London, UK

Just in time for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee… could this be Banksy‘s latest?

(source)

Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the infinite peace to you.

(for you-know-who)

(worldwide)

Special wishes to the estimated 2.3 Billion mothers on our planet on this special day…  have a Good One!

Vancouver, BC

A big, warm, heartfelt Thankyou! to the design community in this fine city for making me feel so welcome at the 2012 Salazar Awards event yesterday. It was a real honour to spend the evening with you… I look forward to hearing from attendees regarding your design ideas and design actions that “aim higher” in helping to unfuck the world and to help solve the problems that our design professions have abetted (often unwittingly).

You can contact me here.

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Frankfurt, Germany (a re-post from 2008)

Having grown up multi-lingually on several continents, I’ve never really been “at home” in any particular place, and have often felt a bit like a chameleon. I’ve also eschewed (mostly unconsciously) being woven into a single community or cultural fabric. This likely explains why I live in the woods (without neighbors or a local community), yet have spent my life heavily involved in professional and global peer networks, and seem to have an ongoing “restlessness to move” and travel on a continual basis. I’ve often used the ironic quip: “If you don’t care where you are, you’re never lost.” as a truism I can really relate to. While being rootless does have its advantages (one tends to be more tolerant of others; adapting to new environs is easier) this identity struggle also brings a raft of other social and psychological issues along with it in its sojourns, including reverse culture shock and a sense of disengaged melancholia.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered this phenomena has a taxonomy and name of its own—Third Culture Kids, often abbreviated “TCKs” or “3CKs” or “Global Nomads,” referring to “someone who, (as a child) has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture.” By definition, “the TCK tends to build relationships to all cultures, while not having full ownership of any,” and “develops a sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere.”

The concept of Third Culture Kids was introduced in the 1960s by Ruth Hill Useem (1915-2003), a sociologist who used the term to describe children who spent part of their developmental years in a foreign culture due to their parents’ working abroad.” Her work was the first to “identify common themes among various TCKs that affect them throughout their lives.” TCKs tend to have more in common with one another, regardless of nationality, than they do with non-TCKs from their own country—over the past decades, TCKs have become a heavily studied global subculture. (My cousin Faith, also a TCK, authored/edited the book Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global, documenting “a life of growing up in multiple nations, cultures, and language regions.”)

Old photos: I always had this thing for small cars (perhaps in reaction to the hulking ‘Strassenkreuzer’ Studebaker my parents shipped over to Germany); on our Stettenstrasse front stoop, my first day of school in Frankfurt.

Winnipeg, Canada

I was delighted this week to receive a signed copy of my good friend’s new coffee-table book, Mike Grandmaison’s Prairie and Beyond, published by Turnstone Press. There’s a book launch and gallery show of some of Mike’s recent photography work on Monday, 7 May at 19:30 in McNally Robinson’s Prairie Ink Cafe. Reservations are recommended—call Prairie Ink at (204) 975-2659 to reserve a table (or join me at mine).

This stunning book features Mike’s breathtaking photography from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, sorted into chapters; The Grasslands, The Wetlands, The Drylands, The Forests, The Mountains, and The Subarctic. Turnstone had asked me a few months ago to write the book’s back cover text, which appears as follows…

Mike Grandmaison’s passionate quest to capture the essence of this great land and his tireless effort to create meaningful, relevant images of lasting beauty have resulted in a truly remarkable, award-winning body of work. Many share my view that his intimate portraits of the natural world and exquisite landscapes are unexcelled, and I am delighted that he has “turned his lens” to the prairies in this collector’s volume.

The fine gallery of light-filled imagery you’ll discover herein reflect Mike’s exceptional eye and uncanny ability to unearth the photogenic in the “here and now”—he finds resonance and beauty in what many would pass by as being commonplace, and he brings a singular viewpoint to his work that is born of intuition, an innate humility, deep respect for the natural world, and an undying attitude of discovery.

ISBN 978-0-88801-393-4

Bob Roach is a designer colleague who often shares his thoughts and views on the GDC Listserv, an active “conversation” amongst several hundred mostly-Canadian (and seemingly mostly west-coast) folks who practice or are interested in graphic design. His “musings” today on the relationship between cold and what it means to be Canadian rang so true that I felt compelled to share. Thanks Bob.

“As you west coasters doubtless know, this historically warm and nearly non-existent winter we southern Ontarians have just ‘sprung’ from has left us all grateful to global warming for lower fuel bills, fewer fender-benders, and a taste of what life on the Pacific coast might feel like. Not surprisingly, real estate prices also rose dramatically (see?).

But maybe because of this unexpected reprieve from inclemency, I’ve begun to speculate and muse more about what ‘traditional’ Canadian winter weather really means to us from a cultural perspective. And even a personal creative one.

As a kid, freezing in low-tech gumboots, on my 2 mile walk uphill (both ways) to school, I used to fume about the injustice of being born in such an obviously-flawed climate. Who’s idea was it to make all of us Canadians, “God’s Frozen People,” anyhow? Why, if I ran the circus…

As I matured—er, that is… as I at least, aged—I began to reflect more about the less discussed benefits of living in a land where every year, we are forced to face the God-awful reality that the god of winter weather, at least judging from the package, clearly was not a benevolent god.

Or was he?

There’s something about seasonally delineated climatic switches that builds an awareness, connection and respect for some quality of our land that goes way beyond the weather-chats and charts that we all small-yak about when things drift out of the comfort of room temp zone.

There’s the visual transformative nature of winter. We sentimentalize it, but nonetheless it’s there, and very powerful in its scale and awesome, often terrifying beauty. But how many of us take the time to really study it for it’s full range of wonder and awe— and respect?

Digging deeper, we get into the whole transformative power that the “cold, lean months” impose upon our social and behavioural structure. As a species that did not evolve in these climes, we become keenly aware of the dependency and better survival odds we owe to such adaptions as community, sharing, safety and all the infrastructure we (and our ancestors) have invested to maintain these supports.

It might even be argued that the classic Canadian winter is one of the strongest influencing factors that forged and distinguishes us as a society with values markedly different from our southern neighbours. It’s hard not to be humbled by the collective power of community if you’ve ever had an engine fail while driving somewhere between Moosejaw and Saskatoon, mid-January, and looked up to see a plow, and a couple of good Samaritan drivers pull over to help. Not sure you could say that kind of feeling is as universal south of the 49th.

I guess I’ve come to view the Canadian winter as the introverted sociopath of seasons. On the surface, it’s inhospitable, cold, and unforgiving. But given the proper time, and mood— it can be dazzling in its generosity of spirit.

Anyhow, that’s my muse for today. If anything, it should teach you to never mix antifreeze with good Scotch.”

Milan, Italy

Franco Brambilla likes to mix nostalgia from the past with cute aliens and beings from Sci Fi movies. See lots more of his creations in this genre here…