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.
(anonymous)
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.
(That’s a lesson that my Daddy taught me [he just turned 92]… Respect!)
Vancouver, British Columbia
I feel very honored to have been invited to give the keynote talk at the 2012 GDC/BC Salazar Student Awards, the annual juried competition and awards-presentation event held to celebrate BC’c most talented and promising design students and their inspirational work. The event takes place at UBC Robson Square on the evening of Friday, 11 May 2012.
The awards competition is open to all students who are enrolled in BC academically recognized certificate, diploma, or degree graphic design and advertising programs, with work in the categories of Print Design, Interactive, Brand Identity, and Video and Motion. Entry deadline for submissions is 12:00 pm on 30 April 2012. More information can be found at the event website here.
My talk entitled ‘Aim Higher’ builds on presentations I gave in Norway, Taiwan, and Spain last fall—the abstract reads as follows:
Our globalized society is morphing rapidly from an information era into an age of ideas—at the same time, we flounder in the uncertainty of tumultuous political, social, economic, and ecological instability—even as our fragile planet accelerates towards the edge of survival.
Designers have greatly influenced the shaping of the over-consuming, hyper-stimulated, non-sustainable world we are in—suddenly we find ourselves thrust into a leading role as necessary change-drivers. This presentation will address a shift in design’s role and the power it holds, share diverse perspectives from around the globe, and offer a challenge to “think about our thinking.”
Happy Earth Day!
General Sherman is a giant sequoia tree located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in Tulare County, California. By volume, it is the largest known living single stem tree on Earth, with a height of 83.8 metres (275 ft), a diameter of 7.7 metres (25 ft), an estimated bole (trunk) volume of 1,487 cubic metres (52,513 cu ft), and an estimated age of 2,300 – 2,700 years.
In 1879, this tree was named after the American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, by naturalist James Wolverton, who had served as a lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Cavalry under Sherman. In 1931, following comparisons with the nearby General Grant tree, General Sherman was identified as the largest tree in the world. One result of this process was that wood volume became widely accepted as the standard for establishing and comparing the size of different trees.
(source)
