Objectified

I missed the documentary "Objectified" when it was in theaters, so I ended up getting it from Netflix. It's actually better because I can watch it over and over again and write down the quotes I like. (Spoilers Alert!)

On form and function

Alice Rawsthorn, design editor of International Herald Tribune, comments on the new generation of products where "the form bears absolutely no relation to the function." "Look at something like an iPhone and think of all the things it does. In 'ye olden days' of what are called analog products, ... something like a chair or a spoon, 'form follows function' tended to work." Imagine some Martians land on Planet Earth, they could get a rough sense what they were supposed to do with them, by the shape of the object, by the way it looks. "Now all that has been annihilated by the microchip. So design is moving from this culture of the tangible and the material to an increasingly intangible and immaterial culture."

Karim Rashid talks about the camera. Before the digital age, the silver film defines the format and proportion of cameras. "All of a sudden our cameras have no film, why on earth do we have the same shape we had before?"

On design thinking

Design is not about the average person. Dan Formosa from Smart Design New York says, "What we really need to do to design, is to look at the extremes, the weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, the strongest or the fastest person. Because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself." If people with arthritis can hold on to a handle comfortably, it will work for everybody.

David Kelley recalls when he started the design consulting firm IDEO, industrial design was "primarily about aesthetics, or the cleverness around function." Designers were like "hired guns to complete some aspect." As they grew they became more and more involved in the design of the overall product. When they take a more user-centered consideration of "what do people value, what are their needs?" it results in different products, or sometimes it's not necessarily a product, not an object per se. The real question becomes not "What's a new toothbrush?" but "What's the future of oral care?" Design thinking is a way to systematically be innovative, to design creative scenarios that are based on objects.

On bad and good design

David Kelley: "People need to demand that design performs for them and is special in their lives. If you can't make your GPS thing work in your car, there should be like a riot because they are so poorly designed. Instead the person sits there and thinks, 'Oh I am not very smart, I can't make this GPS thing work.'"

Karim Rashid: You feel it when you sit in chairs that are very uncomfortable. Imagine how many chairs have been done to date in the world, "why on earth should we have an uncomfortable chair? There's no excuse whatsoever."

What's good design? Dieter Rams, German designer and former design director at Braun, gives the following ten principles:
"Good design should be innovative.
Good design should make a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic design.
Good design will make a product understandable.
Good design is honest.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is long-lived.
Good design is consistent in every detail.
Good design is environmental friendly.
Last but not least, good design is as little design as possible."

It's interesting to see how many designers featured in the film agree that good design objects are straight-forward. Henry Ford once said, "every object tells a story, if you know how to read it." Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa describes it as "design dissolving in behavior." This reminds me of the Daoist concept of "Wu Wei," which literally means "not doing anything" but implies letting it act naturally.

Jonathan Ive, Senior VP Indutrial Design of Apple, explains the design of the MacBook Air. "A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost un-designed. It feels almost like, well of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" They tried to remove the things that are "all vying for you attention." It should "speak about how you are gonna use it, not the terrible struggles."

Alice Rawsthorn says, "Many of the best examples of industrial design are things that people don't think were designed at all." People just use them so comfortably that they just take it for granted. Yes, people tend to only notice and yell when things break or get stuck...

I am saving my favorite for the last. Dieter Rams again: "What particularly bothers me today is the arbitrariness and thoughtlessness, with which many things are produced and brought to market. Not only in the sector of consumer goods, but also in architecture, in advertising. We have too many unnecessary things everywhere." Nicely put! I am going to shave.

The pursuit of happiness

Blaise Pascal once said, "All men seek happiness. This is without exception." Happiness is one of the inalienable rights, but designers/architects don't seem to consider it necessary. They rarely smile in their portraits. Instead, they try to act serious to appear "cool." At a Columbia lecture last night, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister laughed at this and said, "Cool is just a stupid way of being."

In order to remain refreshed and happy, Sagmeister takes one-year sabbaticals every 7 years. (He just recently came back from one in Bali.) He did a little math: average Americans learn in the first 25 years of their life, then work for 40 years and retire at the age of 65. Why don't we use five of the retirement years and disperse them as intervals into those working years? For him, it's a good way to avoid repeating old ideas. And economically it's actually beneficial since you can raise the fees if you have good and fresh ideas all the time.

There are at least two ways of finding happiness in design. One can be happy experiencing design. For design objects, he talked about the moment of happiness in the 1980s when he rode a Yamaha motorcycle and listened to The Police's Synchronicity on a new Sony Walkman. As art works, James Turrell's room at PS1 in New York, Ji Lee's speech bubbles project, and Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago were used as examples that had made him happy.

You can also be happy designing. In the pursuit of happiness in design, he suggests to "think what you really like to do before doing it." Here's a list of things that he likes about his job:
1. Thinking about ideas and content freely - with the deadline far away.
(No pressure is always better.)
2. Working without interruption on a single project.
(Concentrate without being frazzled. Immerse yourself.)
3. Using a wide variety of tools and techniques.
(Try not to get stuck or repeat yourself.)
4. Traveling to new places.
(Just go out and see new things, even if it's just a few blocks away.)
5. Working on projects that matter to me.
(Care more if it's important for you.)
6. Having things come back from the printer done well.
(Enjoy the end results.)

To describe the right to happiness as "I just want to do what I like" sounds like an excuse to be egoistic and stubborn. But happiness is your own pleasure and satisfaction, and is ultimately about fulfillment of the self. Right, maybe I should consider my own feelings more and treat myself better...

For the record, here are my favorite things from the lecture:
Favorite design: trophies for the Vilcek Awards.


Favorite story: When designing the logo for Casa da Musica, Sagmeister failed to avoid using the shape of the building. It was mostly because after Rem's presentation he realized architectural design is actually logo making. But he did avoid sameness by adapting the color palette with a computer program.


Favorite claim: "If a building can stand there for hundreds of years, it's a pretty damn sustainable building!"

Favorite of all favorites: laughing yoga.

Barcode's birthday

Inspired by Google, this is my version to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the first barcode patent.

On October 7, 1952, US Patent 2,612,994 was issued to Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver for "Classifying Apparatus and Method," in which they described both the linear and bullseye printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code. After decades of developments at IBM (a team led by Woodland), the UPC barcode - laser scanner partnership made its first commercial appearance on June 26, 1974 at Marsh's Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, when a 10-pack Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was scanned at 8:01 am.

According to a report by Motorola, more than 10 billion barcodes are scanned everyday now in 25 industries and in places including airports, hospitals, and shipping centers. It costs about $0.005 to implement a barcode. But the system ultimately resulted in significant economic and productivity gains for shoppers, retailers and manufacturers, with estimated cost savings of $17 billion in the grocery sector alone (according to GS1 US).

Architectural evolution

Bjarke Ingels made his way to the TED talk stage. I am not going to comment on his Danish accent nor the cynical comments on China. What I would like to do is to pick up his idea of evolution and expend that a bit more.
Bjarke said, “rather than revolution, we are much more interested in evolution, the idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world... “ He used Darwin's evolutionary tree to describe how they work. "A project evolves through a series of generations of design meetings. In each meeting there are way too many ideas, only the best ones can survive." If the process of architectural design is really analogous to evolution, there are several questions need to be asked.

1. Who makes the selection?
In Darwin's theory, the key mechanism of evolution is natural selection. Mother nature has the power of picking fit species. Who has the power of picking options at design meetings? Our mighty boss - BI in the case of BIG, I bet. This is the inevitable ugly truth, the underlying relationship of employment. Any democratic process still needs a "chief commander" who has the veto power. Some may say, the bosses could base their selections on certain objective criteria. But architecture is not math. You can’t even define a functional kitchen with pure rational reasoning. Judgment is never an equation built with just objective standards. “Survival of the fittest” is hence a myth that varies from office to office. Program, aesthetics, economy, ecology… At the end, evolution in architecture is artificial selection.

2. How are mutants produce?
Mutation is accepted by biologists as the mechanism by which natural selection acts - "favorable" mutations may accumulate and result in adaptive evolutionary changes. There may be harmful mutations, but the encouragement of mutation in general at least increases the chance of beneficial ones. If we see everything unfamiliar as a freak, we can’t possibly make any progress. Mutation occurs in response to the external changes. For architects, a good and adaptive knowledge of the changing world in general enhances the fitness of their creative solutions. You have to be sensitive enough to react, right?

3. What nurtures biodiversity?
Biodiversity is often a measurement of the health of an ecosystem. The variation of species ultimately comes down to the variation of habitats. In an architectural office, only the atmosphere of open-mindedness can encourage diverse free thoughts. What could be the aggressive exotic species that destroys the balance here? I’ll leave that open for imagination…

Urban permeability

The streets system in Beijing is annoying. The megablock urban form means fewer streets and less permeability. All the fences have made the situation even worse. The authority’s hope was, when the streets are fenced up and organized with roundabouts, traffic is channelized – every direction of traffic flow has its own designated lane. As a result, there’s no cross traffic at intersections and the cars would never need to stop.

New York (left) and Beijing at the same scale

Beijing Dongzhimen: How am I supposed to cross the street?

Unfortunately, the planners overlooked the impact of travel time and the number of cars on the street. With the channelized streets, you’ll be miserable if you got into a wrong lane. It will mean you have to go to the next big roundabout and make a U-turn or go around a super-scale megablock just to get back to where you were. Even you are right, most of the time you still need to turn right and right and right again to make a left turn, or make a U-turn at the next intersection and come back and turn right. Still following? Yes, it’s that confusing. All this pain increases the duration of the trip, i.e. keeps the cars longer on the street. Who complains about too many cars on the street? Just let them get to their destinations easier and faster!

Kengo Kuma interview

There was a Kengo Kuma interview on CNN. I like the subtle treatment of materials in his buildings. And of course, he started the talk with Japanese tradition and materials.

He feels that reconstructing cities in Japan with concrete after WWII destroyed the Japanese tradition. I sort of agree. But I am not sure if you can simply blame the loss of tradition on the change of building material. There are so many other dimensions to it. Reclaiming tradition can't be just restoring the use of traditional materials. Concrete is not a traditional material in Japan (you may say it's hardly traditional in any country...), but there were certain reasons in a particular period of history that determined its popularity. He said, "20th century architecture is concrete, iron, and glass. People didn't pay attention to materials." I would argue concrete, iron, and glass are materials as well. It was the attention to these new materials that nurtured the innovations in structure, hence the revolution of modern architecture. Why is architecture only nice when built in wood and paper? To me, Japan is probably the most successful country in remaining a national architectural identity in the flashy modern world. Many of its architects are using concrete, iron, and glass.

Fortunately his approach is not that literal. What he aims at in his career is actually the quality of tradition - in the case of Japan, softness, delicacy, and warmth. "Our approach is to capture the atmosphere of the place... by communicating with the people there," he explained. "Therefore it's important to go to this place several times or to live with these people - to eat, and drink with them." He also sees the importance of checking on details and touching the materials in person. As a result, he travels a lot - meeting people, visiting construction sites and trying to control the quality. Working on 55+ projects at the same time, he only rests about one or two days in a year! But for him, it's a lot of fun. What's more exciting than doing something that you love and care about? "I will keep working until I collapse."

Kuma compares architecture to sushi making. "There are two important things to make sushi. One is the material and the other is the skill..." After listening to him, I would add another one - care.

One year anniversary

It's been a year since I launched the Scribbles! In this year, I posted 82 entries - one per 4.5 days in average. I think this sounds quite OK given the fact that I worked 56.3 hours in average per week all year...

Out of the 82 posts, 48 are related to architecture or design. (That's inevitable and I am glad that I am still interested in the profession.) After that, art and science seem to have a good balance. (They say architecture is both art and science, right?) Poor books only earned 3 entries. (I still read. It's just hard to write about them. Partly because I only have time to read bit by bit - excitement from reading becomes more stretched and less intense.)

I love stats. Here's an attempt to find out the relationship between posting and work load. Strange enough, work schedule doesn't seem to affect the pattern of posting that much, except for two occasions when big competition deadline hits. The other extreme is posting also stopped during vacation. January is a hard-to-find example that fits my assumption, where low work load resulted in a more steady and frequent posting pattern...

The science of sleep

We tend to be more interested in the things that we don't have. In my case, I have found sleep increasingly intriguing and mysterious. (Of course it has to do with the several insomnia patients around me as well.) I just wanna share some of the things I found:

- We sleep every day. (Well, maybe not...) But scientist are still debating about the true purpose/function of sleep. Here are some arguments that support "sleep is essential." 1) There's no convincing case of a species of animal that does not sleep. 2) There's no indication that one can forgo sleep without a compensatory rebound. 3) There's no indication that one can forgo sleep without negative consequences.

- Although the entire body benefits from sleep, the brain suffers the most from lack of sleep. The most immediate, unavoidable effect of sleep deprivation is cognitive impairment.

- You think you will lose weight if you don't sleep much? Several studies, on the contrary, suggest that sleep deprivation is one of the causes of obesity. This may be happening because sleep deprivation could be disrupting hormones that regulate glucose metabolism and appetite.

- Sleep deprivation also makes you grumpy. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and UC Berkeley showed emotional-provocative images to volunteers after keeping them awake for 35 hours. They found out blood flow to the amygdala (an emotion-processing part of the brain) increased by over 60% in sleep-deprived brains. Some other studies linked this to the production of cortisol ("stress hormone").

- Feeling sleepy is different from being tired. Pure sleepiness can be conceptualized as the effect of central sleep-promoting mechanisms telling the brain it is time to sleep, whether or not brain cells need to do so. Examples are jet lag, food coma, or simply being in a boring environment. Pure tiredness can be conceptualized as the inability of brain cells to continue functioning in their normal waking mode, despite the central wake-promoting mechanisms telling the brain it should be fully alert. Do you really need examples for this?

- Multiple studies indicate that sleep may be a good time for consolidating and integrating newly acquired information in memory without interference from ongoing activities. The observation that neural circuits activated during learning are “reactivated” during sleep is consistent with this possibility.

- Researchers at UCSF found abnormal copies of DEC2 gene in those who need far less sleep than average. The gene is known to affect circadian rhythms and oxygen regulation in mammals. When the scientists bred mice to have the same mutation, the mice slept less and were more active than their regular rodent peers. I would be great to be a mutant!

Blind men and an elephant

Buddha tells the story of eight blind men touching an elephant and trying to learn what it is like. The blind man who feels the elephant's tusk shouts out, "the elephant looks like a daikon radish!" The others disagree and assert that it is either like a dustpan (the one who touches its ear), stone (head), a pestle (trunk), a wooden mortar (leg), a bed (back), an urn (abdomen), or a rope (tail). Buddha continues and explains, these men see only one side of a thing. In their ignorance they are by nature disputatious, each holding a fractional view on reality as thus and thus.

As Spock would say, reaching a broad conclusion from limited evidence is not logical. It's called hasty generalization. Think about sustainability which everybody is obsessed with. One general belief is that paper is degradable but plastic is not, so it seems "natural" to conclude that paper bags are more environmental-friendly and we should all use paper bags instead of plastic ones. But this is just one side of the story. What about the trees we cut to make all that paper? In the manufacturing process, plastic bags only consume about 18% as much energy, and less than 3% of the fresh water necessary to make paper bags. According to an analysis by Franklin Associates, Ltd, during the life cycle of both types of bags per 10,000 equivalent uses, plastic creates 9.1 cubic pounds of solid waste vs. 45.8 cubic pounds for paper; plastic creates 17.9 pounds of atmospheric emissions vs. 64.2 pounds for paper; plastic creates 1.8 pounds of waterborne waste vs. 31.2 pounds for paper. When you see the big picture, the saint-like aura around paper bags disappears.

The same trend happens in the field of architecture. Architects are obsessed with green jargon. But how many really understand what it means? Geothermal for a small house? PV panels on the north facade? Yeah, I bet it sounds a lot fancier to say "solar energy harvesting from all around the building."

Another trend in contemporary architecture is the dominance of flashy images. Everything comes down to how it looks rather than how it works. Critics base their judgments just on images, and architects design only the images. We see beautiful renderings that intentionally avoid certain aspects of reality (Zaha's monolithic shapes or Greg's super-blobs?), beautiful photos with fantastic lighting that conceals the detailing flaws (can't forget this), and beautiful moments captured by tasteful photographers that glorify the entire building no matter how lame it is as a whole. Yes, we all love eye-candies, and we would like to believe that's reality. But unfortunately, we are all blind...

The consequences are severe. Everybody is lazified (Salute, J and J!). On the consumption side, the iconic official image has superseded the actual experience and use of architecture in our society of spectacles. People are sufficiently happy with what they see (mostly indirectly). Nobody would take the effort to verify the facts before believing, nor would anyone care to ask about the other side of the story behind the scene. On the production side, representation has replaced the building as the ultimate goal or final product of architecture. How to get it done? Does it actually work? Nobody cares. If people would buy the beautiful lies so easily, why bother trying to really figure it out? Competition? Well... "plans, sections, and renderings don't need to correspond - they just need to look all good." Construction? "I don't care when it really opens. Just hire a good photographer and we call it done." Here we hear a collapse of truth and responsibility.

We are blinded and we are blind. All this reminds me of horse blinders. It would actually be good if it keeps us moving forward. But piecemeal perceptions will only hold us back, or lead us to laughable ignorance...

Feast of curves

I can't say I am a big fan of "organic shapes," but the Ron Arad show at MoMA had the power to engulf me in amazement. It's much more than just a fancy furniture showroom - the space itself is a masterpiece. A giant display structure (Cage sans Frontières) twists and unfolds the beautiful objects as it loops around the gallery. The morphing grid is made of Cor-ten steel, lined with polished stainless steel inside the squares and backed with stretched fabric. The installation functions not only as shelves that hold most of the exhibits, but a powerful unifying device that sets the general tone of the show. As it warps through the gallery, it divides the space into sections and at the same time creates connections and flips it inside out.

It's hard to describe Ron Arad's career. Industrial design? Architecture? Art? Maybe as the exhibition is titled, "No Discipline" can define his work. Of course, most people know him from his chairs, like Big Easy and Ripple Chair. His design has a certain 50s/60s sensibility that resembles Frederick Kiesler or Verner Panton, but the originality is undeniable. He dares to explore new forms, and more importantly, new materiality and manufacture techniques. I was most fascinated by this set of two chairs called "Even the Odd Balls?" (2008), a variation in the Big Easy family. Making the exact inversions out of stainless steel is both conceptually intriguing and technically challenging.


Some other objects picked from the show:

Chair By Its Cover, 1989

Uncut, 1997 (vacuum-formed aluminum)

Thumbprint, 2007 (made of stainless steel rods)

Paved with Good Intentions (series), 2005

Bodyguard n°5, 2007 (blown superplastic aluminum)

I.P.C.O (Inverted Pinhole Camera Obscura), 2001 (by modifying the bulb's filament)

Lo-Rez-Dolores-Tabula-Rasa, 2004 (fiber optics projection from inside a Corian table)

I love this one: Ballpark (2001), a prototype developed for Ingo Maurer’s lighting company. A group of small rubber balls, each with a small mirror on it, catch the light and spell out words or images. The angle of each ball is individually manipulated so that the text reflected on the wall can be different from - even the opposite of - what is shown on the tray. Isn't it fun and ingenious?