Peanut Butter Hot Dog Cookie

Tools as Institutions Pt.1

From an issue of Popular Science, January 1979. This article is so prophetic. You really only need to read up to the first bullet point but I’ll transcribe the first paragraph here:

Plugging into Bell
It’s a new gadgety world when you own your own phone

Last month, a PS editor moved into a new Manhattan apartment. He equipped it with three new phones—none of them, however, from the telephone company. He bought them from a local store and simply plugged them into jacks supplied by Ma Bell.

Our editor is one of a growing number of people who are buying their own phones instead of leasing equipment from their phone companies. Here’s why:
• It’s now legal
• You can save money
• You can get more technologically advanced equipment, with more features, than Bell presently supplies.
…

It’s not LEGAL?! In hindsight it seems insane that we weren’t allowed to own our own home phone but it sounds familiar doesn’t it? I know that I have a certain “i-product” in my pocket right now that is definitely treated in the same proprietary manner as our old land-line homes phones were. But  this is what happens when our tools are not used to our benefit but to the benefit of the institution. When our tools become institutionalized. The home telephone, like the internet and like cell phones, democratize communication and allow for greater connections between people and should be open and available to anyone who wants to use it in whatever way they need it. The first page of this article also states clearly the immediate benefit to phones now becoming “open-source”, you get better stuff! We need our tools to reach their greatest potential by releasing them from the hands of the institutions who’s greater interest is capital gain, and put  them in the hands of many. Control by many vs control by few. DRM, copyright, DMCA and cable bandwidth caps are all current technological symptoms of the same problem that you see below. Maybe as time passes and technology advances all tools will pass through this process and someday become open but it’s much more likely, given the money and the power that these institutions have and require to keep functioning, that it will continue to move in the opposite direction if we don’t do something about it.

HBO’s Grey Gardens

Seeing this promo trailer feels to me like finding out your uncle just passed away but left you a 1937 Bugatti worth $4 million. Okay, not nearly THAT good. But I guess bittersweet. It’s great to see the story of big and little Edie getting the attention it deserves and I have to admit Drew Barrymore looks like a pretty convincing little Edie but the question on my mind (and I’m sure I’m not alone) is why?

The release of this remake is a perfect example of why I love documentary film so much. It can be just as compelling a story without any of the money or bureaucracy that’s usually necessary to create a Hollywood film. Documentary film by definition cannot be produced by a large Hollywood studio. Documentary film has to be nimble, stripped down and flexible under the control of a single vision or small group or else it would never work. Imagine the set and crew (and money) required to shoot a Hollywood film trying to pull off a documentary like Grey Gardens. It would have been impossible to catch the the intimacy that is created via the Maysles brothers and their subject. The original film is such an amazing, heartbreaking, mystifying story and it’s that much better BECAUSE it is a documentary and because these are real people and real lives. Hollywood could rarely invent that kind of story and this new HBO Grey Gardens is a testament to that. I can’t imagine how much it cost to make this. (I wonder how much it cost to make the original.) So if you have never really understood Hollywood or why we all believe it’s as important as Entertainment Tonight makes it out to be, start watching documentaries. If every American watched documentaries that would basically destroy the contemporary entertainment industry. Right? Or is that just WAY to fucking utopian a vision? I guess Hollywood is already kind of destroying itself with ‘reality television’ but I honestly believe that the institution of contemporary entertainment, via documentaries and the internet, could become de-institutionalized really easily.

Oh, and I don’t think big Edie is NEARLY fat enough in the movie.

Ultrasound Printout Sleeve

So, my wife Kelly and I are going to have a baby. Thanks! It’s astoundingly exciting for us! She’s just reached the end of her first trimester so we got to finally go to the hospital and take a little visit to the dimly-lit ultrasound room. Anyone who’s had a baby is probably all excited hearing about these initial phases. Anyone who never had a baby has probably already moved on to another blog. The ultrasound was fun. Little skeletal legs and skull. Weird movements that, via the ultrasound, looked more like bad CGI than a human life-form. But strangely, just as interesting for me was the sleeve that they slid our printouts into.

As a designer I’m always fascinated by situations in life where you would not expect design to pop up. It seems that when it does it’s typically the product of institutionalization of the process that the design is a part of. I’ll bore you in other posts about my feelings for this but first, the sleeve design.

Right away, I’m impressed that there was a sleeve at all. It was explained to us by the nurse on hand that the chemicals in the prints are very sensitive and equated them to old fax paper off the roll (I later admitted to Kelly that I had completely forgotten about when fax machines needed their own crappy roll of paper.) So the sleeve is a protector. That’s good thinking, thank you. But the unnecessary narrative of the couple and the emotion that it comes with is kind of over-the-top. I think we all have our own personal reaction to boilerplate stock photography when it meets medical science. There’s the cover of your insurance plan folder with the elderly black couple smiling warmly at you, the informative brochure about herpes with the chipper college couple smiling warmly at you, or the birthing center commercials with the doctor smiling warmly at the proud new mother and father then looking up, and smiling warmly at you. They never feel true or human. They are horrible caricatures of something that the medical industry would like you to believe is real and see yourself in. This sleeve is no exception, it follows the standard rules of medical industry graphic design, but it also breaks the rules in an even more odd and disturbing way.

Where’s the narrative? What are the emotions of this couple? Why don’t we see their faces?  What does daddy think of his new twins? What will mom name them? We don’t see their expressions which is disturbing since, for Kelly and I, this moment was also tempered with some anxiety since this was also our first chance to find out if there might be any complications with the baby or the birth. The angle and the focus of the photograph is off the parents and on the object which forces us to infer our own emotions to this event. Is the focus taken away from the emotion of the couple and made ambiguous in order for this design to also speak to couples that have possibly received bad news (maybe twins?) as well as good? If so, why choose a photo in the first place?

But most importantly why fucking twins? It seems a good chance that the content of the ultrasound printout was Photoshopped in later. What a weird decision. 

Really, I believe in the power of design which is why I don’t believe that this design is necessary in this experience. You may disagree. But if you do, do you really think this is the way to design this? And if you’re wondering why I think the design of my ultrasound sleeve is a big enough deal to even worry about, think about the context; this is a parents’ first introduction to their child. Isn’t that one of the most important times for graphic design to do a good job?

Just too weird.