Designing Media

ack!!!!! Horay!!!

On: Bjorn Again? Rethinking 70s Revivalism through the Reappropriation of 70s Clothing

By Nicky Gregson, Kate Brooks and Louise Crewe

This article covers 2 different reasons that groups in England in the early 90's were adopting 70's clothing and how one side was for play while the other was a symbol, ad advertisement, of one's knowledge and respect for the design. I see in it the hunt of youth for knowledge, respect, and reputation. It was entertaining.

Same Ol' Same Ol'

On Pruitt and Adlin's Personal Life Cycle (Tanner Thompson).

On second reading of this chapter, I couldn't let go of a phrase that I recently heard a design researcher say to me "Once you have a persona, you don't need a new one. People are people, and new technology isn't going to make them any different, it's only going to alter which object they use to carry out the same behavior. My boss can make me go out and check to see if there's anything new, but I'm going to see the same thing: wow, people use their phones instead of their alarm clocks, computers, and newspapers. New object, same action."

So I'm reading this Tanner Thompson persona, and I'm thinking about how it's slightly dated, and how I watched this PARC talk about how teenagers are using 2-4 internet/entertainment devices at the same time now days and how crazy that was and how web designs need to be integrated with the idea that no one will be entirely focused on your page, so non-irritating alarms are being added. And I'm wondering how -even though his goals would remain the same- if Tanner's persona would need an update for more than just to keep the interest of a designer. Hmp. Think. Think. Think. I get back to you.

On Fournier's Consumers and Thier Brands:

Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research

I'm lucky that since this article came out (1998), many of the concepts Fourier discusses have been adopted into marketing and brand concept strategies (at least, where I am earning my degree). I found that this article also somehow re-enforced something Abby Margolis once taught me about objects and brands in relationships: people are not always looking for who they are, but sometimes, a balance of who they think they'd like to be in context... ie: sometimes, a teenage girl wants to feel just a little like a responsible woman (when she's washing her face?), which means that marketing a brand to someone doesn't always mean trying to pretend to be like your audience, but remembering to provide an authentic representation of the value delivered by a product: sometimes soap is better seen as responsible than fun.


The life stories provided by Fournier were hard for me to get through, and I worry about where any border between storytelling and data is supposed to exist... are the soft sciences about interpretation with a back-story of data? (I need to interview more design researchers about this.) When tabled-out, the relationships were delightful and so humanistic that I was forced to subject my neighbor to a long and drawn-out conversation about how his relationships with brands fit into this type of table. Super fun.

On: Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice

by Jack Ingram, Elizabeth Shove, and Matthew Watson

Of all the articles I've read about in creating personas, it was this one that really helped me hone-in on how I wanted to describe my use-cases for my study. The group's six themes (acquisition, scripting, appropriation, assembly, normalization, and practice) were much like something I think I read recently in Donald Norman's newest book about emotional design [cognitive psychology, yum.], but when I read how they applied basic social psychological concepts to the motives for a stage, I was more than on board.

I found myself taking notes about each of my personas- how did social comparison fit into "Lisa and Greg's" lifestyle, was "George" subject to the Diderot Effect? Were the three of them beginning to Specialize, and how/why had Self-Identity through new objects taken a back seat to a whole generation of people? Had "Anna and Susan" Scripted their objects into a role that was at risk of being in opposition to the sustainability movement? How could new designs alter their behavior without confusing, irritating, or alienating who they felt they themselves were while also assembling into the group of older more emotionally charged but perhaps less sustainable products?

Also, and I'm not sure exactly how this fits in at all, but after having read so much about Martha Stewart's Living, I am drawn back to the Donna Hay and Real Simple magazines that I loved before Stewart became part of my vocabulary. How do sections in their magazines that celebrate new uses play into the "themes" set out in this article? What happens when that which establishes a (if even somewhat fairy-tale-like) status quo embraces an old technology over a new one that may be advertised on the next page? Do the "30 things you can do with a paper clip" ever really get used, or are they simply party tricks for the imaginary house wife?

I am officially in love with this article, and only hope that I can one day implement these incredibly valid issues into my own work- whether academic or applied.

On: Material Attributes of Personal Living Spaces by Gosling, Craik, Martin, and Pryor

After having read this work, I know 2 things.
Thing 1: However beautiful information can be, it needs to be visually stimulating to pull a reader through, lest he get exhausted by fig. 4... pages and pages of raw data are best left to the appendix. In other words, I need to know my data so well that I can visually communicate the story to my audience. Story. Hm.
Thing 2: The idea to have the interviewees rate and agree to being rated on their openness was brilliant. It's beautiful when data can tell you something we all already see in a new way: Andrea Gibson says "The key to falling in love is f***ing up the pattern."

I'd love to use this paper to study the results after my photo sort to see how Baby-boomers' objects imply their openness... I wonder if there's a link to sustainable practices and the variety of objects owned by a Boomer within his or her personal living space. Ideas. Ideas.

On Dianne Harris’ Clean, Bright, and EVERYONE White:

Sometimes I can’t get around my critical eye. As a poet, I am so accustomed to creating stories through creative exploration of an individual, but when something becomes official- when it becomes a scientific statement… whether of a soft or hard science, I have trouble buying into the certainties with which some authors make assertions about a time or culture. Such is the case with Harris’ article about the 1950’s white post-war era aesthetic.
Harris writes with conviction and uses an incredible wealth of resources (namely architectural magazines) to describe how architects of the era created a “white” aesthetic, but, although I can see the correlation, I cannot see the causality that she does.
More than her point, I saw an echo of the 1950’s in today’s Green movement- how the Sustainable aesthetic has been adopted into a clean and modern one, how the two are married to a predominantly “white” perspective, and I wonder if that comes from the nostalgia wrapped in the 1950’s that the “modern” look brings with it. Her comment that “The houses and gardens are portrayed as clutter-free environments, when in actuality they were jammed full of new consumer goods,” threw me back to my interviews with current interior designers. How appropriate.
Finally, because I am currently studying the Boomer population in terms of the home and sustainability, I was fascinated to read about the homes that Boomers grew up in- ones that had a heavy emphasis on the privacy, the closed-off back yard, the pride in ownership, that Boomers have undoubtedly carried with them as they’ve aged. It makes sense to see a culture who wants to leave the apartments of a pre-war era, but could the Boomers’ disgust with apartments only come from a nostalgia? Hmph. Reasearch.

On Elizabeth Shove’s Converging Conventions of Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience:

I adore Shove’s take on the way that technology and our concepts of safety (comfort and cleanliness) continue to “ratchet” to more and more extreme concepts. I see it as a culture that has evolved, survived, because of our resourcefulness, and now that we have less to fear, we adopt new ones. It seems that the new technology doesn’t necessarily push people to higher standards, but enables them to collect, to hunt and gather, and then, once these things end-up in their homes, consumers have to rationalize their use and then new habits get passed on as the standard and the cycle continues.

Martha Martha Martha

On Ted Gachot's Through the Cooking Class (from AIGA Journal of graphic design) and Micheal J. Golec's Martha Stewart Living and the marketing of Emersonian Perfectionism (from Home Cultures.

I have to say that I am forever in awe of anyone that can read a Martha Stewart Living magazine and see as much in them as these 2 men. While Gachot weaves the company into a sinister Godmother of life with every question answered, Golec takes the "Self-Reliance" route and both settle on the concept of perfection in some of the most witty journal writing I have had the pleasure to read. Everyone loves to poke fun at big business.

Gachet's point is that Living is more about the lore, the witchery delivered to the reader than the actual practical value, and, having also been reading Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, I found myself weaving the lore concept into Golec's insistence that the success of the magazine carries back to the US' Puritan roots.

"Of course!" I think. The Crucible! Golec goes on to give his reader a Cliff's note version of Emerson's Self Reliance before plowing through concepts of Martha's perfect modest extravagance (and I remember Puritan silver buckles), and finally landing on a point, a good point: "The visualization of perfectionism configures the private sphere while simultaneously evoking the public sphere.... Perfectionism as a principle of conduct is not so much embodied in a person as it is distributed through bodies, surfaces, lights, and gazes....."

In a visual culture perspective, I can totally see how these perfect objects take the reader outside of space and time, and deliver an indulgent simplicity, a fairytale, a form of entertainment wherein the reader may never actually bake the perfect truffle or collect those woo woo plates, but can and will live within the walls of a life that does- for a few pages, anyhow.

On the Unbearable Whiteness of Green

I recently read an editorial about the "Unbearable Whiteness of Green".... how the green movement is plastered with only upperlcass white people. I was excited to find a valid point- I hadn't thought of such a thing (I'm a white 20-something design student in Portland; sometimes it takes me a minute to remember the rest of the world isn't as pastey, booky, or as Indie as we are.), but I totally agreed before reading the article- I couldn't remember any uber green articles that featured people that I couldn't directly identify with. So I start reading.... his main example: Vanity Fair.

The author writes "just flip through the pages of Vanity Fair's recent green issue (the one with Leo DiCaprio and that cute polar bear cub on the cover). ...Now, count the non-white Americans in the whole magazine. Okay. Now try to find the working-class environmentalists, the ones trying to protect their kids from pollution at the fence-line? Go ahead. Keep looking. See what I mean?"

I went through a few more Vanity Fair issues, after reading this part, and found that the magazine covers all its topics in the same way: predominantly white and wealthy. At this point, the author lost credibility in my eyes, and I had a hard time following his link to California's Prop 87. I couldn't stop thinking about his main point, so I did a little research of my own and found that Paul Mohai, associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment authored the first African-American centered study on Sustainability.

Apparently, in 2003, African Americans are more likely than white Americans to make sustainable lifestyle choices like buying pesticide-free foods , consuming less meat , and driving less. However, African Americans were less likely than whites to recycle. Also, African Americans were more concerned about their local environment (23% more!).

Had I read anything like this, which took me minutes to pull up, I'd be a happier, more convinced reader. What ever happened to establishing validity before jumping into an argument?

Vals

Took the VALS test this week, and found out that I am an Achiever/Innovator. This amazing, because the VALS says that Achievers "live conventional lives, are politically conservative, and respect authority over the status quo. They value consensus, predictability, and stability over risk, intimacy, and self-discovery." As a ridiculously liberal spoken-word poet, design student, and Portlander, who has once traveled the United States on a whim, living out of her car, I disagree. Maybe, though, the fact that I'd buy Arm & Hammer over Dr. Bronner's magic bar, puts me in with the soccer moms.
From here, I had a hard time investigating something that made me want to yell "Fraud" at the computer screen- no matter how "successful, take-charge person with a high self-esteem" it tried to tell me I was. The whole thing seems to work backwards under the idea that buyers choose products based on who they want to be- instead of looking at what products they buy; this test claims to ask if one "likes to move around a lot" in 16 different ways and derive whether you'd buy the red or blue pair of underwear without acknowledging that we are all different actors in in different environments.
If an individual is the sum of his behavior and environment, then how can you determine who he'll be when shopping at a store through an online test in his home? Maybe test-taking Leah is much more conservative than I thought! Thanks VALS!

Home again

After hours and hours of field research and interviews, I am, again, digging through pounds of psychological studies: this time, more about the objects and the home and less about Baby-boomers' INSANE impact on the state of everything as they age over the next 30 years.

On "The Semiotics of Home Decor" by Joan Kron (from Home-Psych: The Social Psychology of Home and Decoration):

Kron wrote "If an object reflects a person accurately, it's an index of status. But symbols of status are not always good indices [of such]." She goes on to talk about how anyone with a lump sum of money can buy an object that someone of a higher class might own, and that "clusters of symbols are better than isolated ones." I read this, and wondered when I last bought something to indicate who I already think I am instead of who I'd like to be, and came-up blank. To me, the two represent the same thing: a desire to be the same type of person said buyer associates with a user/owner of said object- why else would the active lifestyle sportswear industry be so huge (does everyone that buys a sub-arctic Northface sweater already think of themselves as Summit climbers?)? If it can be said that we adapt to life through imitation, and then internalize our actions and vocabulary just long enough to find a new situation to adapt to, then how are our possessions any more than a physical expression of our hopes? Status... status comes when we are given an object by someone above us, and so, to me, because America lacks the rules bestowed upon nobles of 15th century Germany, object ownership is no longer granted to us by the king: we are allowed to buy that watch or gorgeous couch in the same way we could wear a Prada scarf without repercussion- but have that scarf given to us personally by an esteemed someone, and it becomes a symbol of how the world should see us.
Simply put, I can't see how an object we choose reflects more than who we want to be (unless we are being cheeky and saying "I am a person that wants to be _____"). Only an object given to us reflects how those people "should" see us... because it acts as a physical reminder that someone thinks of us. Status is merely wrapped up in the giving and becomes proportionally apparent when given by someone we admire- be that for talent, genius, or political success.

Beyond that, I found the rest of the piece a fascinating flurry of instances when we, as owners, cherish the things we own, and could understand why someone would feel detached from an area that lacked familiar objects- things to remind him of how he fits into the world.

Best Gifs of all time

Designs featured on "I am not an Artist" are more than entertaining, but witty and well thought out. Definitely a must see.

We Feel Fine

I am in LOVE with Jonathan Harris' Universe, which displays modern "mythology" information through storytelling in a beautiful and compelling way. The site, which was created way back in 2007, may seem less "informationally" relevant than other modern sites (it has not been updated), but in terms of concept, the site remains an inspiration.
Harris, who created "We Feel Fine" (also mind-blowing) in 2006, recently came out with a book about it!! He has also released Sputnik Observatory, a sort of home video meets Ted talks (watch his ted talk here) sort of thing.

Both Cool Hunting and 99% have covered Jonathan Harris and his project "We Feel Fine," and I recently read a photo-article he created in Good Magazine about an Alaskan Whale Hunt.

CHIFOO

Had an awesome time at CHIFOO, which is now being hosted at the Art Institute of Portland's open space. James changed her presentation topic last minute to cover- you guessed it- the ipad, and how it changes the game for ipod/ iphone apps. (think big, right?)
Fantastic!


March 3rd, Jessica Coffey, with Teneo Research speaks about Advanced Research techniques- I wouldn't miss it for the world.