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.

Objectified

Gary Hustwit’s new film ‘Objectified’ screened last week at the Walker Art Center. Sort of a of a quasi-follow-up to his previous film Helvetica, Objectified is a film devoted to contemporary product design. Sadly, I think the title says it all. To me, the film is unable to really effectively illustrate the importance that the designed object plays in our lives and instead focuses on the cult of “rock star” designers and the objects of desire that they create.

I don’t have any problem with the design rock star talking heads. The work they produce is amazing. But the film lacks any history or context. With Hustwit’s Helvetica we were able to track the life and the history of Helvetica, building a personal relationship with this important and ubiquitous underdog of a typeface. Objectified instead seems to run more like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes’ business plan:
Phase 1: Talk to Jonathan Ive.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Product Design!
There is no mention of early 20th century designers, early modernist influences, philosophies, or even a brief history of product design itself. The only designer in the entire film with any real product design history that predates the 80’s is Dieter Rams. Seriously, not even Raymond Loewy?! (You can put any early deceased important designer’s name in that last sentence. No, they weren’t in the film either.) It seems like the film intends on convincing us that amazing intelligent product design is solely the invention of the last 20 years, that we have only technology to thank for giving us this opportunity to design our lives and that there are only a select few that can actually do it for us.

That empowering concept that design is something inherently human is mostly swept under the rug for the sake of another great shot of people ogling over objects in display cases. There is one shot, a single moment where we see a cork holding a door open. The interview overdub suggests that democratization of design is redundant and that all good design is inherently democratic. I couldn’t agree more, but this film is not at all about the democratization of design, it’s about the objects that we have defined our lives with, applied our own identities to and lived vicariously through. This film is a love letter to conspicuous consumption. We rest on the cork for second then move on to more beautiful objects.

In the end I feel like the film really does a dishonor to design in general. It is beautiful and well-made but leaves you with a sense of desire to redesign your living room in Karim Rashid and believe that his name, and the other contributors to the film, are the sole proprietors of product design. I would have much preferred a film that was half as beautiful but empowered anyone who saw it with the idea that our lives are only what we design them to be. That we don’t need our designed objects blessed by the right designer but that we can empower ourselves with our own decisions on how our life should work. That’s the real power of design.

Yes, a Shepard Fairey post.

So legal action is in “progress” between Shepard Fairey and the AP. The discussion of these proceedings and whether or not Fairey’s HOPE poster is fair-use or not has been fucking fascinating me for months now. I’ve forced friends into repetitive drunken conversations about the legalities of this image, wanting to hear their thoughts. Mostly because for the longest time I felt that it did not constitute fair-use. My feeling on the matter came down to the simple concept of “advancing the image”, a term employed numerous times to legally assess fair-use. I feel that anyone debating fair-use must ask: “Does the new use of a copyrighted artwork express a new or different idea than the original image?” My opinion for a long time was that I didn’t feel that Fairey’s HOPE relayed any different meaning than Garcia’s photograph. A photograph Obama already invokes hope and a brighter future as these were Obama’s campaign ideals. So to use a photograph of Obama for the purpose of stylized interpretation to invoke the image of “hope” felt to me redundant and not necessarily an advancement of Obama’s image.

But recently I came to the conclusion that even though I couldn’t critically defend it, there is a power to that poster that the photo does not have. There is something larger going on emotionally in that poster that  is difficult to substantiate and quantify. Some “magic.” Although this intangible power may not hold up in court (although, who knows. Even the US government admits that the”… distinction between ‘fair use’ and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined”) it seems to me that the poster does emotionally advance the image beyond the original photograph.

But now I’ve come across this, an additional Obey/Obama poster from last March.

It seems that in the shadow of the notoriety of the original poster this second “CHANGE” poster has been forgotten about. But I think this poster is important. It brings up a really important question for me. Although this poster is stylistically similar to Fairey’s original HOPE poster (since it comes from the same artist and was most likely created in the same manner) it doesn’t seem to me to carry the same power. It seems to me that the power of the original HOPE poster still rests on the photo itself, and if this is so I’m not sure anymore that Fairey HAS advanced that original image. That original image may be as powerful as it is purely because of the photograph. Or else this other CHANGE poster should contain that same power, right? Or am I just expecting too much from the consistency of an artist’s vision? Is there another obvious reason that this image is not as powerful that does NOT stem from the photo itself that I’m just not thinking of?

Stay tuned to find out how I feel about this next week…

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.

Peanut Butter Hot Dog Cookie!

PBHDC.
I just made that up. I guess I should buy that domain name too. So, I don’t know why yet (because I’m just as self-obsessed as anyone else maybe?) but I’ve started a blog. I also don’t know why I’ve named it Peanut Butter Hot Dog Cookie either. I guess for me it kind of represents thinking about new (potentially brilliant or potentially horrible but usually asinine) ways to look at cultural standards. Something like that. It was either that or ‘icanttakethisshitsittingdown.com’ so really I think this name is better for everyone involved. I wanted to take it seriously (and learn *a little* about code in the process) so I done gone and buyed me a domain name and a server and am trying to figure out how to make all this wordpress crap go. The design is obviously not mine because I told you I don’t know how to do this yet but I think it will be good for now. I’ll try and customize it more later when(if) I know what I’m doing. I’m going to post whatever the hell I want here and pretend like nobody is watching (which they probably aren’t anyway so that won’t be a problem.)