Process & Public Art - Buster Simpson

The Buster Simpson exhibit at the Frye Art Museum made me think about landscape, process, and our hopes for public space and public art. He is an artist motivated by process artwork as a collaboration, making work from society's waste in the 1970s. He avoids an end goal based on achieving an aesthetic and instead focuses on process and primarily stewardship of place. He also highlights the conflicts at the heart of our "clean and green" movement that continues to ignore the processes of industry and instead focuses on creating parkland by "cleaning and greening" by essence ignoring the processes alteration.  His goal is to create public land that allows for an enlarging experience of what public space and parks can be, places of learning, discovery, atypical use of materials, places of mess, chaos, and exploration.

He uses symbols of the Woodman, the crow, and salmon to talk about process, salvage, collection, place, and environment.

He asks an important and frequently overlooked question in the process of city building - What is the relationship between the old and the new, what is salvaged, sacred, and saved. How are we stewards and caretakers of our cities, towns, and environments?

Kiyoshi Saito

Kiyoshi Saito Japanese printmaker, 1950s

Kiyoshi Saito, Japanese printmaker, 1970s

A few weeks ago I went to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is Victoria, BC and came upon an amazing exhibit of the prints of Kiyoshi Saito, a self-taught printmaker largely working in mid-20th century Japan. The focus on flattened perspective, pattern, and inventive approach to printmaking made his work stick in my mind.

Gold duct tape & Maps

For my new home office venture, I decided to make an old school name plate for my desk. It needed to be made out of two of my favorite materials to play with gold duct tape & maps.

Client Communication, UW lecture with David Conrad

To follow up my previous post in Communication is a design problem,

David Conrad, an interaction designer, held a presentation at UW on communication with clients.
He outlines some pertinent ideas, most importantly language is complicated and we need specifics to guide how we interact and what we hope to gain from the interaction.

I went to this talk precisely because of the communication gaps I'd witnessed and that no one I worked with seemed to think needed a clearer, more systematic approach or thought we had the time to develop. I come from the place of thought, where you can't afford not to establish common ground and clear approaches to conversations about design, whether amongst team members or with clients. 

An excellent point he referred to is Donald Norman's distinction between complexity and complicated. We seek to integrate complexity, solve complex problems, but we should not relay things in a complicated way. We solve for complexity and seek clarity in explanations.

He asked, What is a good conversation about design?

1. Talk about you process, make transparent where you need input, what kind of input, and what are the client expectations.
2. Say what you are gonna do, Do it, and Follow up.
3. Describe your decision-making to the client, make clear what inputs you need from them.
4. Don't ever show anyone work without being able to walk them through it.

Transparency build trust, knowing where someone is coming from and what is expected builds cohesion.

Amuse Yourself - via Ira Glass

2012 Commencement: Ira Glass, Host, PRI's "This American Life" from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.


So, I originally saw this video posted on Roman Mars 99% Invisible podcast news page. As always Ira Glass is full of amazing words of wisdom and inspiration, foremost seek to amuse yourself.

Some take aways (while this talk is aimed at journalists, it's applicable to anyone with a passion):

1. Follow your curiosity, what is interesting to you.
2. Don't wait for permission or the right job.
3. Start right away, even if you don't know how.
4. Show your work to people, get feedback, get advice.
5. Try things again and again.
6. Your work must stick in your gut, that's what will make it memorable.
7.  Seek and incorporate surprise, pleasure, discovery!
8. You're not gonna make any money, so might as well have fun.
9. Be mindful of the business side of your work, the more idealistic your goals, the more savvy you should be about the business side.

Communication is a design problem

A few weeks ago, a frustrated friend sent me a text, upset that he was pulled off a project because his project manager and he weren't on the same page. A very talented designer and one of the few "people" people I know in architecture, I told him the problem he's facing is not with design abilities, it is fundamentally a communication problem. His project manager and he weren't speaking the same language, not giving enough time and energy to understanding each other verbally.

Communication limitations are real and there are design solutions.

What needs to happen:

1. Clarify a transparent step-by-step approach to articulating project goals.
2. Write out and post on a wall the guiding questions. 
3. What do you all plan to do?
4. How do you plan to do it?
5. How do you plan to show and convince others of it?
6. Create a regular system of check-ins among the teammates outlining what needs to be discussed, how, and what are the take aways. 
7. Never leave a meeting without answering - Do we have a clear idea of the next steps?
8. Give honest feedback, but be respectful.
9. Never assume anyone just knows what to do or what you are talking about.
10. Never assume something doesn't need to be explained.

Project failings are rarely solely about the product, a problem reflects a breakdown in exchange of information and thoughts between project participants.

In a field where most work is completed in project teams and is client-initiated, how can we get away with not addressing verbal communication necessities in our education? 

Just because we speak the same language, does not mean we can communicate and understand each other. This is a skill that people develop! We need to approach the communication process as a design process, integral to project success. We create relationships, functional and dysfunctional, through verbal and physical communication.

We need to create:

1. Design a system of information exchange
2. State the ground rules 
3. Make the expectations clear
4. Seek to understand and listen
5. Leave ego outside the room

In an industry focused on "collaboration", verbal communication is the intangible work that we do, except we do it with minimal design and often limited results. 

We are a process industry, as much as a product industry. We just want to get to designing things, the fun part, but approaching verbal exchange, question asking, information gathering as a system to be designed, creating a platform for useful exchange, is integral.

We know how to speak, that doesn't mean we communicate well. 
In fact, let's all assume, we do it poorly, and apply our design efforts equally to that task.

Diorama fun

 

We all know it's fun to make an imaginary world. And since diorama is the adult word for playing with pieces of paper, glue, sticks, etc...and constructing a world, I am glad I can say I made a diorama, instead of telling my parents I spent the afternoon playing with art stuff. While I think that sounds pretty cool, apparently all the studies that cite the need to include more play in our lives and its influence on creativity, hasn't really made an impact on the previous generation yet. Time to hit senior centers with some glue sticks!