January 9th, 2021
David Stairs
Steve Zdep is dead, that much is certain. He passed away on November 6th, 2020 from causes not revealed in his obituary.
I hadn’t seen or heard about Steve Zdep for over 50 years. My high school best friend Bernie Flanagan told me Steve had died in a 2020 holiday greeting. This year was supposed to have been our 50th high school reunion but, like everything else, it was postponed due to Covid-19. I remember my Father attending his 50th reunion in 1985. I thought at the time, “This is crazy.” It seemed even crazier when mine rolled around. “No way I’m going out on the links with a bunch of old duffers,” I thought, mostly because I don’t play golf, but also because high school was not exactly the highlight of my life.
I attended Christian Brothers Academy, CBA to those who know it. A Catholic preparatory school in Syracuse, New York, CBA was opened in 1900 by the teaching Brothers of Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle. These days it’s co-ed, but when I attended it was all male. We were the 70th graduating class. On graduation night at the Onondaga County War Memorial 175 of us were onstage in white dinner jackets with red carnation boutonnières. We looked pretty smart. CBA was a competitive place, athletically and academically. My classmates went to Ivy League schools: John Wu to Yale, Mike Tyo to MIT, Charlie Burzalow to Columbia. I had a different trajectory. From attending a school with no art curriculum, I intended to go to art school, and, after a couple years at SUNY Oneonta I transferred to RISD, the closest I ever got to the Ivy League.
My CBA classmates went into the professions. They became lawyers, doctors, and university lecturers. Steve Zdep became a dentist after attending Georgetown. I assume he was a good dentist, since he also taught dentistry. But as I said, that was after my time. I knew Steve in a different capacity. You see, Steve Zdep played trombone, and so did I. We played together in high school for a year, before I tired of marching in the cold and being yelled at by our dictatorial band director. But Steve and I went back even further, to grammar school. We also played in the Saint Margaret’s grammar and middle school band. In fact, that’s where my horn ended up, after my Mom pestered me about donating it to the parish for years. I remember Steve as a mediocre trombone player. I don’t mean this as a criticism; I was no better. We both blatted our way through Pomp and Circumstance each year at graduation. But Steve was such a laid back, easy going kid, it wasn’t possible to be mad at him when he flubbed.

The author in more innocent times
For me the most salient event regarding Steve at Saint Margaret’s School was not the band. Years earlier Steve and I had been in the same kindergarten class, Helen Maloney’s downstairs half-day afternoon session. I was a big cry baby. At first I cried every day, wouldn’t let go of my Mother. We all recognized our seats by the little gummed label animal stickers on the backs of our chairs. Mine was a deer. I don’t know what Steve’s was.
The social event of the 1957 school year in kindergarten was Steve Zdep’s fifth birthday party. I remember it because he was the only kid who celebrated his birthday in school that year. Steve’s Mother Edy made sure of that. There was a big chocolate sheet cake. I don’t remember any presents, in fact, I don’t remember much else about the event other than the cake. After kindergarten Steve and I were classmates, but never in the same home room again. That’s how it went— separated at cake.
Now that Steve Zdep is dead, the world will never be quite the same. Of course, this is true for every human life. With each passing year the obituaries roll in as more and more of the people I grew up with slide down death’s trombone, like in a funeral march from Tremé, to join Steve in the Great Hereafter. It’s not that I object to death, railing against the inequities of human mortality. I know what’s coming and I assume it ain’t gonna be fun. But I do recognize that there is some sort of balance in the universe. I know this because of Steve Zdep. He may have been a middling trombonist, but he was a good dentist, proven by the fact that his son, Steven R. Zdep, is also a dentist. Just as my kids, Maya, Chris, and Luco, are all in Art and Design. What goes around.
So, I’ve survived my trombone-playing kindergarten-birthday-party-celebrating former-grammar-and-high-school-non-home-room-classmate. One can only hope for a legacy half as good.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Death’s Trombone
December 9th, 2020
David Stairs
With states reporting record numbers of infections, there is no doubt that this Christmas season will be one many will find hard to forget. The malls and retail centers we so precipitously abandoned way back in March do not have the same attraction of earlier years. Since Covid is THE story of 2020, even overshadowing the presidential election, we’ve scrounged up a few holiday suggestions for that extra special Christmas 2020 memento of the years’ most familiar meme.

A “Clovid” orange
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Have Yourself a Merry Little Covid
November 2nd, 2020

Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Don’t Regret November 3rd
October 26th, 2020
David Stairs
Max is over, thank God.
And by Max I mean Adobe Max, that brightshiny overripe bells-and-whistles software tradeshow masquerading as an allconsuming excuse to be pretentiously jejeune.

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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Maxed Out
August 21st, 2020
David Stairs

A wild back yard
Except for a couple of thunderstorms, it hasn’t rained much in central Michigan this summer. It has been quite hot, and as usual, very humid. After aggressively mowing the grass in late May and June, it’s growth abates and it mostly browns off. The only way to keep grass green is by watering it, and in a world of diminishing clean fresh water, there has to be a better use for it than golf green lawn grass.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on The Design of Summer
July 3rd, 2020
David Stairs
America has finally caught mask fever, fifteen years later than Asian people. There are still many who refuse to “suit up” including Covid deniers, those suffering from claustrophobia, and some who claim medical excuses. But the possible reasons for not wearing a mask are narrowing, with major airlines rejecting travelers who renege.

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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Masks! Of Course!
June 13th, 2020
David Stairs

I thought I was speaking truth, but now I’m not sure that it wasn’t simply “my truth” rather than something absolute. Maybe absolute truth doesn’t exist, no matter how much we’d like to believe in it. But, if this is the case, then we’re really doomed.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Relevance
May 14th, 2020
David Stairs
Courtesy Wikipedia
America’s got troubles. I don’t mean the song lyric kind, but, you know, serious troubles. And they’re not the soft purring type you might find on a now infamous classic sci-fi show. Those are tribbles, the sort that pundits and wags like to compare to Donald Trump’s hair.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on The Tribble With Troubles
April 19th, 2020
David Stairs
Are you just about sick and tired of seeing pictures of viruses?

Courtesy NIH
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Alternate Coronas
March 31st, 2020
David Stairs

A sign of our times
There are interesting new ways to mark the passage of time. I generally take account each week when I venture out of my home to grocery shop.
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on Lady Macbeth Did Not Have an N95
March 17th, 2020
David Stairs
Informatics is enjoying a renaissance.

Courtesy LiveScience.com
If you haven’t already encountered it, this graph is bound to become the most talked about x-y axis since Al Gore’s Nobel prize-winning acceptance speech. And it represents events more immediate than climate change, if not more important.
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on Of Flattened Curves and Ballooning Statistics
March 2nd, 2020
David Stairs
I suppose bookmarks are a personal thing. Some are woven; some are printed; some are just bits of stuff. My son uses a piece of red thread. I won’t say that I collect bookmarks either, but when I am in a bespoke store I will not leave without one. In honor of my favorite bookstores, I’d like to share their bookmarks.
Out west, in Portland there’s Powell’s City of Books. This venerable warehouse on West Burnside Street is always crowded and, while I’d like to say you can find anything there, the greater liklihood is that you will get lost looking. For those who like to get lost, this will not be a problem.

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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on A Good Bookstore Deserves a Good Bookmark
January 19th, 2020
David Stairs

Paramount
“We Are the Borg.”
With these words, Maurice Hurley, writing for the Star Trek TNG episode Q Who?, unleashed one of television’s most implacable adversaries on the world. But, as with much speculative fiction, Hurley and his co-writers were only mining the literature of science and engineering probability.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Resistance is Futile
December 15th, 2019
David Stairs
Who doesn’t love a podcast?

Some weird personality or obscure ideology you need to catch up on on that long commute to work in the morning? Needing to block out ambient noise in your open space office cubicle? What better way for a busy person to stay both informed and amused?
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Posted in Letters | Comments Off on Pod People
November 1st, 2019
David Stairs

Have you ever been in a super loud environment? I don’t mean the usual sort, like a kindergarten classroom or a football stadium on an autumn weekend— a scene of audio cacaphony— I mean a visually loud room. The Victorians were sometimes guilty of visual clutter, with their knick-knack trophies and flowered wallpaper, but they had nothing on modern commercial interiors.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Overbranded
September 14th, 2019
David Stairs

Illustration by Chris Stairs, age 9
I often think about stubbornness. My son Chris is a Leo, and he can be one of the most stubborn people I know. This is not to criticize my son, or to implicate all Leos, but it is a character trait they are somewhat known for.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on On Being a Butthead
August 6th, 2019
David Stairs
Affluence isn’t free.

Giraffes at a gallop on the Serengeti, Tanzania
In May 2019 the UN released a report about the state of the natural world. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported that species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, and that the rate is accelerating.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on Covering the Cost
July 1st, 2019
David Stairs
Since when did coding corner the market on the definition of “smart”?
I recently attended a UCDA design conference where Helen Armstrong was one of the keynoters. Ms. Armstrong, a multiply-credentialled academic with deep ties to the AIGA, talked about Big Data, and how designers can/should employ it to their benefit.
Yellow-cyan-indigo paint scheme non-algorithmicly determined
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Non-Algorithmic
May 24th, 2019
David Stairs
While most people these days don’t think much about cattle when they discuss branding, they also probably don’t focus on Apple’s iconic 1984 Superbowl ad as the catalyst for a whole new generation of brand differentiation. Yet, the upsurge of interest in brand fascination is traceable to the 1980s and its emphasis on supply-side economics.

CMU’s Centennial Sculpture, by Charles McGee (installed 1992; relocated 1999; birds voluntary)
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Branding Academia
April 13th, 2019
David Stairs
The editors of MIT Press and Design Observer have compiled a collection of essays to celebrate that weblog’s 15th anniversary. Culture Is Not Always Popular sports the same title as the presentation Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel made at the 2003 AIGA Power of Design conference in Vancouver B.C., which was delivered the very week the Design Observer website launched, at the time a marketing slam dunk that quickly garnered a captive audience for the new site. Yet, despite the title’s heady aspirations, this anthology reveals DO not for what it has aspired to be— avant garde, but what it actually is: largely bourgeois.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on Design Is Not Always Elitist (thank god)
March 11th, 2019
David Stairs

In 2014 my program hosted a campus visit by the popular and likeable Stefan Sagmeister. Since I made the arrangements for his talk, and chauffered him from and back to the airport, we had plenty of time to visit. I told him his royalty for the visit was payback for the Sappi grant he helped adjudicate for me and my partner in 2003 and, despite the fact he did not know me at the time, I considered it a debt repaid.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on Documenting Social Design
February 18th, 2019
David Stairs
On Christmas Day one year we visited our friend Kasule Kizito, who was staying at his home in Masaka. We traveled to Bukalavu taxi stage by matatu, where Kizito met us and took us to his home. Kizito was then attempting to repurchase land subdivided from his grandfather’s estate by his 70-odd descendents. On December 26th Kizito broke ground on the new brick house he was building for his eighty-year-old mother.

Stucco-covered brick house with corrugated steel roof
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Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Building One’s Mother a House
January 8th, 2019
David Stairs
It’s seemingly on every designer’s mind these days. No, not sex (although that might be a close second) but social design. How did a matter of collective conscience come to rival primordial drives?
Not long ago only cranks and fuzzy-headed idealists were talking about social design. To perform a service “pro bono” was to earn a little social capital in an otherwise expensive and ultimately self-destructive manner. Working for free was akin to what slaves did. Design professionals in the great consumer economy deserved better.

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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on Who Owns Social Design?
October 8th, 2018
David Stairs
Economic growth is one of those hot-button issues politicians are always promising to support. In fact, almost the surest way to a failed career in politics is to preside over an economic downturn.

This land in NE Portland won’t be empty for long
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on The Tyranny of Development
August 16th, 2018
David Stairs

Way back in 2011 I first wrote about a wonderful device my friends in South Africa had come up with. Known as Eva, the Arivi paraffin stove had been an INDEX competition finalist in 2009, and had won an award from SABS, the South African Bureau of Standards, in 2011. While visiting them in Pretoria last Fall I caught a glimpse of social entrepreneurship on a micro-manufacturing level.
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Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Social Design and Micro-Manufacture