January 8th, 2012
David Stairs
I’ve been writing about altruism at this blog for so long it all begins to blend together. My inaugural essay spoke about the biological/memetic basis for altruism. The year before I had published an essay at Design Issues that was a prelude to D-A-P. Finally, along comes a book that corroborates some of the things I’ve been saying.
The Penguin and the Leviathan, by Yochai Benkler, the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, is a follow-on to his 2007 The Wealth of Networks. Benkler’s current thesis is that humans are much more cooperative than we’ve previously allowed.
Using the Linux penguin as his totem of cooperation, Benkler cites Wikipedia, E Bay, Obama’s 2008 campaign, and Southwest Airlines as just a few of the many examples of the power of cooperation. The scientific and psychological research of the last 30 years suggests that people are fundamentally cooperative not, as formerly believed, self interested. Our hierarchical, punitive, incentivized economic, legal, and educational systems are designed for the wrong model. In Benkler’s words: “Through the work of hundreds of scientists, we have begun to see mounting evidence in psychology, organizational sociology, political science, experimental economics, and elsewhere that people are in fact more cooperative and selfless, or at least behave far less selfishly, than most economists and others previously assumed.”
I’ve previously argued the benefits of communal interest over incentivized self-interest in posts about our models of design education. Benkler, arguing primarily from a business law point of view, suggests that the centrally controlled leviathans, such as command-based bureaucracies, like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or CCP China, as well as reward-based institutions, like Wall Street banks and General Motors, don’t have a chance unless they adopt the strategies of Toyota and Google.
Benkler’s seven “ingredients of successful, practical, cooperative systems” are:
—Communication
—Authenticity
—Empathy
—Fairness
—Reward
—Transparency, and
—Diversity
These sound an awful lot like the values that have been popping up all over the design memeplex for the last ten or so years. Many of these values influence reciprocity, which, in turn, begets cooperation. I, for one, think Benkler’s thesis is correct: social engagement is fundamentally connected to creativity. We can only hope that the idea continues to accrue critical mass.
David Stairs is the founding editor of Design-Altruism-Project
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December 7th, 2011
Ed. note— This interview of Daniel Drennan was conducted by Nabil Chehade at American University of Beirut, where Mr. Drennan has been teaching.
Series of four posters for the Return to Palestine March, May 15, 2011. Artist: Jamaa Al-Yad
NC: Have you been involved in any projects that lean directly towards more political issues in Lebanon and or the Arab world? If so, what are some examples?
DD: A few years ago we founded an artists’ collective, Jamaa Al-Yad. Our aim is to “empower and activate voice”; we have been working so far on a variety of projects that mostly address issues concerning Palestine, though we are starting to branch out a bit. For example, we created a variety of posters to commemorate historic events (the “nakba,” the “naksa”); the Right of Return Conference held in Beirut; Israeli Apartheid Week and BDS efforts; the Right of Return March to Palestine; etc. We’ve participated in events that engage people in terms of cultural expression and their environment, and most recently we curated an exhibition of Palestinian posters in conjunction with ESCWA for the commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity With Palestine held at UNESCO Palace in Beirut. So we see ourselves in a bigger picture than just creating political artworks.
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Posted in Ex Patria, Interviews | 1 Comment »
November 6th, 2011
We’re pleased to observe that our friends at Terrestrial Design in Pretoria, South Africa recently won an award from the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), that country’s design oversight body, for their safe Arivi paraffin stove. A 2009 INDEX Award finalist, the Arivi addresses a much needed improvement in stove efficiency and safety for people living in township areas. Congratulations to Anya, Tasos, and the whole gang at Tessertrial, and keep up the good work!
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October 15th, 2011
Victor Margolin
Let’s be clear. The folks on Wall Street and others who work in the financial and banking industries don’t make anything. They create pieces of paper that encode the bad deals they have foisted on American consumers or they buy and sell these pieces of paper among themselves. How many letters have each of us received telling us that our mortgage or some other payments we owe are now due to someone we never contracted with? We got those letters because our original lenders sold our debts to people who thought they could profit from holding them and collecting on them. After all, there’s the interest to be gained and the possibility of a foreclosure if we don’t pay up. Many people also bought bad mortgages, geared to cause them problems through the hidden costs of variable rates. In fact, a gullible public eager to better itself with new homes was euchred by the mortgage industry into setting itself up for draconian foreclosures.
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October 1st, 2011
David Stairs
In Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord attempted to define the interrelationship between government and commodity capitalism. No finer recent example could be found than the 9/11 10th Anniversary commemorative activities that took place around the country this past month.
Making a rubbing at the 9/11 Memorial
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September 3rd, 2011
Daniel Drennan
In April 2010 I found myself in Montreal for an academic conference. It was my first time there, and as I am wont to do in such a new place, I looked up used bookstores and otherwise roamed around the city. In one such English-language bookstore in the city center I asked the owner if he had any books on the Montreal Olympics that were actually critical of the games. A bit taken aback, he stated “no”, and wondered, defensively, why I was looking for such material. I explained that I was going to be teaching a design studio entitled “Mediating the Real World”, and one of our projects would involve investigating the Olympic Games as a paragon of corporate branding and design that obliterates other valid manifestations and expressions of a popular and populist nature; I was hoping to find readings for the students. He apologized again for not knowing of any such work, and left me to my browsing.
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August 11th, 2011
David Stairs
This essay was originally published in Speak Up October 26, 2004. It seems just as timely as ever.
Branding.
From the pages of Print and Communication Arts to the sessions at the AIGA biennial conference, this is what can only be called a hot button issue for graphic designers. The AIGA even sponsors a seminar on branding, based upon the book The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier. To quote from its prospectus:
The upturn will be driven by brand. Here’s why:
Cost cutting has gone as far as it can.
Venture capital is offline.
Features and benefits don’t sell anymore.
Tough economies always intensify competition.
What’s left is brand. Happily, brand is something you can influence. The trick is to make the most of the resources you already have: people, networks, knowledge and the value behind everything you do.
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July 20th, 2011
David Stairs
I was over at Design Observer yesterday, reading Rick Poynor’s lament about the depressed state of design criticism. The comments, posted by the usual band of DO nabobs and groupies, were unusually critical. One commentator referred to DO as “a likedy-like NYC mafia,” and another mentioned the “deteriorating state of Design Observer.” This surprised me, and led me to follow a couple additional links.
One piece, “For Sale: The Earliest Modern Studio in America,” was criticized as a “real estate advert dressed up as historical commentary.” It describes the history of Jessica Helfand and Bill Drenttel’s studio home, and solicits purchase offers. Another essay by Helfand from a couple years ago, “Can Graphic Design Make You Cry?” is a piece extolling the virtues of communication that is personalized and strives “to join the manufactured thing…to the world of the living.” This got me to thinking about the hierarchies that exist within the design profession, and my humble position within them.
It goes without saying that, in the design world, I am an outlander. I don’t think “likedy-like NYC mafia” is a particularly cogent description of anyone. In my opinion, a sounder analogy would be “Yale design mafia.” This might include Sheila de Brettville, Michael Rock, Jessica Helfand and Bill Drenttel as well as their partner Michael Beirut, and a slew of their students too populous to enumerate. Some of these people, like Jessica, are alumni of the Yale program. The experience Jessica describes in her essay of having teachers whose “perspective was one that privileged rigor over voice, seeking the most reductivist solutions to life’s most complex problems” has been more famously propounded by Lorraine Wild, a 1982 Yale graduate, in “On Overcoming Modernism.” I have always been puzzled by the struggles of very smart people to break the bonds of “modernist myths.” Perhaps because I was a latecomer to design, possibly because I was 40 when I returned to grad school, I remember assuming that modernism was fraught with error, and was careful what I selected from its cannon. No bondage. No struggle. Just skepticism.
Ezra Winter House, Falls Village, CT., 1931. High Modernist
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June 25th, 2011
David Stairs
When it comes to saving the world, I’m a reformed do-gooder.
Yet, not a day goes by that I am not reminded of how many people are working mightily to save the world. First and foremost, there are the entrepreneurs, those who float websites and publish magazines and manage non-profits. These have been flourishing since before Mark Zuckerberg made it chic to connect in cyberspace, and seem to bloom at a rate of 100 for every 1000 members of population on the West Coast.
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June 1st, 2011
David Stairs
It happened in an instant.
One moment I was leaving the school parking lot, the next the ground was close to my face and I could see the EMT’s feet as they worked around me. It was 8:20am Monday May 2. Moments earlier I had dropped my son Luco off at Renaissance Public School Academy, a charter school located on Isabella Road in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. It’s a fast road, 45mph, with no speed zone for the school.
I’d left this parking lot thousands of times and never taken it lightly. In the mornings and after school there could be hundreds of cars turning in and out. It was treacherous, even when there was no ice on the ground.
On this day the two cars in front of me left together. Drivers have so much respect for the speeds here that they don’t even observe the appropriate traffic rules. As I looked to my left I saw a vehicle signaling to enter the parking lot 200 feet further south. Safe there. On my right a vehicle was making a right turn to exit the lot while I waited to make a left. I couldn’t see around him, so I waited a couple seconds for a clear view. Southbound traffic was approaching fast; If I moved now I’d have time to clear the line of left hand turners in the middle lane out on the road waiting to get into the lot.
I went.
That’s when time began to slow. As I looked left again I realized that a vehicle had been masked by the turning car on my left, was approaching me at full speed, and I’d pulled right out in front of it. I didn’t hear the impact but clearly remember the thought of my own scream, “This can’t be happening!” Only the night before I’d been congratulating myself on 42 years of collision-free driving.
I remember thinking I needed to get away, to get free of the embarrassing wreck, so I moved my legs and slid across the passenger’s seat and opened the door. The next thing I remember was people asking me polite questions, “What’s your name, sir?” “Who are your next of kin?” As they strapped me to a board and shoved me into the ambulance the school principal stood nearby shedding huge tears. Earlier this year she had been rejected by the county road commission in her bid to get a school speed-zone established on this stretch of road.
What was left of my ’09 Prius
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