Vancouver, Canada

Eric Karjaluoto posted a thoughtful piece on Sustainability today on his blog ideasonideas, worth reading here. Among other things, he questions “ownership” and the burdens that come with it… and he closes as follows:

…

“One of the things we do own is our legacy. Long after we’re worm food, the things we’ve done, said, thought, and fought for, will remain. A rental culture is better in tune to this actuality than one locked in in the illusion of ownership.

Your decision to give back to your community will impact the lives of others. Your decision to not drive a car will extend our species’ stay on the planet, and the quality of it. Your choice to do more than collect a private mountain of riches will afford you time to consider the needs of others and seek to understand them. This last point will pay out greater dividends than owning any object adorned with a “desirable” logo. (For what it’s worth, when I see a Louis Vuitton handbag, I’m not impressed; I just see a sucker. Same goes for your BMW).

All of us, from the dawn of time to the end of our existence (and beyond) are connected. We’re all drawing from the same pool, which means you can’t actually own anything. Such a notion is solely a remnant of a less sophisticated and socially evolved time. That being said, you can experience almost anything, and if you’re crafty, may never even have to pay for some of it.

Isn’t that infinitely better?”

Vancouver, Canada

Eric Karjaluoto, a well-spoken thought-leader in our field, published a book entitled Speak Human earlier this year. Now he reflects on lessons learned… here.

(Previous posts by, from, or about Eric on this blog appear here).

WTF?

Stare at the “+” sign in the middle of the square above for a little while. You will see a green dot circling between the pink dots… pretty cool, eh? Keep looking at the “+” sign for a while longer… the pink dots eventually disappear. (Cool becomes freaky).

I’m somewhat of a fan of whacky visual phenomena (witness past posts such as this, this, and this). Though I have encountered the above example before, I stumbled across it again today on Eric Karjaluoto’s fine blog, here. (There is a Wikipedia entry that attempts to explain: Lilac Chaser).

Vancouver, BC

Ominous clouds move swiftly upon an otherwise placid summer sky, blanketing it in darkness. A brief flash of light gives way to slow thunder that groans achingly in the distance. Our hero looks up past the brim of his dusty, worn hat—knowing and weary. An epic battle is afoot…  and this is how the movies begin.

The notion of a meritocracy

I was raised a capitalist. The child of immigrant parents, I came to believe that capitalism was fundamentally just and egalitarian, with the vast bulk of wealth largely shared amongst those who worked hardest for it. For my mom and dad, and many of their era, this steadfast belief turned out to be both necessary and at times quite accurate. They started with little, toiled deliberately to build a life for themselves, and saved (when I’m sure they would have preferred to do otherwise), all so their kids could have access to opportunities that weren’t available to them.

I have to admit that when I too held to this construct, most things seemed to make sense, and the world appeared infinity simpler: The people who “picked themselves up by the bootstraps” could prevail over anything; Those with the best ideas profited from them; I would have even reasoned that those less fortunate were likely so as a result of their own volition.

I oversimplify how I once pictured things, in part for the sake of this story (any more detail, and I fear you’d nod off). Nevertheless, I must admit that I looked at things in polarizing terms, seeing few other possibilities. Perhaps I was also a bit naïve, believing that most things must “balance out” in favor of the honest and decent.

 The world we’ve created

To think in those same terms today, I would either be a fool, or one of those great many, steadfastly determined to maintain a comfortable illusion (but an illusion nevertheless). This fantasy I speak of is one that persists regardless of its cost to our neighbors or future generations. It’s one that requires us to not ask questions.

In subscribing to it, we can’t allow ourselves to wonder how corporations afford us such (suspiciously) under-priced goods. We can never ask how all our trash magically disappears each day, and why we rarely find it in our own backyards. We must in no way challenge notions that masquerade as plain fact: perhaps best illustrated by the deluge of products brought to market using the words “eco” or “green” as prefixes, with little real consideration as to what such words should actually represent.

. . .

Read the rest of this great online article by Eric Karjaluoto on his blog ideasonideas here… (article re-posted with permission).

Vancouver, British Columbia

I don’t shill, so to be honest, I’m feeling just a little bit dirty in posting this… on the other hand, I know that Eric Karjaluoto is a damn good writer (I’ve commented on that before, here) and I get the impression he’s also a pretty good thinker, designer, and (likely—I’ve never actually bent elbows with the man) a pretty decent human being as well.

When I received Eric’s “pseudo-spam” message today, stating that he’s “doing something that sort of scares him—giving away his book,” it did get my attention. It appears that over the next few months, Eric will be posting his new book Speak Human online, one chapter at a time. Though “kind of foolhardy,” he thinks the message delivered in the book is important (how could he not?, I think to myself), “whether they decide to drop $20 or not.” What can I say… this man is also not shy.

You can review the book’s Table of Contents here and the second chapter, Thank Goodness You’re Small (which just went live,) here. Good luck, Eric, really… perhaps you’ll buy me a beer and we could have a face-to-face conversation some time? :-)

Vancouver, BC

You’ve been struggling with your marketing for years. Every time you take on a new initiative you hope for it to make a difference, but somehow you’re left back at square one. Although you have a new website or piece of collateral it hardly ever seems to make a difference. Where’s the disconnect? I suspect it’s in your story and the value you put on it.

“Young, progressive, out of the box”

A few weeks ago we met with a company that was having exactly this problem. They’re a respectable law firm whose website just didn’t seem to be doing what it needed to. They particularly liked a website that we had crafted for another firm, and decided that they should get in touch with us.

The meeting went swimmingly. They were all pleasant and had a lovely office space. They explained to us that they were quite different from other law firms, and that while others were rather boring and stodgy, they are in fact much younger, more progressive, and “out of the box” thinkers*. They didn’t think this came across in their current materials, and were highly dissatisfied with their existing website. They felt that if we built a site for them like the one we built for their competitor, it would remedy this problem…

[Read the rest of Eric Karjaluoto’s well written piece on ideasonideas here].

Vancouver, Canada

Eric Karjaluoto is a design-focused thinker and a very good writer—he’s also a talented and award-winning designer, ‘serial entrepreneur’, and a founding partner at smashLAB, a strategic interactive agency. Many in our field know him for the Design Can Change initiative he spearheaded in 2007 in an effort to unite designers to address climate change. A piece posted by Eric yesterday on his popular blog ideasonideas is well worth the read, here…

“The invasion of design has begun, fueled by an army of talented newcomers and low-cost offshore services. This new breed trades methodology for mimicry and by doing so radically undercuts pricing, sometimes even working for free. Like it or not, supply and demand in the design industry is undergoing upheaval. Worse yet, for design buyers it’s getting harder to differentiate between good and bad design.” (full article here)

Thanks for sharing your intelligent views, and keep up the good work Eric!