying for a service indirectly. Don’t have stocks & RRSPs that are supporting companies & activities that are not in alignment with your intentions and your vision of a healthy world.

7. Don’t whine / complain. Articulate places you wish could be improved, and then either plan & act on a solution, or accept the situation as-is.

8. Create meaning with your work. There are many ways we can bring meaningful solutions, services & products to people’s lives. Accomplishment. Beauty. Community. Duty. Enlightenment. Freedom. Harmony. Justice. Oneness. Redemption. Security. Truth. Validation. Wonder. Understand and have intention in the meaning your work brings. (See makingmeaning.org).

9. Think & imagine first, act second. Thinking is something we can do at a capacity beyond other animals. Combining reason, imagination, memory, ethics, and common sense with our intuition is humanity’s privilege — our greatest super-power. And it’s an evolutionary throw-back when we don’t take enough advantage of our capabilities here before action.

10. Explore and acknowledge what you’re doing on a deep level. In graphic design, ask where does the paper we print on come from. How our computers are manufactured. What role graphic design has on society and ecology.

11. Always work to create the best possible solution. This is what progress is. This is how we step forward and grow, and how all parties can feel pride and satisfaction in the work.

12. When you are privileged to do so, consider money second, not first. Try to choose a lifestyle which affords a financial buffer in your life. Then put your focus on creating projects that you enjoy, and that offer value to our world. After you’ve established value, then figure out how the enabling finances will flow.

13. Do not compromise your own health nor your family when working extra hours on graphic design projects. Sometimes the best work comes out of a late, late night, with extra coffee and some loud music. But take care of health and family too!

14. Treat staff, coworkers, clients, collaborators, vendors with generosity. (This includes font designers, software manufacturers, makers of the music we listen to in the studio).

15. Be confident, but try not to be arrogant. Have humility, be open minded, and respect what others contribute. But don’t be shy about what you actually can bring to a team or situation.

16. Work with conflict gracefully. Feel free to get pissed. Know that destruction & vice are both part of life, and participate in both. But don’t hold grudges (for too long). Argue only constructively. Protect yourself from repeat harm, but then forgive & move forward.

17. Learn from others. From books, school, websites, conferences, colleagues. Sometimes the best solutions for a particular need have already been discovered by someone else in the industry.

18. Use innovation. Technology, industry, society — everything in this world is changing. Sometimes the best solutions for a particular need will require some invention, some innovation.

19. Build for maximum longevity & efficiency & effectiveness.
In consumption, we often talk about the three “r”s — reduce, reuse, recycle. A product with a long shelf-life benefits both reduction & reuse, in contrast to products with shorter shelf-lives.

20. Make peace with the fact the universe doesn’t care. Don’t become a fundamentalist, and don’t get too self-righteous. Take on the above 19 principles as the most passionate hobby. Various religions and science don’t give us one clear path — the universe may even be impartial to our actions. Following the above principles are intended to simply be healthier, more aesthetically attractive & ennobled than sloppier alternatives.

London, U.K.

Greenpeace climbers recently scaled the front of BP’s corporate headquarters in London to “brand them with a logo that better suits their dirty business.” Greenpeace “thinks their logo needs a makeover to better suit a company that invests in tar sands and other unconventional oil sources like deep water oil,” and that a company that invests in tar sands—the dirtiest oil there is—needs something other than a nice green flower as their brand identity. “While our effort at a new logo is OK, we think you can do better, so we’re asking you to help us redesign BP’s logo…” More information here.

Several designer colleagues alerted me to this movement to find a more suitable “brand” for BP today (thanks Toze in Porto, thanks JS in Montreal). For years I’ve been showcasing BP’s effervescent floral symbol as the classic example of “corporate greenwashing” at design lectures I give, so I’m neither surprised nor disappointed at what seems to be a growing movement to help this industry-leading company project a more honest image. Just deserts, methinks…

Images: a selection from among of the hundreds of alternate BP logo entries flooding in; more here.

If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will—and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievements—we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And values do not come ready-made: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to square the facts of one’s own experience with the historic patterns formed in the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing values.

If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic  manifestations of love are not recorded in the day’s newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds.

Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened  in our own lifetime.

—Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) Values for Survival, 1946

…is give peace a chance.

(just step back… or move to the side)

“Breaking News” from the Huffington Post…

Thanks, Gregor, for the timely and ironic link…

Vancouver, Canada

I’m pleased to be participating in the Design Currency: Defining the Value of Design event here this week. Davin Greenwell has been documenting this multidisciplinary design conference, e.g. here.

Photo: ‘Yours truly’ moderating the Sustainable Cities session on Wednesday morning—photo by Davin Greenwell.

Tyuratam, Kazakhstan

Fifty-nine years ago today, on the 12th of April in 1961, the first manned spaceship left our planet from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Soviet Union with a singular and heroic (if somewhat diminutive) man aboard—Yuri Gagarin, the world’s very first “rocket-man” or cosmonaut…

This was the beginning, the blazing of a trail which has now become a road to the cosmos. One after another, spaceships are leaving earth for the wide expanses of the universe. Today, space pilots live and work for months aboard space stations, they fly to the moon; and Soviet and American spacemen have accomplished a joint experimental flight.

In the near future, perhaps, earthmen will go still further, journeying to other planets and universes. But alongside the names of these future explorers there will always rand the name of the first Soviet cosmonaut, for Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight in space represented not only a triumph of science and engineering, but also a bursting of the “bounds of possibility,” the breaking of a psychological barrier. It was literally a flight into the unknown.

Being a pilot, he had flown many demanding assignments, including flights at night and in blizzard conditions, and at home they would wait anxiously for his familiar step. Even so, he was never very far from the earth. But now… he had gone out into the unknown where no man had ever been before. Valentina, his wife, well understood all that this entailed but had agreed. And this, too, was an act of heroism for the mother of two small children.

From Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star Town), Yuri had flown to the cosmodrome. It was quiet at his home. The children were asleep. The sky, washed by recent rain, was studded with stars. The night seemed to be waiting for something. The wet pines stood motionless, and the houses merged together in the stillness and bluish darkness. In only one of them shone a yellow rectangle of light…

“Am I happy to be setting off on a cosmic flight?” said Yuri Gagarin in an interview before the start. “Of course. In all ages and epochs people have experienced the greatest happiness in embarking upon new voyages of discovery… I want to dedicate this first cosmic flight to the people of communism—the society which the Soviet people are now already entering upon… I say ‘until we meet again’ to you, dear friends, as we always say to each other when setting off on a long journey. How I should like to embrace you all—my friends and those with whom I am not acquainted, strangers and the people nearest and dearest to me!”

(From a booklet published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1977—which some might call “propaganda?”)  Care to ramp up the nostalgic context a little more? Have a listen to the Soviet National Anthem, here (best with lyrics, I find…).

People of the world!
Let us safeguard and enhance
this beauty—not destroy it!

Beginning in the Edo period…

Boro is a Japanese word meaning “ tattered rags” and it’s the term commonly used to describe patched and repaired cotton bedding and clothing lovingly used much longer than the normally expected life cycle. “Boro textiles were made in the late 19th and early 20th century by impoverished Japanese people from reused and recycled indigo-dyed cotton rags. What we see in these examples are typical—patched and sewn, piece-by-piece, and handed down from generation-to-generation, where the tradition continued. These textiles are generational storybooks, lovingly repaired and patched with what fabric was available. Never intended to be viewed as a thing of beauty, these textiles today take on qualities of collage, objects of history, and objects with life and soul.”

From the excellent blog Accidental Mysteries. More background on boro textiles (and lots of samples) here. Today’s pre-aged, stone-washed fashion mimicry doesn’t even come close…

Oporto, Portugal

Lots of wit, acerbity, pathos, and considerable illustrative talent on display in this virtual cartoon museum founded in the home of port wine back in 1997… thanks to designer/climber friend Antonio Coelho (Toze) for the link.

(wherever, right about now)

Oh, I do so like clocks… (might I fault growing up in punctilious Basel, Switzerland for this)? So, perhaps predictably, I was delighted when Carol, our wonderful Coordinator (at Circle—the design consultancy I have commuted to almost daily for just over 34 years now) sent me a link to this great online CLOCK resource yesterday.

(Admittedly the viewpoint expressed by means of the streaming data seems somewhat U.S.-centric, but that bias aside, it still rocks!) Find out for yourself, here.

(from the beyond…)

Only days before his untimely death in 2001, Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) gave a riveting talk at the University of California that sparkled with his trademark satiric wit—about, amongst a myriad of foci, blind river dolphins (in China), reclusive lemurs (in Madagascar), and a seemingly doomed parrot (in New Zealand) that is as fearless as it is lovelorn… “an ingenious commentary on his own personal, close encounters with these rare and unusual animals… revealing that evolution can actually be mighty fickle.”

Without a doubt, the best online talk I’ve viewed in months… watch it here (close to 1.5 hours in length, and worth every single minute). Enjoy!

Did you ever read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut?

“…April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away…” (more here)

Unknown location* (and unknown original image source)—but I like it!

*Update: on 14 May 2010 I heard from Steven Hamilton, who writes: “I was browsing your blog and noticed a photo from my backyard! Just thought I’d let you know the photo of the face on the wall with the hanging ivy hair is in Columbus, OH, in Pearl Alley between Paterson and Oakland Ave., just North of Ohio State University… I pass it every day on my way to class.”

Thanks, Steven!

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

How timely, methinks… an architectural hen-house for Easter. Inspiring, and quite lovely… by Frederik Roijé.

(thanks Kevin)

Randburg, South Africa

Check out a great feature article about the work of ex-pat Zimbabwean designer/educator Chaz Maviyane-Davies in the handsome online edition of DESIGN> magazine, here.

View a bunch of previous posts about Chaz and his graphic activism here.

Berkeley, California

The talented folks at Free Range Studios (who previously produced highly effective viral narratives that I’ve blogged about such as The Meatrix and The Story of Stuff) have just released their latest—The Story of Bottled Water. Once again, Annie Leonard delivers an important message with remarkable clarity and focus. View it here.

It’s high time that this story of the evils of bottled water be elevated and shared more broadly. I never have, nor ever will, buy bottled water. Local well or tap water suits me just fine—bottle your own (in a perpetually reusable container). I carry a Sigg bottle with me in my car, and there’s always one on my desk. When traveling in regions of the world where drinking free local water might present a health hazard, I carry an effective, compact, light-weight water filter with me as well—one minute of light pumping provides a liter of clean, refreshing, potable goodness.

Oh, today also happens to be World Water Day.

(now everywhere on planet earth)

Best wishes on this astronomical vernal equinox, recognized for the first time this year by the United Nations General Assembly (as decided during the meeting of The Inter-governmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage of the United Nations held last September in Abu Dhabi) as the “International Day of Nowruz.” Nowruz (literally “new day”) marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the new year in the Iranian calendar. As well as being a Zoroastrian holiday and having significance amongst those of Persian descent, this day is celebrated throughout the Indian sub-continent as the new year.

Today, the sun can be observed to be directly over the equator, and the north and south poles of earth lie along the solar terminator—as a result, sunlight is divided exactly between the north and south hemispheres (with daylight and nighttime of equal length everywhere). Some great diagrams showing equinox day arcs at various latitudes are shown here.

I’ve posted about Nowruz in previous years here and here.

Winnipeg, Canada

Warming weather and melting ice (several weeks earlier than usual) has been accompanied by the first flights of Canada Geese returning from southern wintering grounds… I was delighted to see and hear flights of hundreds of the big birds squawking overhead as I drove in to the city this morning—positive confirmation that we have all survived another winter (and two days before the equinox to boot). Welcome back…

Illustration: from a series of wildlife drawings I did back in the mid-1970s… remember Rapidographs?)

Detroit, USA

I rarely take pleasure in the demise of someone or something… this is one of those exceptions. G.M. has (finally) announced that it cannot keep the sinking Hummer brand alive—more info here in a New York Times editorial today.

Vancouver, British Columbia

I must say, I have mixed feelings about Canada’s hosting of the current Winter Olympics. As I live several thousand km away and don’t watch television, I’ve been spared the round-the-clock coverage—though I did watch the opening ceremonies online after the fact, as well as two live hockey games (I believe I am obliged to do this, by dent of being a Canadian, eh?). GDC designer colleague Casey Hrynkow (a Vancouverite, so on the doorstep of all the action) has expressed her thoughts on “lessons learned” quite eloquently here, and re-posted below, with permission:

In the late months of 1997, the 2010 Winter Games were a twinkle in the eyes of Bruce McMillan and Rick Antonson of Tourism Vancouver, and then Canucks owner, Arthur Griffiths. It was a buoyant time in Vancouver. The economy was humming along. Tourism was growing. We believed in a better Vancouver. We were innocent of the world-changing events of 2001. At that point, the wheels were set in motion for Vancouver to compete against other Canadian cities to win the right to host the 2010 Winter Games. Thirteen years is a long way out to foresee how these Games might be perceived in 2010. Sometimes you just need to take a shot.

Many people have rightly raised concerns about funding the Games in lieu of other more egalitarian causes. Hosting the Games has been associated with tossing the elderly out of their homes, hiding the homeless and canceling surgeries. Although the rhetoric has been a bit maudlin, much of this may indeed be true. Mistakes and misuse of power exist. I understand the frustration of advocates for the disenfranchised. They have seen Vancouver “gulping the Koolaid” since the Games began. A universal truth, however, is that an issue this complex is not so binary that it can be reduced to an either/or concept.

Spending on culture is never a waste

There was so much angst and anger leading up to the Games about how we could spend money on a “party” rather than health care, education and social housing. There is absolutely no doubt that we must put more into all of these priorities. But this is not all that human beings need.

I cannot imagine a modern society where physical needs are the only concern. People  are recharged and psychologically fed by interacting with society. The ancient practice of meeting in marketplaces and forums is critical to our well being. The eloquent part of that interaction is through the arts. The arts allow us to imagine, to stretch beyond our human form and to escape the day-to-day of just getting by.

I don’t really think anyone but a handful of people had any idea what the Games would do to the streets of Vancouver. We have poured into them, talking to each other, shouting and clapping and laughing. I’ve seen people break into spontaneous dance and song.  Street performers, singers, artists, designers, actors and musicians have pulled us out of our February doldrums and shown us how amazing Vancouver can really be. People say that they want more and they want it to continue. Who can blame them?

We like the world

Vancouverites seem to have discovered that it’s pretty cool to have the world show up. We saw it during Expo ’86 to some degree, but a lot of the people who are now seeing this were babies in 1986. We have peeked out beyond our parochial viewpoints and enjoyed the presence of our global family. A big part of what the Olympics is about is making the world a better place. One of the three Olympic ideals is to “build a peaceful and better world through sport”. That is a very succinct statement but captures issues of the environment, culture and social need. It is a fact that exposure to new ideas makes us more tolerant, more generous and helps us to think more broadly.

We could have done better

Oh, yes. We could have done it better. Not one thing, done by anyone, anywhere at any time has ever been flawless. The Olympic effort as been no exception. There are some big blights on these Olympics. The heavy-handedness with which brand management was handled is now infamous. Not everyone got equal billing. First Nations got too much, and they got too little. Our cultural mosaic was not represented well enough for many. The balance of opinions was not represented. Bad people ruined the legitimate protest of good people.The litany of wrongs is long and bitter.

So what do we do with that? We have amassed a knowledge cache from this that can be put to good use—from funding formulas that work and don’t work to the unerring reliability of the Zamboni. The populace has discovered in staggering numbers that public transit works quite well and I think we’ll see far more use of it going forward. We’ve had time to stare at what being Canadian is about. Perhaps now we’ll have a better idea of how to define ourselves to the world.

Would we do it again?

That’s a great question. I think that we may have collectively realized that this wasn’t such a bad experience. I suspect we will see some long-term economic growth from it, however incremental. If you believe that economic growth increases our ability to fund the social safety net, then economic growth will be a good thing for everyone in Vancouver and the province of BC, not just the privileged.

I think that hosting the 2010 Games was good for our collective psyche. We found out a lot about ourselves and about others. We figured out how to pull together.

If we do something like this again, we will do it better. We need to embrace legitimate protest and honor it, listening carefully to what it asks us to see. We need to consider an even broader perspective of legacies than even these groundbreaking Games managed to do. And, hopefully, we’ll do it while we still have that valuable cache of knowledge at hand. If that is wasted, it will indeed be a lesson lost.

London, U.K.

“The media landscape is changing rapidly. The way people communicate is changing the way marketers have to think about how to reach consumers…”—watch a compelling, short, statistical, fact-filled, entertaining “must see” piece from economist.com here.

(thanks to friend ‘Segun Olude for the link)

Happy (Chinese) New Year, my friends!
Kung Hei Fat Choi!

“Time is the substance from which I am made.
Time is a river which carries me along,
but I am the river;
it is a tiger that devours me,
but I am the tiger;
it is a fire that consumes me,
but I am the fire.”

—Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Victoria, British Columbia

The GDC has added a resourceful section on Sustainable Design to its website here, along with a useful range of sustainability-related links here.