velocykel

If you haven’t read it, now would be a good time to get a copy.

We’re just starting Chapter 7. Literally.

Get ready.

I keep thinking back to the time just before and at the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

The November before the pandemic, I was at a horrible conference in New Orleans. I took a walk on the Friday morning of the conference to escape the insufferable architecture professors there with me. I wound up at a cafe near the new convention center, a small local joint known for its omelettes. While I was eating, a very small, cheery, heavy set woman in a blue t-shirt came in and very sheepishly raised her voice a bit to get everyone’s attention. She awkwardly explained in somewhat broken English that in celebration of international influenza awareness day, the Mexican Consulate (conveniently located right next door) was offering free flu shots to anyone who would like one.

The room fell silent, and some guy in a red hat (no joke) said loudly “The last place I’d go to get a shot is the dirty fucking Mexican embassy.” A bunch of people in the cafe laughed. I stood up in the awkward silence and in my very best booming teacher voice turned to the woman and said, “Gracias, Senora. Tu amilibidad es infinita.” She smiled. Then I turned to the red hat and said in a more booming voice, “You’re a fucking idiot. You realize that these folks are in OUR country handing out vaccinations to OUR citizens because OUR government doesn’t do it. I guess that’s one thing that makes your version of America so fucking great. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I could tell, the red hat was flabbergasted. Literally, his mouth was agape. I left and walked next door for the first flu shot of my life. I chatted with the lady in the blue t-shirt for a long time, and she shared some very sad stories about being a Mexican consul worker in the United States. Amazing how, despite how hostilely this country treats folks from Mexico that they are willing to look after American citizens with kindness.

A few months later, during the pandemic, I took a walk to my local grocery store. News reports from across the country were showing empty shelves and shortages of nearly everything. I was shocked to walk in and find the shop on the corner full to the brim. Oddly, the store wasn’t stocked with the usual American brands, but Canadian groceries, some with the French side facing out. It was a funny, but very welcome sight. I packed up a car load of groceries and said a silent prayer on the way home for our proximity to the Canadian border, and the willingness of our Canadian neighbours to share.

Not everyone who isn’t American is an enemy. It will take some time for the Red Hats to realize that. Once they do, the damage will be done, and I fear it will be too late.

It all reminds me of my favorite t-shirt: Karma Is Real.

Truly, a perfect winter evening.

When I was an undergrad, my design instructor showed this film. I thought it was very thought-provoking then. I showed it to generations of my own students, and I still think it’s thought-provoking, but perhaps for different reasons.

Nighttime tree.

Any electrical engineers or electronics people out there? I was on the treadmill last week, running at 15km/hr and the treadmill stopped dead. Turns outt the little built-in fuse/GFCI blew and the machine stopped. After a thorough inspection and clean out I determined that static electricity was the cause. So, I grounded the machine and started wearing difference shoes but I’m still spooked to run too fast. Any way to jump the fuse/GFCI? It’s not a super powerful motor or a super nice tread so if it gets fried eventually, I’m ok with that. I’m more ok with that than getting thrown off the tread again. Any advice?

Some people—especially those who identify as leftist, progressive, or just plain “democrat”—are afraid. They fear a President Trump ripe with retribution, carefully plotting against his enemies. They imagine the worst and hope for the best. They draw lines between the dawn of the Third Reich and what is occurring in America right now. The Jews in 1938 never believed that the worst would happen, yet it did. Surely, history repeats itself and will again. For these believers, we have spun into some kind of Man in the High Tower alternative reality in which America is no longer a force for good, but a scary dystopian state run by a wannabe dictator.

Last year, my Romanian manicurist, Nicoleta, made an observation. She said to me, “I know what it’s like when a country falls apart. I know the warning signs. I lived through it. Twice.” She watched first as her country, once part of the Warsaw Pact countries behind the iron curtain, fell apart alongside the Soviet Union. A failed country mired by a failed ideology. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fortunes for Romania have been erratic. A sharp shift toward democracy was too much for the country to handle in too short a time. The economic engine gave out. Years later, the Romanian economy was one of the strongest in Eastern Europe. However, the intervening twenty-ish years weren’t pretty and for the average Romanian was not an easy period.

Nicoleta’s warning kept echoing in my head, “It’s easy for a country to know what they don’t want. It much more difficult to for a country to know what they do want and how to make that happen.” In Romania, they knew they didn’t want Socialism or Communism, but they didn’t quite know what they wanted, and it took nearly thirty years to get back on the horse and figure it out. Thirty years is a very long time.

We’ve seen it before. In the USSR, the economy gave way, and so too did the political structure. Soviet society knew what it didn’t want, but is still grappling with what it wants to become. Britain thought it no longer wanted to be part of the EU, but it didn’t know what it wanted in place of that. The myriad things promised: a burgeoning NHS bolstered by the transfer payments being invested into the NHS rather than going to the EU, a sudden uptick in foreign investment, the ability to negotiate free trade with the United States, Canada, and other countries, control over its own borders. None of it ever materialized and the British government fell into a chronic state while the economy floundered. Britain’s hard-fought position on the world stage continues to diminish with every passing day, and Britain still isn’t sure exactly why they opted out of the EU.

Few countries share a cohesive vision amongst citizens. The small ones can and do, because these countries—Denmark, Estonia, The Netherlands— effectively are nation states. One or a few big cities and a picturesque rural country or a few colonies that follows the lead of its capital city. Those countries can set policy easily and follow a course more simply that a country that has become too big, too diverse, too ill-informed, and too complex to govern effectively.

Trump ran on that platform: slash and burn. He did an outstanding job of it. Now, he has to deliver the impossible: building the “Great America” he promised. Changing the narrative will not be easy. He could do this by acknowledging that as Americans, we don’t really want equality or the government telling us what our rights are. We really don’t care much about the rest of the world. We don’t want people coming here from countries we’ve never been. We know we want a male country and not a female one. We want to buck up and make it work and we don’t want a bunch of mushy pussies, though that’s what most of us have groomed the subsequent generation of kids to be; emotionally defective, dependent and dysfunctional failures to launch living in their parents basements.

Trump could (and should) start a reconciliation commission: getting disparate people to come together, to work together, to build trust and understanding. He won’t. Instead, it’s likely that he will continue to threaten… because threatened people, scared people, are compliant. They don’t want to offend or rock the boat. The first post-election SNL cold open parodied exactly that: all the people that poked fun of Trump are now scared shitless. That fear translates into power. The East Germans feared their government, and the Soviets feared theirs. Burmese and Hong Kong Chinese fear their government now. Fear and complacency are not good bedfellows. Countries where the voice of the people, collectively and from disparate ends of the political and socio-economic spectrum, united to speak for a common goal have prospered. This happened in Poland led by the Solidarity movement, and in India during the fight for independence, and in Chile during the Plebiscite. People have power. They also have a choice.

Lots of my more liberal friends are worried, particularly about Project 2025. None have read it. I’ve been told it is the new Mein Kampf, and a plan to do away with the constitution. It’s not, it’s a manifesto for the conservative right that the left would be wise to read. The left, in my lifetime, hasn’t published a manifesto of any kind. The conservatives have published at least three that I can remember. The democrats need to understand that poking the bear and saying the opposite of whatever our republican friends are saying isn’t a political strategy, it’s a recipe for failure. It’s why the democrats have lost three slam dunk elections out of the past four and have completely lost control of the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. Listening to Nancy and Chuck bitch about bullshit does not a good plan make.

Undoubtedly, the political pendulum in America has swung, and perhaps with good reason. A lot of what we’ve been doing isn’t working, it doesn’t make rational sense, and is certainly not sustainable over the long haul. Abortion for example, isn’t a democratic cause. Abortion isn’t about women’s rights. It’s also about men’s rights. Children’s rights. Doctor’s rights. The rights of those to believe in the religion they choose. All those other folks, too commonly, get glossed over and good democrats tow the party line: abortion is great! Abortion isn’t great. It’s sad, scary, traumatic and nuanced. Each and every reason for having or not having an abortion is fraught with circumstances, choices, and things that the government has no business regulating or worrying about. Democrats lost that battle and need to move on, because it’s polarizing and is turning off more people than it is winning over.

Similarly, we’re paying for wars and pandemics that weren’t of our making, we’re bailing out places that aren’t our home. We’re helping others before we help ourselves. That kind of messiness leads to a voiceless frustration, which now, has a voice. That voice is angry. Angry is never good.

I’ve said for years, it doesn’t matter if you vote republican or democrat any more than it matters if you root for the Patriots or the Dolphins. All the players are employed by the NFL. The only loser in the equation is the fans. Our political arena has turned into a spectator sport. To my democratic friends I remind you, Trump is not the master of our destiny and to my republican friends, I remind you that he is not the answer to our problems.

We have a choice to listen and to ameliorate and to collaborate to stop being observers and start being participants. This greater and more brazen political space to speak your mind, also means we will either have to gain a larger ear to listen or the outcome will simply mean more boil overs, more confrontation, and more violence. When we bump up against that, we need to stop and reverse course. We need to listen to understand and collaborate more. Violence and infighting will lead to greater instability, misogyny, racism, and hostilities none of those make America great. Moreover, that kind of behavior gives the government—and Trump—an excuse to exercise increasingly greater, swifter, and broader enforcement, which will look like a police state, precisely because it will be a police state. We owe it to ourselves to defend the principles on which this country was founded, and to do so in a respectful, patient, and productive manner.

Tonight as I go to sleep, I reflect that by this time tomorrow the world will be in a different era. The order of things will be different. It’s not that this hasn’t happened before, it has. It’s just a rare occurrence to know about the change in advance.

Sunset view from my office window. #WindowFriday #Fensterfreitag

A quick winter hike.

So today, I was running on the treadmill… and my worst fear happened. It stopped dead. I however did not stop. Oddly, though I was running forward, I fell backward. The rowing machine cushioned my fall.

I think the tread motor overheated … but I’m not sure why.

Fix it or buy a new tread??

Some backyard telescope images. Chilly night! 🔭

One of my goals for the new year is to find a number of old school pen pals – someone who I can write to like once a month and will write back. Interested? Let me know!

Also in my backyard.

From my backyard.

Helvetica

Tiny little lunar eclipse.

Today, I:

• Delivered homemade muffins to neighbours and helpers as a thank you.

• Made 3L of homemade youghurt

• Made 2 experimental batches of Larabar knockoffs, Cherry Pie and Apricot Ambrosia

• Fabricated 12 little plastic key fobs from scraps to organise our keys and keep the plastic out of the landfill for a bit longer

• Made a batch of seed crackers

• Parceled out seed cracker mix for 6 more batches

• Took my first Tunisian crochet course

I had always enjoyed being a designer and similarly enjoyed the multifaceted creativity that came along with the process of designing. I liked the idea of making, of creating, of problem solving. I began my career creating spaces, and moved into creating graphics, and for years, I became obsessed with branding—what makes us want to buy (or not buy) objects. Why are some brands “cool” and others not? I became obsessed with glossy magazines like Wallpaper and Monocle, because Tyler Brule seemed to have figured out how to decode what is cool by zeroing in on the most hard-to-find and hard-to-get design items that would somehow make my life magazine quality.

Slowly, over time, my relationship to design began to sour. Graphic designers worked hard but most of their work was ephemeral, disposable, and too much of it was at the service of industry: driving clicks and persuading through manipulation. Specifically, as I examined branding closely, I came to recognize that the act of branding was sociopathic, a harmful manipulation of our emotional fragility in the service of consumerism and profit. I slowly backed away from creating and endorsing the creation of brands.

During that time, and in my earlier years, craft to me, was something that I always “did” and enjoyed, but was quietly shameful. I felt that it was somehow, tacky, time consuming, labor intensive, and ultimately undervalued. Despite the obvious shortcomings of Design, I committed my career to being a designer and teaching generations of others to Design. Fashioning others to arbitrate “cool” from boring or mundane but also to examine and try to use design to tackle the problems of society. Somehow, Design, as an academic discipline seemed to have crystalized in the period of hyper-industrialization just following World War II, and it never really changed all that much.

Increasingly, I felt disgusted that no matter the discipline—architecture, interiors, fashion, graphics, digital—the ultimate goal was to make more, sell more, to feed the beast faster and cheaper. The entire enterprise was (and is) careening out of control. Looking back, it was my own willful blindness or sheer ignorance that led me astray and my own timidity that prevented me from speaking up or speaking out against my colleagues who were, perhaps, well intentioned, but also, perhaps, equally ignorant, but certainly more indoctrinated by the corporate machine, endlessly feeing the Design Industrial Complex, which held that no matter the problem, throwing money and stuff at it would yield a solution.

I regret not questioning my colleagues more directly and not speaking up sooner, because many, hopelessly out of touch with how the world has changed (and seemingly unaware that the world has moved on from the 1950s), are still teaching the same thing now that they were twenty or thirty years ago. That is a disservice to our students and a dangerous outcome for our world. I regret not questioning my students more directly, because so many, pumped with optimistic idealism felt they could change the world through Design. They didn’t. They couldn’t, because the entire industry was, like the products they were creating, designed to chew them up and spit them out. Rather than preaching the gospel of Design, what I should have been doing for all those years was to question whether these young people wanted to become designers or creative thinkers. Though most would have chose the former because of its familiarity, ultimately the majority became the latter moving on to creative endeavors tied to the fast-moving train wreck that is the Design industry by a hair-thin thread.

My critical examination of design piqued when detachedly viewing an Amy Meissner exhibit at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. The exhibit collected pieces that had been knitted, mended, stitched, and made over the years. Meissner’s philosophy is observational and clear: “Hand stitching isn’t fast work. It’s a quiet skill that feels tenuous, nearly lost when placed in a contemporary context; it slips away like childhood, like domesticity, like safety beneath the weight of something handmade. I sew because I don’t know what it is to not sew. It’s this expectation of what the hand-sewn form is — protective, warm, decorative — so much like the definition of the domestic role, which compels me to heave against it. I take the traditional, beautiful handwork I was taught as a girl, then later as a professional seamstress and couch it within the painful, uncomfortable or frightening. My intent is to create thoughtful, arresting work, reliant on layers of narrative within the pieces themselves and within the history each viewer brings.This is time-based work, using old skills. An act of cutting apart, then piecing oneself back together.”

Until Meissner’s exhibit, I hadn’t thought of all the women doing what had been traditionally labeled as women’s work, and I had certainly never questioned why their loving and painstaking efforts were not frequently exhibited in museums, but often the work of bawdy or charlatan men was. Why were Robert Rauschenberg or Ava Hesse, or Clifford Still celebrated artists, but my afghan-making grandmother not? My grandma’s crochet was made from a place of love and care. I am not sure I can say the same for Rauschenberg or legions of others like him. Why did I spend years in graduate school studying the work of modernist men—artists and designers—that now, we know was fraudulent or fraught with mistakes and misjudgment? Meanwhile, many of the female observers like Jane Jacobs—left out of the party by the boys—turned out, largely, to be correct and far more in tune with what humanity actually needs, as opposed to what we think we need but actually only desire.

A few years later, I was excited to stop into the Dyson store in San Francisco to see what they were showing, to lust over the products that I wanted to buy, but that were too expensive for me to actually acquire. Walking around the store, I proudly thought… I have that fan! And, I have that fan! And, I have that exact same vacuum cleaner! And that one too! And, oh. I own everything that is on display in the Dyson store. And in fact, in a few instance, I own multiples of the items on display. It was a shock and a wake up call.

Slowly, I took note that my obsession with Design (capital D) changed. I was increasingly disturbed, and later disgusted by Monocle magazine and its relentless message that whatever I was doing was inferior, outmoded, outdated. Monocle just wanted me to buy more stuff. Junk I didn’t need. In her book, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarchek makes reference to magazines, “that’s just what the color magazines do … they tell us what we’ve failed to do, where we’ve messed up, what we’ve neglected; ultimately they set us on ourselves, filling us with self-contempt.” She punctuated the slipperiness of my vague sentiment, exactly.

The following year, I went to a conference and one of the sponsoring firms gave me a backpack. It is a Hershel backpack and very well made, but it was completely free. It ended my life-long obsession/quest to find the right bag. The plastic bins in my attic are testament to my failed attempts to find the right bag. The rationalization, as I was buying the bags was familiar: this bag will change my life! I would envision myself using the bag, being ultra-organized, and toting it around with every possible item tucked into it’s own little pocket, prepared for every eventuality. Headache? I could fish out Advil and aspirin. Hungry? I have a power bar in it’s own little compartment. Chapped lips? I have Burt’s Bees tucked away right here, next to my favorite fountain pen… that just leaked. I can now say, no bag, no pen, no piece of clothing is ever going to change my life or prepare me for every eventuality that might occur.

I came home from that conference ashamed of my secret bag collection and further ashamed of the sheer amount of “stuff” that I owned. Why did I have so many pieces of clothing? I have enough to stock a small store, in a range of colors, sizes, styles, and price points. Doubtful that I will ever wear it all in my remaining days on this earth.

Over the years, i have realized that we can pretty much buy anything we want, whenever we want, from wherever we went. I read an essay by Joan Westenberg about capitalism that touched on a number of thoughtful points and that captured my own observations more saliently than I ever could; this endless cycle of buying is “a behemoth that thrives on relentless growth, often at a devastating cost. under its reign, we witness the widening chasm of inequality, where the affluent soar on the wings of wealth while the less fortunate are left to the whims of an unforgiving market.” I would add that the endless cycle of consumption and buying has made us lazy, sustainably out of touch with our immediate environment, and in constant need and danger of needing a company or its products to help us to merely survive, while pumping us full of garbage and chemicals and dismantling our social structure all in the quest of greater profit and influence. We see this in nearly every corner of our lives through fast fashion creating the illusion that cheap clothes are the answer, through medicine and pharmaceuticals convincing us that any number of human ailments are eminently treatable by a tablet or cream (that may cause any number of new ailments), through the planned obsolesce of consumer goods, and even through the endless march toward sustainability that moves us ever further away from a sustainable world. It seems, no one notices that the push toward electric vehicles and the conversion from natural gas appliances to electric equivalents leaves behind an immeasurable mountain of trash. If indeed automobile manufacturers and governments were truly concerned about energy independence and converting our cars and appliances from fossil to more sustainable fuels, why have they not created a conversion kit for existing products? Why have conversions not become a cottage industry? Because the march toward sustainability writ by corporate sponsors is just planned obsolesce packaged in a more sophisticated way to sell us more stuff we don’t really need or want. Again, it is sociopathic and cleptopathic.

This all comes at a cost and that cost is significant. Westenberg goes on to write, “our planet, the cradle of life itself, is treated as a commodity, its resources extracted with reckless abandon, its delicate ecosystems pushed to the brink for profit. in its unbridled form, capitalism has ushered in an era where consumerism is king, and possessions are the yardstick of success. in this relentless pursuit of more, we have lost sight of what truly matters — our connection to each other, our harmony with nature, and our sense of purpose beyond material gains.” this, as a result, leads to that we are “trapped in a cycle that glorifies wealth and power, ignoring the human cost it entails — a cost paid in the currency of social injustice, environmental degradation, and a deep sense of existential void.”

Similarly, Orsola de Castro’s outstanding book, Loved Clothes Last helped me to understand that design and consumption are choices we make. Like Westenberg, de Castro underscores that people are behind the items that are made for us, even when they are mass produced. I recalled, after reading the book, that for years, I would question my students “Who made your shirt?” They would look at the label and respond “Calvin Klein!” Or “DKNY” or some other corporate behemoth. I would then rephrase the question and ask, “I didn’t ask what company made your shirt, I asked “who,” and reminded them that years of branding, subversive marketing, and dangerous advertising had—inside of a generation—made us disregard the person behind “who” and think of “who” in terms of corporations and brands. This is disturbing especially when coupled with a learned inability to create. That is, in my grandparents and parents generation, every individual would be capable of sustainable repair or creativity: sewing a dress from an old table cloth, gerryrigging the engine of a car to get it to work. Now, if there’s not an app on a smartphone that does it for us or a company that can sell it to us, we are out of luck. Too many people have lost the basic skill sets that allow us to advance as society. We have become helpless and captive hostages of corporate design. When you think of all the things we buy directly: goods, services, food… and the things we buy indirectly through selling our data online and to marketers, the behemoth is, indeed, consuming us and the “design” industry that works in the service of capitalism is killing us.

True designers, ultimately, are problem seekers and problem solvers not problem creators. It’s high time that we re-examine and re-visit the reason d’être that fuels design. It is time for us as designers, as educators, and as humans to flush our design schools of the hustle mentality that has been subversively seeded by corporations and businesses, to tackle some of the biggest problems in our world. It is time for us, as designers, to stop the endless cycle of consumption that is, indeed, consuming us, our creativity, our lives, and our planet.

I would argue that over the last 100 years, design has democratized to the degree that design ensures conformity, not the freedom of individuality. So, the time has come to pivot, to change, and to embrace re-recreating rather than simply making.

With that, instead of simply “designing" something for you, I will endeavor to be a re-volutionary: to sustain, to re-make, to repair, to re-use, to re-envision, to re-fresh with our ingenuity and by our own hands in a way that takes care and time… with you, specifically, in mind. The idea isn’t to create what can be endlessly replicated, but to capture and appreciate the qualities that make every object, environment, and experience unique, such that there is not another like it in the world. Each is unique, like you. A celebration of humanity and its triumph over hyper-industrialization, rabid capitalism, and ceaseless consumption. It’s time for design to change the world again, but this time, for the better.

Plastic pollution in the air. Makes you wonder, if plastic was floating around in the air (instead of the oceans and ground)… would we feel differently about it?

An afternoon at Niagara Falls.

I’m surprised many people want Oasis tickets. BBC Radio 4 seems to have been talking about it for days. I just don’t get it and wish I understood why peoplele want to go to see live music and live sports. I avoid both like the plague. crowds + noise = no thank you.

I think that @joanwestenberg.medium.com has the ability to read my thoughts. I can think of something and then 2 days later, she publishes an intensely well-crafted essay about it. It’s like that algorithm thing when stuff starts popping up in social media… only this is useful and meaningful.