Originally posted to Scintillating Bullshit Version Two in August 2006.

When I get done with school, I am going to start a design firm. I am going to get a small business loan and rent out a bunch of space in one of those midtown office buildings, with the shitty Hermann Miller gray carpet and the drop ceilings. I will then hire a bunch of youthful unknowns from RISD, CalArts, MCAD, Van Eyck Academy, RCA, and whatever the fuck. The deal is going to be as follows: if you work for me, you can use a computer, but it has to be THE MAINFRAME. Cuz, see, I will buy a mainframe¹ and install it, and as for computers, that will be it, in terms of what is allowed in the office. Powerbooks (or rather, excuse me, "Mac Book Pros") will get checked at the door, much like the bag-check arrangement at The Strand and other such commercial outlets. So if you are a guy, you will invariably look like this:

... and if you're a girl, you'll look like this:

... I should mention at this point that these images are not at all intended to suggest gender-normative role designations; sometimes, if you're a guy, you'll change the tapes, and sometimes girls will use the light pen to draw shit. The pursuit of such activities will be a product of what needs to get done in the workplace, rather than whether you have a dick or a pussy, essentially. Just so you know. Yes.

Anyway. By enforcing such constraints, I will conjure the eternal spirit of Paul Rand,² who will fuse his undead powers with my own mortal body in exchange for avenging his disgrace and slaying the dickfaces responsible for the perversion of the UPS logo. After this, I will be unstoppable, and I will rule the design world with an iron fist, sitting atop my humming mainframe, cackling to myself in the dark.

Anyway that's one career option, I might go to law school instead, who knows.

David Foster Wallace is the second coming of Christ. SRSLY. I don't mean it in some technical Revelations/Dharma-Wheel/Ten-Plagues sense — not like some grandly coded metaphor involving four horsemen and some magic bread that turns into fishes or anything like that. If I was reading an essay that kicked off with "David Foster Wallace is the second coming of Christ" I expect jokes to follow, and to not have to take that first sentence seriously. Even it's some crazy Andy Kaufman type shit I should still be somehow net-entertained at the end. But really, srsly. For myself, and for a lot of people in my generation, Wallace was like Jesus cubed, in certain ways.

Yes. Lemme explain. So yeah in terms of contemporary Western mythology, the timeline goes like this: before your Jesus guy came around, the big God entity was typically described as a sort of paternalistic, top-down asshole.¹ I'll gloss over this point because you've heard assholic examples of stuff He has said, like out of some preacher's mouth or emblazoned on some Tea Party member's home-made and grammatically suspect protesting sign. We can all cite many examples to demonstrate how God was a incorrigibly domineering fuckface. This is because monotheism keys on an imbalance of power so absolute it is incomprehensible — the God figure wasn't paternalistic in the robe-bald-bearded Sistine Chapel Hollywood visual sense, but that was the best way at the time of its conception, really, to metaphortically describe God's totally transcendant station of control over people.

When Jesus was around, language had not evolved a relaxed enough set of integrated control pragma to allow the human race to thrivingly self-manage, as it were. Now, examples illustrating this assertion are probably not as tip-of-the-tongue as the last one, but trust me: I got Bar Mitzvahed and I have read the Torah, a beautiful handmade document in which systems of control are blended seamlessly with the symbols for expressing basic phonemes and the pitches at which they must be sung.

Rationally, if one accepts evolution, one has to look at language as a necessary component for the human species' survival; otherwise we wouldn't have evolved to be able to speak in the first place. And language, like other complex subsystems, is itself evolving. And so you have to look at the early monotheistic-era descriptions of God as some sort of über-dad, whose image can be invoked for an easy laugh on late-night T.V., came from a more metaphorical way of communicating.

The reason we can take this hokey Family Guy image of God so literally is because of the way the idea of Jesus humanized the idea of God.⁵ The Jesus notion makes God into a bivalent thing, with two separate sub-entities. Actually three if you count the "holy ghost", which is like some sort of superego-equals-ego-plus-id "shell god" entity, I don't really know. Either way, Jesus riding to town meant that ol' Sherrif God wasn't the only heat-packing hard-drinking sonofabitch around. That is a horrid metaphor I just used, but it's accurate in terms of the power-dyanmic shift I'm talking about, and the fact that it is horrible will hopefully serve to illustrate how metaphorical language can shift around on you.⁶

The power shift wasn't immediate. After Jesus was settled on as the agreed Son of God, we ended up dumping the tyrannical-overlord idea for the picture-perfect image of God as a bivalent, forgiving shepard, one who despite his divinity could feel real human pain, and was therefore a real person who you (yes, you) can fundamentally relate to. He Died For Your Sins, and all that. But so the languages of the time were products of a monotheistic control system, in which the God role was still the über-asshole. That contradiction is why we were left with the literalism of passion plays and their emphasis on Jesus' pain and suffering throughout his ignoble end as, like, a plus — an idea which is easiest to comprehend when you know firsthand how sadistically, stiflingly restrictive the monotheistic way is in contrast.

David Foster Wallace knew, firsthand, that smart people could feel pain! Smarter people are better at not seeing the simple universal truth in the notion of Jesus's "pain" — smartypantses like Wallace, who had far more elastic lingustic firepower⁷ than their church-going counterparts, and could use it to easily convince themselves into a life of psychic agony with logical-sounding rationalizations. Smart people can be in terrible pain without knowing it because they out-think their own limbic systems, and that is a fucking problem really.

Really — if some 90-IQ semi-literate janitor guy can stop doing drugs and renounce psychic agony why couldn't Wallace? You do know that he was a severe addict for quite a while in like his late 20s and early 30s. He was very much a cross between Gately and Hal⁸ in his actual non-fiction life, before going on the worst kind of antidepressants.⁹ Writing Infinite Jest and many other stories let him actively take a role in illustrating that addiction. He provided a very compelling image, for us readers, of AA (and specifically Boston's brand of AA) as an alternative to the tastelessness doldrums of post-Jesus religious philosophy.

In fact he didn't just provide it, he sexed it up. His unstoppablie literary powers were brought to bear on a task that sounds impossible: he gave us an AA that is both viscerally and conceptually awesome. Tell me you didn't read Infinite Jest and it did not make you actually hang out at Don Gately's table at the post-Reconfiguration Allston diner he'd go to with his sponsor after meetings. Now I have been to enough AA meetings, and sat next to enough varyingly sober characters on Boston public transit, to be averse to that social scenario on the basis of putative ambient smell alone — but Wallace went to many more AA meetings than myself. Reading Infinite Jest gets you into the inscrutable and counterintuitive Zen of AA culture in a very comfortable way. As the narrator of the book, loaded up with relatable implicit characterization, Wallace himself is Virgilesque. His heartfelt peans to AA's tableaux of pain are constructed with abundant conversational artifice, guiding and protecting his audience to things that are hard to understand.

In Infinite Jest, he repeatedly shows and tells us that intelligent people can fuck themselves up royally by being too smart, which is an irritating postulate for smart people — people's whose identity is tied to their intelligence¹¹ — to even consider. You might just think this point is but one path through IJ's dark garden of subtexts. But think about it: admitting the practical fact of the failure of raw intelligence to win out over human pain, in the battlefiend of his mind and what he could see around him, was like the ultimate defeat. He was a nerd of such all-encompassing Biblical proportions¹² that logical prowess and rationality were horribly overvalued, and the extraordinary esteem for these traits was worth his life. Really — he was almost chivalrously devoted to the notion of absolute rationality,¹³ to the point where he had to die by logic if he couldn't live by it.

He couldn't think his way out of killing himself and he tried so terribly hard.

His final release, the thought that allowed him to take his own life, must have been something where he realized he had to kill himself to logically prove that logically proving to kill yourself was a bad idea. Like, fiendishly bad in the Christian Devil sense that letting yourself live in pain through rationalization is easy, and sort of in our nature despite the fact that we know better. That Being Clever was a deadly sin, a nasty complement to Despair or or Sloth or Acedia,¹⁴ hiding insidiously in plain sight, disguised as a good character trait to have.

I know what you're thinking. It's probably something along the lines of "that's a disgusting thing to say", or maybe "you're insane to think it's funny and/or reasonable to talk about DFW like this". But I miss the power of old-school religion, and not because I was born in the wrong era. The language is different and the control-structures within it are decentralized, yeah, but the power to move people is still there in the things that we say and write.

So fine, yeah, maybe it is crazy for me to say that when I think of David Foster Wallace — his work and his life, and their endings — as the second coming. But why not really? Jesus was just some blabbermouth some Romans nailed to a tree until his buddies Matthew and Luke deified him on paper, but that totally worked out, we got to humanize God a little. And look, I'm no fan of all the hypocritical killing, suborning, and torment that was subsequently carried out in God's name thereafter — but it's not like I'm talking about either Jesus or Wallace having the magical ability to stop people from being assholes. That is impossible. Neither of them ever had that kind of power, but I say that both of them did demonstrate ways that our collective societal assholicism can be less painful to deal with. Like in general.

And so yeah. So While I'm interested in the evangelism of my theory here, I'm not that idea of starting a church. I'm sure I'm drinking enough to justify going to AA, though — a fact which I find kind of backwardsly exciting. AA may be non-denominational, but its decentralized¹⁶ nature and emphasis on patience and tolerance could have only evolved in Ano Domini, out of the multivalent language of post-monotheistic culture. I think maybe AA would be a place I might be able to get people talking about what is spiritually important in Wallace's work. At the very least, it's worth a try and I'm sure they're quite inured to nutball stuff like people inventing religions and what have you.

Yeah — maybe if I get enough hardcore AA members to read Wallace, they'll take care of writing gospels and coming up with rituals and stuff. I don't need to be in charge, it'd be fulfilling enough to help everyone else get the Language of the Second Coming off the ground; I'll hang out in the back of the room, making sure the coffee pots are full and the ashtrays are empty, candles are for St. Gately and St. Hal, and there's always someone around to nonjudgemenally listen to an anonymous recollection of depravity.

In an interview with Ellen Lupton in 1994,¹ Michael Rock said something about meaning coming from "the forms of design itself", and mentioned that the aesthetics of letterpress having class identity encoded within. I assume by "the forms of design", he was referring to the relationship between process and meaning, rite?

Similarly, my drafting critic last fall in the BEB said that each drawing methodology (orthographic, isometric, perspective et cetera) can tell a story, and by privledging different viewpoints, you change the story. Seems obvious when I write that point down here, but it was quite an illuminating notion for me to hear, at the time.

But so this weekend, I was having a drink with Laura on the roof of the Gansevoort Hotel, kicking off a >48h bender of idiotic decadence and intoxication, and I was amused that I could see some brilliantly clean examples from the typology described in Steven Holl's Pamphlet Architecture number 5, The Alphabetical City.³ I've always been sort of a fan of this book⁴, probably just because it addresses urbanism in terms of type, however formally.

I could only see this shit, however, cuz I was on the roof of a pricey hotel, many stories above the buildings in question. Generally this is the case with any sort of planometric design: you have to be relatively quite high up in order to have a viewpoint that tells you what is planometrically what — unless you yourself are the architect.

My mom used to be the head of the dance department at Wellesley College, where she worked for almost 20 years. I grew up playing around on its campus, which really is quite elysian and gorgeous. I was always struck, specifically, by the distinctly non-elysian science center.⁵ As a kid, I was drawn to its labyrinthine Alice-in-Wonderlandishness. I would amuse and occasionally confound my mother by getting purposefully lost in there, because it was deliciously disorienting.

I revisited the Wellesley science center when I was in college, and I was amazed at how completely incoherent it seemed to my newly designophilic eye. Bridgelike pathways went everywhere,⁶ the signage was kind of nuts, and you couldn't get to where you thought you could get when you looked around. Not that there's anything wrong with that, really, but hey.

My friend, one of my mom's students, knew how to get up onto the roof, tho, so we did that in short order. When you looked down into the building through the one of the skylights, it suddenly made a great deal more sense, visually. The crazy bridges were actually radially arranged around a central core. Programmatically separate areas were deliniated cleanly. And so forth.

(At this point in my life I had much to learn of bullshit design language, it should be noted, so I didn't say anything about programmatically separate areas or radial fuckshit. I probably blurted, "oh so now it makes sense" or somesuch.)

So yeah, you could say that planocentrism (a word I just made up just now) is a class thing, no? And a problem, I think. The idea that a program diagram can become a plan is so tempting, given the nature of drafting technique (including, of course, the methodology enforced by contemporary CAD systems). But people end up looking up at buildings way more often than they look down on them, cuz of gravity and whatnot... one could postulate a class gradient that follows elevation from sea level linearly,⁷ as well.

Indeed. As I ranted about two or so years ago,⁸ these starchitects enjoy their helicopter rides.⁹ At that level, one can free-associate with elaborate metaphor, and talk about a monstrous idea like a city as if it was a painting. Such thinking is constrained by the viewpoint, and makes little sense outside of the narrow socioeconomic strata the thinker is operating in. The upshot, then, is that we get coffeetable books filled with baroque but useless theory, and designers who earnestly believe that they are operating somewhere outside their own navel.

Not like I'm any better, of course; I was up at the rooftop bar having an overpriced mojito with the rest of 'em. I'm just sayin'.

This piece first appeared, in more or less this form, in the Fall 2006 issue of Work in Progress,¹ a quarterly magazine published by the RISD architecture department. It ran alongside a companion essay by the great David Sokol.²

People often think that bullshitting is the same as lying. This can’t be the case, though… at your last critique, was that long-winded rant you received about “interstitial dualities” or “recontextualization” a lie? Not necessarily. If you got out a dictionary and dutifully parsed out all the branching convoluted sentences, you might find that the nonsense people concoct at these things is actually factually correct. The strain of bullshit that percolates in schools like ours is more about confusion than it is about outright deception.

You can, of course, use bullshit to obfuscate a lie. When James Frey, the now-infamous Oprah-anointed memoirist, was recently found to have fabricated his shady past to make himself seem more interesting, that was a lie. But when called on by Larry King, he said things like “95 percent of my book is true” and “all memoirs are subjective”, citing numerous examples. These things were arguably true, but they were also total bullshit.

I started systematically studying bullshit at RISD shortly after I arrived in the graduate graphic design program. I would be at a crit, and someone would say “Yes, I’m fascinated and inspired by the notion of interconnected linear elements.” Why couldn’t they just say “I like lines” and be done with it? And moreover, how could a rational (and most likely talented) human being say such a thing with a straight face?

My first project was to compile all the bullshit words and phrases I could find into a bullshit dictionary. This was easy and fun; by including commentary, I could finally say what I really thought about such vapid terms like “innovation” or “emergent behavior”. The book is shaping up to be a decent field guide to navigating some of the nonsense we’re exposed to daily in art and design circles.

It became clear, however, that the bullshit goes far deeper than mere words and phrases. There are more complex patterns of obfuscating nonsense at work, and they vary greatly between departments and subjects. For example, one of the first things the RISD graphic design curriculum beats out of its new members is the use of most subjective descriptive terms, like “beautiful” or “disgusting.” So you end up with GD students making bizarrely pseudoscientific proclamations like “This generates a fantastic visceral response.”

That’s just in GD, though. I wouldn’t suggest trotting out such speech-pattern chestnuts over in the BEB. In architecture, you’ll want to talk of systematized spatial logic, of mutant typologies, and of sympathetic abstraction, with maybe a few Italian vocab words like pallazo thrown in to seal the deal. And both of these bullshit methods are entirely different from your average discussion in textiles, where the use of the word “beautiful” is not only permitted but pervasive.

It’s a bloody mess. But it’s our mess, indeed, and I want to help. I’m gathering data like this by visiting critiques in as many departments as I can. I record these critiques on tape, and then transcribe them, allowing the patterns of speech to emerge on paper. The book I end up with from this material will provide a direct window into the bizarro-world of linguistic alchemy that we seem to be brewing.

See original content here

yeah I'm losing my edge
I'm losing my edge
the kids
are coming up from behind

I'm losing my edge
I'm losing my edge
to the kids
from yale
and from sciarch

but I was there

I was there in 1898
I was there at the first punchcutting of aksidenz-grotesk

I'm losing my edge
I'm losing my edge
to the kids
whose footsteps I hear
when they pin up their work

I'm losing my edge
to the internet seekers
who can tell me
every draftsman
from every good firm
from 1962 to 1978

I'm losing my edge
I'm losing my edge
to all the kids
in tokyo and berlin
to the art school brooklynites
with little moleskines
and borrowed nostalgia for unbuilt saint petersburg

I'm losing my edge
I'm losing my edge

but I was there

I was there
I was there

I'm losing my edge
I'm losing my edge

I can hear the footsteps
every night at the computer

but I was there
I was there in 1975 at the first publication of the push pin graphic
I was working on the kerning, with much patience
I was there when martin venezky started up his first firm
I said "don't do it that way, you'll never make a dime"
I was there
I was the first guy showing lot/ek
to the deconstructivists
I showed 'em at cooper union
everybody thought it was crazy
we all know, I was there

I was there

I've never been wrong
I used to work at phaidon
I saw everything before everyone
I was there at weimar with johannes itten
I was there at the GSD during great debate between christopher alexander and peter eisenman
I woke up face on the keyboard after final GSAPP crits in 1997

but I'm losing my edge
to bettter looking people
with better ideas
and more talent
who are actually really really nice

I'm losing my edge

I heard you have a bookshelf with every good book
every great poster by tschischold
all the modernist hits
all of the archigram maquettes
I heard you have a test print of every mike cina poster
on epson semimatte
I heard you have an autographed copy
of every koolhaas book from 75, 89, 98
I heard you have an online scan archive
of every good art nouveau lithograph
and another flat file from de stijl

I hear you are buying a drafting table
and a bone folder
and throwing your computer out the window
because you want to make something real
you want to make a gehry coffetable book

I hear that you and your firm have sold your CAD workstations
and bought powerbooks
I hear that you and your firm have sold your powerbooks
and bought CAD workstations

I hear that everybody that you know is more relevant that everybody that I know

max bill, griffo, jenson, OMA, louis sullivan, HHR, milt glaiser, cecil balmond and arup, SOM, kusama, bonnard, gordon matta-clark, widen and kennedy, superbad, didot, ogilvy, paul rand, richard neutra, agfa monotype, josef albers, herzog and demuron, skolos/wedell, bucky fuller, taki 183, jeremy bernstien, john maeda, banksy, bodoni, richard meier, jessica helfland, designers republic, dave eggers, moholy-nagy, mies van der rohe (LESS IS MORE!), rafael vinoly, sanford kwinter, fontshop, LARS MUELLER PUBLISHERS!! gregor schneider, mutabor, mariko mori, die gestalen verlag
font bureau
art deco
karel martens
karel martens
karel martens
karel martens

we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
we all know what you really want
ok stop

This piece was originally published on the ineffable SpeakUp. Mr. Vit sensibly elected to cut out the discussion of E-Prime — this is the original text; note 1 contains the previously unpublished segment, for my cognitive-linguist nerds.

I decided, recently, to have a go at excising the word "just" from my vocabulary. Not in the adjectival usage ("just" as in "justice") nor in the noun ("just" as in "a large-bellied pot with handles", according to the OED) but as an adverb. Oh, you know, I'll just write this article on language minutiae and graphic design. That's what I mean. I use it all the time, in that casually dismissive sense. So do most of my peers and contemporaries; it's almost as common as the plague of "likes" with which my generation is constantly upsetting our more grammar-conscious elders.

I'm not worried about offending them, though, or anyone else. By eliminating the dismissive adverbial form of "just" from my vocabulary, I'm trying to hack my own brain.¹

It's like how, if you say "I just have to design these four posters, and just work out the type treatment for the whole series" to yourself out loud, your eye-rolling is somehow implicit. You just have to do these things; they're not even worthy of discussion, really. But the same sentence without the "just" sounds far more monumental: "I have to design four posters, and work out the type treatment for the whole series." That sounds like a far more serious endeavor to me.

The reason this is particularly important to me, a graphic designer, is that this inherently dismissive attitude can short-circuit the iterative processes that we use to make things awesome. For the purposes of this essay, I would define awesomeness as a state characterized by a rich holistic intertwining of style, content, and meaning. An awesome graphic work is the sort that you might stare at for a few tense moments, upon first seeing it, before quietly uttering "fuck yeah!" under your breath.

Consider, for example, 2x4's entry in the Urban Forest Project's poster contest. The buttons on this page that allow visitors to download the poster or order a totebag printed with it are laughable, as the poster is a blank white sheet of nothing. Ostensibly, this poster is "about the space between the trees". Is this cute in a snarky, in-joke sort of way? Perhaps. Is it awesome? I would say no.

There are many posters on the urbanforestproject.org website that are either formally elaborate, or technically so, or both ... examples I am partial to the entries by Alan Dye and Petter Ringbom. These are awesome, as are many others. Some of the less complex posters are no less awesome; consider the entries by David Reinfurt or Nikki Chung.

I would consider some of the entries that fall back on default modes to be generally less awesome. Whether the default mode in question is unique to the designer's house style (see Paula Scher's) or specific to the means of graphic production (see COMA's), these posters invariably end up as one-liners. You read or see them, and that's it, you're done.

But the 2x4 example epitomizes anti-awesomeness in the most thorough fashion. It is, I would submit, the ultimate product of the mentality fostered by the overuse of "just". You can readily imagine the smirk on the author's face when he or she decided to send in a blank PDF file, knowing full well that their authority as an agent of a highly regarded design firm would guarantee the blind acceptance of their imbecilic pun into the projects' pantheon.

I don't mean to single out the Urban Forest Project, but the fact that it collects such a wide range of designer-authors under one aegis makes it an ideal context in which to compare awesomeness, and test for the evidence of "just" default-mode thinking. If you're familiar enough with a given aesthetic, you can spot the "just" stuff easily, in any portfolio. Experimental Jetset, the Amsterdam-based design collective, has practically made a career of "just" employing default typefaces, monotonous color palettes, and other such deadpan decisions.

I want to point out at this point that "just" design is not necessarily bad design, and awesome design is not necessarily good. Awesomeness can suck you in, but the design in question must hang together as a whole, or it will lose you, and the awesomeness will have been wasted. And sometimes the "just" move is the right move, as the signature type treatments of iconic artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbra Kruger indicate. In these cases, the simplistic repetition of the default type style in question becomes synonymous with the persona of the artist, and so encapsulates their message. (In design, we call this "branding.")

I propose that there is a perfect fulcrum between the opposing forces of absolute "just" and absolute awesomeness. At this point, the rote application of a default approach is harmoniously tempered by the rigors and context-dependant overtures that characterize awesomeness. Artists and designers who have reached this magic singularity in their practices can be said to have a ™.

A fine example of a ™ practitioner is M/M Paris, the French design studio chaired by Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustniak. M/M Paris' aesthetic is highly distinctive and contiguous throughout their work, but they completely eschew the bog-standard default styles, having created their own sort of "just" approach using the methodology of awesomeness. Many of their posters contain hand-drawn type, and the letterforms themselves often have line weights, contrast values, and other parameters that are notably common to many of M/M Paris' works. But in each case, these letterforms are manifest for their given context, and their given context only.

We can refer to this hybridized approach as M/M Paris™. It is a systematic default style that can be applied in a veneer, but a veneer that can only be concocted (and summarily decocted) by M/M Paris themselves, as only they retain the distinct strains of awesome that are essential for the styles' formulation.

Many of the established upper echelons of graphic designs' canon are ™ practitioners. The likes of Ogilvy™, Landor™, Wieden+Kennedy™, Pentagram™, Vignelli Associates™, and their ilk, continue to land lucrative contracts. They have the same appeal to their clients as does a company like Ford™, or Charles Schwab™, or Maytag™… the breath and scope of their respective histories have achieved the critical mass necessary to sustain their ™ equilibrium. Likewise, relatively younger independent entities such as Fons Hickmann™, Tomato™, Aesthetic Apparatus™, Graphic Thought Facility™, Harmen Liemburg™, et cetera, all are nimble enough to maintain the trappings of ™ness at small sizes.

At both ends of the spectrum, their work is both serially recognizable and utterly distinctive. It is important to note, however, that these luminaries™, as well as their up-and-coming subordinates™ with less name-brand recognition, have all historically been delivered to the nirvana of the ™ state through paths lined with hard-earned awesomeness. The dichotomy of "just" and awesome is an inequitable one, and the spiraling gravitic arms surrounding the ™ state only spin in one direction.

This is the primary reason I want to purge the actual word "just" from my speech. As Orwell postulated, if I can't think it, I can't do it. And so it will go. This act will constitute but a tiny fraction of the journey down Awesome Street, but it's high time I got going. I just have to fix my brain first, and I'll be right there.

The title here is true, and this is a true story. I used to love noodling around with electronics. It didn't matter what, as long as it was "electronics", and "noodling". This was when I was between, like, 6 and 12 years of age, mostly. I would gather junk TVs and stereos in my basement "workshop" and dissect them. I didn't really know what I was doing; the best I could do was make funny noise come out of speakers, or make the lights light up on some component thing. I found old telephones especially entertaining, because of the easy-to-decode colored wiring and such.

So but yeah. I had a friend named Ara Kenian. He was my first nerd buddy, in retrospect; he would come over and we'd rewire things together. He was much better at that stuff than I was (I think he eventually went to MIT for engineering, or somesuch) and we'd have a lot of fun, because he'd try to establish some legit project for us to work on, and I would fuck it up egregiously, and so we'd degenerate into nonsensical babble, which I guess is what you do when you are a poorly socialized nerd child, as we both most definately were. Yeah.

Here, in fact, is an example of how nerdy I was at the time: when I got my allowance, I would take it to the local hardware store, and buy needlenose pliers, or cable TV connectors, or shit like that. Not candy, or whatever it was that you normal 8-year-olds blew your allowance on. I bought electronic parts. That's how I usually put it: parts. As in, Mom, I cleaned up my whole room, can I go to Mass Hardware and get some parts now, pleeeaase?? It was kind of ridiculous.

If I was a really really good kid, and did everything I was supposed to, and I was really lucky, I would get a trip to the dumpsters behind the Sony service center. That was a special treat for me, maybe once every two months I'd get to go.

But yeah, so at one point I got an oscilloscope. Oscilloscopes like the one I am talking about looked like this:

... I am sure that these days, you go and get some $40 USB dongle thing, and then pow, your computer can do everything an old-skool oscilloscope could do, AND MORE. But in those days, oscilloscopes were still pretty much the shit. You could literally SEE what was going on in your wires, basically, and this was the missing piece of the puzzle for me to actually do some sort of actual electronics stuff. I was very excited.

But what happened was this: the next time I was at Mass Hardware blowing my allowance on parts, I ran into an apparently like-minded individual. I struck up some sort of conversation with this guy, Joe, who appeared to be my age, and who was also there with his mom, on a quest for parts. At least, he appeared to be my age, but he kept saying that he was 15, even though he was my height, which was short for an 8-year-old I think. So we were talking about parts and electronics and other such shit, and I mentioned (no doubt with pride) that I had an oscilloscope.

It was shortly after this that he invitied me to his house, which was coincedentally located not two blocks away from my house. He was charming and friendly, but most importantly, he said I could come and take as many parts from his basement workshop.

After somehow winning my mom over to this idea, I went over to Joe's. I was, quite frankly bowled over: while my parents had confined my workshop to a small corner of our basement, Joe had clearly taken over the entirety of his, much to the audiable chagrin of his mom. Joe, in fact, was constantly quibbling with her, and would occasionally use his parts as weapons: he had constructed a bunch of ridiculously overpowered amplifiers, whose sole employ seemed to be the squelching of his mom's aggrivated comments. So we tromped around through the basement, through canyons formed of shelves of parts, past workbenches covered with floral masses of wires, and under enormous subwoofers hung from the raw joists in the cieling with spare wires. And Joe had a big paper bag, into which he would throw all manner of interesting parts.

"Vacuum tubes? Sure, have a bunch!"

"You want this power supply? Here, have a power supply. It's brand new, works, yeah. Take it!"

"Here, I can give you these phone bells. Oh, you like phone parts? I have more of them in this box. Go ahead!"

It was my dream come true. It did not bother me that Joe would occasionally put down his boxes of parts, and grab around me for a hug, saying things like "It's great to have met you, buddy pal." Nor did I find his mom's squalking protests at all amiss; after all, we both giggled when the speaker noise overpowered her. But I do remember him saying, about a third of the way through, "So I'll bring these over, and trade you for the oscilloscope, right, buddy?" And although that was a big deal, definately, I assumed that I had promised him such, and I nodded enthusiastically.

And that's what happened. He came over, and left me with the parts, and asbsconded with my oscilloscope. After he left, I realized that the trade was hardly equitable, and that he had clearly got the better part of the deal. But that was okay, even, right? I mean, he was my new friend, and I'd get to play with the oscilloscope over at his workplace, just like he could play with my all my phone stuff and my nonsensically reconfigured tape decks. Right?

But so: Two days later, Joe rang my doorbell unexpectedly. He didn't say much. I let him in, and he went right down to my basement workshop. He packed up most of the parts he'd left me with, including the power supply and the totally awesome vacuum tubes, and left without saying goodbye.

And I knew then that I would NEVAR SEE HIM, OR MY OSCILLOSCOPE, AGAIN!!!! (sob)

So there you have it: a midget stole my oscilloscope. I think Ara came over after that, and we laughed it off and built something baroque and nonfunctional out of the leftovers. And then I forgot about the entire episode until like a year ago, when I somehow drunkenly recounted this story for some friends, and my pal Jed shouted, "A midget stole your oscilloscope!" And so. I don't mind using the offensive term "midget" vis a vis this guy, because he is a dirty thief and a manipulator of children. Yeah!

So. LET:

architecture = 80's pop-rock,
graphic design = hip hop,

THEN:

type design = turntablism,
interior architecture = late 80's alt-rock,
(... e.g. Atelier van Lieshout = The Pixies)
book design = the Wu-Tang Clan,
poster design = Tupac,
news/editorial design = Biggie,
web design = 50 Cent,
info design = the Ultramagnetic MC's,
letterpress poster art = Snoop Dogg,

THEREFORE:

Design*Sponge = Russell Simmons.

AND:

urban design and urban planning = 90's crybaby alt-rock,
contemporary art = American Idol,
furniture design = jazz,
textile design = The cross-genre continuum consisting of everyone ever cited or otherwise referenced by LCD Soundsystem, Mr. Murphy et al and his close associates, and all those who will come after them and rip them off,
apparel design = electroclash.

SO THEN:

package design = the Fugees,
contemporary calligraphy = the Digable Planets,
Felice Varini = Autechre,
exhibit design = Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys,

BUT THEN, LET:

structural engineers = rock drummers,
(... e.g. Cecil Balmond = Lars Ulrich, etc)
CAD = MIDI,
O-CAD = MAX/MSP,
BIM and parametric systems = Ableton Live,

THEREFORE:

Frank Gehry = the Postal Service,

AND:

Hektor = Atom and his Package.

FURTHERMORE:

critical theory = reggae,

THEN:

digital ethnography = Shaggy,
contemporary video art = Buju (or maybe Anthony B),
net.art (quote-unquote) = Bob Marley,
architectural theory = Rusted Root (or Dave Matthews, or maybe even 311, or some shit like that),
media theory = Hootie and the Blowfish,
Fluxus = the T-Connection (circa the reign of Kool Herc).

AND THEN:

motion graphics = the Black-Eyed Peas,
just video and film editing = just Fergie,
database design = the Game,
web-nerd non-design stuff = the rest of G-Unit in general,

THUS IT FOLLOWS:

industrial design = delta blues,
magazine design = Octagon-era Kool Keith,
contemporary painting = Will Smith,
contemporary sculpture = Eminem,
Bio-art = Rihanna.

IN CONCLUSION:

DADA = Run-DMC,
surrealism = Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys,
Andy Warhol = Robert Smith,
Marcel Duchamp = Kraftwerk,
Le Corbusier = Paul McCartney,
Robert Moses = John Lennon,
Jane Jacobs = Yoko Ono,
Robert Irwin = Sun-Ra,
Robert Venturi = Led Zeppelin,
Tibor Kalman = Sean Combs,
Benjamin Franklin = Elvis Presley.

This article was originally published in Polish, in the Summer 2007 issue of 2+3D. I do not personally speak Polish, and as such I can't speak to how it read in the end. Like for example, they added an additional lengthy footnote in reference to my use of the acronym "WTF", presumably a translator's note or a profanity recalibration, which I appreciated despite its inscrutability (I couldn't scrute it, at least). In any case is what they were going off of.

If you’re a student in any sort of design school today, you are probably sick to death of hearing people ask "What is design?"¹ Foundation-year art school instructors will frequently trot this one out to kickstart discussions. Arbitrary definitions ("Graphic design is essentially typographic!") will doubtlessly follow, which will be countered by contradictory edge-case refutations ("Oh yeah? What about Tomato and Ed Ruscha, then?") … From there, the conversation will invariably devolve into pointlessly circuitous bickering and the wanton splitting of argumentative hairs, which is great if you’re trying to avoid doing any actual design work. The truth is that the nature of design is tautological: design is what you get when you design².

The rather slipshod arrangement of work at the National Design Triennial, currently up at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York, is like a physical manifestation of the classic "What is design?" conversation. It has the same basic ethos: a bunch of circumlocutions that, while entertaining, fail to assert any useful conclusion. The individuals whose work is on display have produced things of fantastic value, wonder, and scope, but the show incoherently fails to bring them together them in any meaningful way.

The show is called "DESIGN LIFE NOW", with the emphasis squarely on "LIFE". In writing her catalog essay, "Intelligent Design", Barbra Bloemnik goes to great lengths to prove that design equals life, to the point where she compromises basic scientific facts³, as well as her own authority: Bloemnik's starry-eyed praise for the iPod is unflinchingly sycophantic, and the subsequent comparison of the market systems surrounding the iPod to a living organism comes off as a stretch.

Many of the items on display are similarly overreaching in their context: one of the Triennials' entries is Apple itself. It is not specifically the iPod that has been honored with inclusion; nor Jonathan Ive, the oft-lauded designer of the iconic music player; nor the iPod's distinctive advertising campaign. It's just Apple. Apple has been installed down the hall from a few prints of elaborate compositions that Joshua Davis, designer and programmer, had a computer generate for him. Davis' images are rather unremarkable; to judge from the accompanying copy, they were included primarily to illustrate the stochastic processes Davis harnessed in his code. On their own, they are confusingly bland and meandering, and as such they rely on their accompanying texts to connect them back to "DESIGN" and "LIFE". The Apple display is similarly confounding, as its broad scope weakens the link to the Triennials' ostensible theme. I would hazard that these displays would benefit from inversion: simply showing us the iPod (rather than an invocation of the entirety of Apple Computer), and an installation with Davis' software at work (instead of flaccid prints), would make more sense.

The same thing is true about most of the specific selections that comprise this Triennial: a little nudging would considerably reduce the "WTF?" factor. Some of the elements are truly important, like Ben Fry's Processing, the display of which was handled quite well at the show. A product of the MIT Media Lab, Processing is an open-source programming environment, created with artists and designers in mind. The inclusion of a codified framework that gives rise to specific instances of design work was a smart curatorial move. Processing itself needs little introduction, and it easily fits into the show's conceit. Its presence actively broadens the scope of what a gallery show can call "design", and its inclusion naturally extends to the rather fantastic schmorgasbord of visualization work which Fry and his contemporaries have done with the system. The nature of the system itself encapsulates the potency of open-source and collaborative education as forces in contemporary design.

Unfortunately, most of the other entries don't betray this sort of consideration. What is worse is that the entries themselves don't readily speak to one another. That's theoretically OK, as many an interesting story has been concocted from disparate parts. But there is no story here. The show reads like a junk drawer; little apparent curatorial regard shows through for the overarching relationships between the panoply of items on display... relationships that could have been coaxed out and leveraged. Samples of high-tech building materials appear next to some interesting artisanal glasswork, which is next to yet another paean to Chip Kidd's book covers. There is a robotic lobster, and there are cartoons that teach you science pragma, and there is an assuredly comfortable chair (DO NOT TOUCH!), and there is a model of a building that looks interesting. But so what? There are no thematic groups or subgroups at all. The Army's million-dollar AI soldier simulation⁴, for example, is across the room and down the hall a bit from Nicholas Blechman's self-published war-themed book of satirical illustrations. They're not close enough to be engagingly dissonant, nor are they far enough away from each other to create a sense of spectrum. Generally, you're left with more questions than answers: why is this kayak suspended in the room tiled with intricate microprisms? Why are these proposal boards for an unbuilt super-sustainable laboratory complex in the same room as this flagrantly maximalist chandelier? Why are there 10,000 or so⁵ random entries related to OMA, who are based in Rotterdam?⁶

The show's curators and shepherds have attempted to preempt such questions with a bunch of ex-post-facto lexical handwaving. Aside from Bloemnik's aforementioned catalog essay (which screams "LIFE!"), Brooke Hodge ("CRAFT!"), Ellen Lupton ("HUMANS!"), and Matilda McQuaid ("TECHNOLOGY!") all weigh in with an essay of their own, in which they each attempt to shoehorn the show's participants into a specific big idea. Each tract glosses over a fact here and a fact there, in an effort to pull together a cogent theme. Preceding these, an introduction by Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, explains away the inclusion of international starchitects as a strike against the "artificiality" of a curation program focused on American design⁷. That's funny, because that "artificiality" is encoded in the Cooper-Hewitt's stated mandate as "the preeminent museum and educational authority for the study of design in the United States"⁸, to say nothing of its history.

The denial of the museums' past is further echoed in the exhibit's complete and willing disregard for its formal context: hardly any of the work has been integrated into the Cooper-Hewitt's ornate Georgian interiors. The book's first and last four spreads, together with the covers, are all glossy full-bleed amateur-grade photographs of various designers in their workspaces. This works out a lot better than it does at the show proper, where the same images are blown up to super-human size and hung on panels in the museum's front hallway. Unlike the 2003 Triennial, where printed patterns were hung so as to be consciously framed by the baroque moldings, the massive image panels scorn the walls on which they hang, suborning their visible history with the anti-aesthetic of the generic white-box gallery. Most of the individual exhibit installs follow suit in their lack of engagement with their environs. There are a handful of notable exceptions, of which the most visible is Electroland's reconfiguration of the museums' central staircase into a digital xylophone. The few standouts fail to alleviate the sense that the show is at odds with the museum that contains it, which in turn exacerbates the pervasive cacophony.

Irritatingly, the Triennial seems to want to compensate in attitude for what it lacks in vision. The haphazard treatment of the subject matter, further drawn and quartered (as it were) by the curators' essays, allows for the easy weaponization of the loose theme of "DESIGN LIFE NOW" against would-be critics. "But, that's what LIFE is all about!", the Triennial seems to shout. "LIFE is random! LIFE doesn't make sense, and so neither should we! Evolution, not revolution!" Yes, perhaps, but that sounds like an argument I've heard before, back when I was an undergrad.

Graphic design might not work in the white cube,¹ but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: The Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK² (among countless others) offer designers and design aficionados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com³ — allegedly⁴, but unconfirmedly, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura⁵.

I started using ffffound last week, and it’s quite a fascinating place, really. The idea is that you bookmark images. Yup, that’s pretty much it. Like flickr, your account on ffffound consists primarily of a series of images, presented in chronological order with regards to their post date. Unlike flickr, which is geared towards sharing personal photographs, ffffound users share images they find anywhere on the web.

The layout ffffound employs looks simple, but the bookmarking technique is eyebrow-raisingly sophisticated: The site furnishes users with a bookmarklet⁶ which will highlight all of the images on a page with a blue border. You click the one you want, and it is then replaced by an amusing graphic that says “FFFFOUND!” in amphetaminic chalkboardesqe handwriting.

Ffffounds’ bookmarklet only highlights images that are within a predetermined range of scales; this prevents you from accedentally posting 5-pixel-square site navigation images. The whole bookmarking process is remarkably unobtrusive, because you aren’t whisked back to ffffound, and you can keep using the site you are on.

All of the stuff you post ends up on your page. Each image has three other images associated with it, randomly, chosen from the images you (and anyone else who has posted that image, as identified by a hash of the URL) has already posted. This results in a constant churn of new visual shit, both for users of the site and for casual browsers. At the time of writing, ffffound is awash with designy stuff: type samples, color studies, abstract form, diagrammatic architectural illustrations, crazy visualizations, posters, photographs of old equipment… I have not witnessed such a collaborative confluence of design-oriented material in one place.

At first brush, ffffound’s paradigm looks to be based on your typical “Web 2.0” socially-networked navelgazery, because ffffound users have “favorite users” and “followers”. There are a lot of key differences however… You can’t tag anything, you can’t comment on anything, or write testimonials about people. You don’t even control the social network; you gather “fans”, or become one yourself, based on who bookmarks images that someone else bookmarked before you.

Furthermore, there is no RESTful API, no XML, no JSON, no pingbacks… Aside from pretty vanilla RSS syndication, ffffound offers none of the oft-vaunted programmatic interfaces that characterize “Web 2.0” sites. It’s reassuring to note, however, that the lack of these things is not an impediment to the site. It is closed and one can only join by an invitation from existing users (who can only invite three others), and therefore self-curating — I would imagine that the quality of the images in general (which right now is pretty fucking high, at least if you’re a type-nerd, designer-face like me) would degrade rapidly if anyone could join. That’s not a very democratic statement, I know; but design plus democracy equals drop shadows and other X-TREME photoshop filters, and the lack of ‘democracy’ in the case of ffffound is in line with its stealth anti-Web 2.0 ethos.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a bit of blogging and tagging myself. Really, being able to tag and comment and manage and share and reorganize your thingies, alongside other peoples’ thingies, in all sorts of ways in a coherent and intuitive fashion, et cetera, is why flickr and its ilk are at once both excellent resources and useful tools. But your flickr account is YOUR SHIT, specifically, implicitly, as indicated by its integrated creative commons licensing⁷ and general nomenclature (e.g., images you upload are specifically labeled “your photos”). Ffffound, on the other hand, is implicitly SOMEONE ELSE’S SHIT, which is a verrrry sensitive issue, even with all the happy-go-lucky “sharing” rhetoric that characterizes “Web 2.0” discussions. Ffffound goes out of its way to remind you of this: All images are headlined with the title of the page from which they are “quoted” (as ffffound has it), with links back to their sources. Ffffound’s lack of other typical user controls allows it to maintain that crucial distinction: By removing your voice, ffffound does exactly what it claims to do, which is grant you the capacity to bookmark images.

The de-emphasis of the user’s voice has a very interesting effect on ffffound’s content. User voice is such a cornerstone of “Web 2.0” malarkey, where many business models are variants of the idea that you, the user, shoot your mouth off so someone else can get AdSense money. As such, the action ffffound affords you is the ability to sycophantically declare that you like something, by bookmarking it. These things then get posted to your account, and if other people like them, they voice their approval in kind. You can’t really use ffffound to hate things, or otherwise. Contrastingly, I frequently use del.icio.us to hate things;⁸ del.icio.us remains gorgeously minimal, but your tags and comments combine with the links you post to provide people looking at your account page with a general composite viewport into your tastes.

Ffffound, on the other hand, can only illustrate your particular sensibility in the arena of graphic awesomeness.⁹ Perhaps this is why so many of the images on ffffound are typographic: Images of type are the best way to directly say something within the confines of ffffound’s system. If I was getting a degree in “postmodern anthropology”, or somesuch, I would say that ffffound is like a “distributed digital Cabinet of Wonders”, or maybe a “data-driven Exquisite Corpse, fashioned into an endless möbius strip”… but no, I’m getting an MFA in graphic design, and at the end of the day, I’m here for the type. I would say to you that ffffound is quite an interesting gem, and I’d add that the exclusivity isn’t as off-putting as it might sound… I was happy with visiting the site before an invitation serendipitously came my way. Do have a look… at the very least, you might find some crazy color palette to rip off¹⁰ or otherwise inspire you. Indeed!