Mr. Freud, why are you so strange?

Coffee

I finally understand designer's addiction to coffee... the feeling you get from a dawning inspiration is similar to a dozen cups of espressos.

nationality of my friends

I recently met up with a friend who just moved to study in London. And while I sat there listening to how cool it was to have European friends and purported higher social status therefore, avoiding unfriendly asians in a clique, how I didn't seem to be making any friends of my own etc., I was torn between amusement and exasperation.

Other than the fact that I was thoroughly insulted, I am surprised at how that incident persistently annoyed me. I wasn't affected by the sweeping fallacies, the stereotyping of races or the very negative impression of my supposedly sad life, but the argument used to support the behavior – being a good expat.

According to said friend, being a good expat in a new country involves making new friends and adopting the local culture.

Fairly said. But it was strung along and mutated into
being a good expat involves making new friends based solely on their race/nationality
(so you can classify them as 'look at my international friends!')

adopt the local culture by trying your best to impersonate their accent


You can draw your own conclusions here.
I still wonder what does being a good expat mean and the idea verges on spatial territories and the psychological conditioning of adopting a different set of behaviour when in a different territory. Isn't it interesting how the change in space can infect the psychology of someone so deeply?

In a small scale, the 'rules' of behaviour is easier to understand. Walking from the bedroom to the bathroom, there is a sudden urge to associate with the different territory by activating the objects in the room or taking off your clothes. But in a much bigger scale like flying across the globe, what defines the 'rules' of behaviour?


To end off, this is a blog posting by an American lady staying in Singapore:
http://expatbostonians.com/2011/03/04/bad-expat-part-1-ur-doin-it-rong/

is it possible to be nostalgic for a memory that is not mine?

triple rainbow

off topic but psychedelic enough to warrant a break from my updating spree.... I saw a TRIPLE RAINBOW! the 3rd rainbow isn't that clear in the photo but.... use your imagination!

elective series part 1.

Matthew Taylor's lecture on 21st century enlightenment was particularly intriguing, especially on hearing that 3 of the main values in my country's national pledge are inadequate myths. What I found most puzzling was his mention that increased incentives decreases the ability to perform complex tasks because that drives against the idea of setting target goals and working towards a fulfillment.

But having watched Dan Pink's take on Sam Glucksberg's experiment on verbal behavior and problem solving, it became clearer that incentives narrow people's mind and increases ability to perform mechanical tasks as opposed to cognitive tasks. Does that mean we should pay the manual labourers more and give white collared workers less incentives to increase productivity?

Also, perhaps affluent societies have lower levels of happiness but (no references here) we could be less unhappy as well. In other words, we have a neutralized wavelength of emotions. If you're a dialectic then working towards a happier/ more contented society would also mean you create a one which experienced bitter sadness as well. But if we are able to experience sadness through empathizing (let's say with a less fortunate society) instead, and in doing so fill the gap in the "required" emotional polar, are you able to cheat your own moral compass and become a truly selfish, happy community?

Let's give a crude example... a charity organization runs a campaign and tries to educate us on the sufferings in a certain country. We are shown pictures and told stories about their plight and we empathize with them. Compelled by our morals to help, we donate to the organization and then walk away feeling very blessed and warm and happy with the thought of helping someone and a sticker to prove so. But the organization is a bogus that just swallowed your cash as administrative fee to make you happy. Blow this up big scale and you get a twisted dystopia of suppressed sufferers to feed the emotional quota of the happy folks.

__________________

I also think that people have an idealized view of what our future would be like. *warning: generalization* Something not too far from the flying vehicles and sci-fi dreams that started centuries ago. Or maybe the dream of utopian society of lush green fields and evolved intelligent beings peacefully co-existing with nature? And as we work towards creating that vision of ours, we create a lot of by-products that are unfinished or failed experiments and low grade prototypes of what we imagine in those visions. Like the sketches you do before the final piece.

But experiments and creations like these take time and resources. And of course finances. So these by-products are then marketed to the mass, aka ourselves, and advertised and touted as desires of the individual in a society. As such, our bigger inert desire for the future fuel the market to sell us what is essentially the rubbish sketches, and in order to sell those, the market creates in us a sense of desire for these failures. Before long, we demand for more and improved versions because they are merely pale comparisions of something that we think we know deep inside us. And that demand drives the market to supply us even more of the rubbish, faster and with more ting-tongs to distract us.

Anyway, that is my explanation for where the demand the fuels a consumer capitalist market comes from.

Sadly, you're happier now.

do you think that in searching for happiness,  you find more sadness instead? Or perhaps in becoming a more cheerful person, you also had to experience the bitterness of deeper pain? Would you pay that price then? When you achieve a goal but instead of delirious jubilation usually associated with achievements you find yourself confused what would that mean? Hey! Just imagine what would happen if I mismatch all your emotions to wrong situations. You'll never know what to work for again!

I know people always look back at their childhood and say that times were happier back then. Perhaps it is not that childhood was a happier time. But that emotions in childhood was more moderate and mild? Or maybe it just became a distant memory of a hazy utopia we project into our own minds.

"Expecting life to treat you fairly because you're a good person is like expecting a bull not to charge because you're a vegetarian" Dennis Wholey
.
is life fair?


i wonder...


what if I try to be philosophical and say "it's not what life gives you, it's what you make of it" and thus life is fair?


but don't you need materials to create something? do we all have the same amount and same quality of material? If you give one person a pack of blue-tac and the other modeling clay with all tool provided and a kiln, and both are of equal talent, who would be able to reproduce a more accurate model of Beethoven's bust?


or maybe i'm too shallow to understand

how did it change?

do you remember when you're young and you were accidentally given a few extra coins in the change while buying a little snack or toy from the corner shop? And being the virtuous little child, you return the extra amount and the shopkeeper and everyone around beams with pride at the honest little kid while you're secretly chaffed at your amazing mathematical skills.

then you grew up and the few extra coins turn into hundreds of dollars and suddenly the beaming faces change into twisted swirls of agony and little beady eyes with weary wrinkles around the corners. You're no longer the bright honest angel but simply a foolish foolish naïve thing giving away cash that could be yours. The shopkeeper no longer smiles warmly at you but narrows his eyes in suspicion. You little cheater. The story changes.

was it just a superficial moral?

from moorgate to barking

There must be some days when you just wake up with an 'Information Desk' sign stuck across your forehead.

When you get pass your days making minimal contact to strangers, having five approach you consecutively in one single morning is enough to make you wonder if maybe your dark blue windbreaker doesn't make you look like a Tube security personnel. And the best part? There's only one line, in one direction on that one platform.

So anyway I've come to the conclusion that us humans are forever thinking about running away to another planet when Earth finally fails us. But in actuality, we fled to Earth... from Mars! *nods seriously* That would totally explain the history of water existence on Mars and the asteroid killing the dinosaurs theory (that would be our spacecraft landing on Earth). woooahhh... that's the answer to life right there.



Well, yes, I do suffer from lack of sleep. Why do you ask?

Grey is nothingness

the distance between

Undecided

Grey is everything

Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still.

— Calvin Coolidge

Sometimes I go... Huh?

The best part of my try out. I don't like to fail. Failures look ugly.
I want to make beautiful.

but then ugly is a lazy thing.

They say you reap what you sow. But the packet of beans I bought doesn't say how many beans I have to sow before I grow a giant bean stalk.

Of Canned Tuna and Darwinism

Dinner of canned tuna in sunflower oil. Dolphin safe and Omega-3 destroyed.

Was reading about Darwin's Beagle journey and how he came up with his theory.  It's quite amazing how throughout history inventions and break-through has always been a case of who presented it best. For each brilliant new theory or invention, there is always a series of people who has done it before albeit in slightly different methods and with different intentions but with the similar conclusion. And of these, some faded into oblivion only to be rediscovered long after their lifespan, some ended up looking like bitter and sore losers, some were beheaded and yet some just don't make that big an impact.

So what makes that perfect equation of Marketing + Idea + Correct Timing = Genius of the Century and how do you make sure you don't end up as some others you see at the end of the wikipedia page?

On another note, it's quite amazing how a bald monk who spent his entire solitary life staring at bean stalks and probably eating beans, one day decided to call us all BB, Bb, Bb. bb and the entire world nodded seriously in agreement. Isn't life logical!

The Greeks were probably doing the same when Socrates said that being born a women is the ultimate divine punishment. *nods seriously in agreement*

can you tell I just had a really crappy day?

Of understanding and what is that?

If someone explains something to you, do you understand or do you conform?

When a person of supposedly better knowledge of the subject produces reasonings and theories and talks their way inside your mind and it slowly dawns on you that you are agreeing with them. Does that mean you now understand? Or does that mean you just lost your own opinion?

Truth is, if you take it just at surface level, you are generally conforming. Moulding yourself to a shape casted by many others. Anyone who's been through school will have experienced that regurgitation of formulas, scientific facts (only so called because they have yet to be debunked) and whatever it is that they call education. But unless you take each piece of information and analyze on it, reflect and draw up your own conclusions, you are simply taking a very watered-down version of another person's intellect, isn't it? But come on, who in the right mind would be able to take that sheer amount of information piled on them and dissect each and every one? So that's it! Every single one of us is a copy!

Michael Bierut once wrote an article on his 'accidental' plagiarism of a Willi Kunz's typographic work. One of very first comment that popped up was by someone who feared this act of unoriginality so condemned by the design world that he refuses to read design magazines.

That's silly isn't it? It's like saying "I insist on being original and hence I will not study the dictionary or read any books". How on earth is he going to learn? Besides, it is not just Communication Arts or Grafik that are design related. Every single object produced by man is design related. That means Vogue, that crappy tabloid newspaper, receipts from the supermarket, the power socket on the wall... chances are whatever you're touching now has been through a design process. Now try avoiding all these and come up with something totally original. I'd give 2 pences (I'm broke) to bet someone else has thought of the exact or similar idea. Hah!

Going off on a tangent, my prof recently mentioned Design for Life the BBC series kind of like Project Runway for product designers. It's pretty crappy even though Philippe Starck is the big boss insulting British design at every episode's beginning. Not surprising the series has faded into the thermosphere of public consciousness. You can catch it on Vimeo if you have an hour to spare.

Of Speech and Stupids

Part of what I love at Central Saint Martins is that we get to do Academic Research. I apologize for being a geek! But really, doesn't it give you pings of joy to find out that UPPERCASE and LOWERCASE were so called because that was how they stacked letterpress in drawers? 

So it's all great fun to find out that Italics were once favoured by the Italians (well, duh.) as a sort of Carolingian script revival, Romans used to write in full majuscule WITHOUTSPACINGBETWEENEACHLETTER (god know how they read without going cross-eyed) and BOLD typefaces only came about pretty much in the advertising boom of the 19th century. (makes sense, who can read Futura Extra Light on billboards? or a 12th century scribe furiously thickening the lines of an entire sentence with a sharp nib and blotchy ink?)

So the next time someone tells you nobody writes entire books in italics and that not using commas in your essay makes for uncomfortable reading, remind them that once upon a time, people wouldn't have been able to read properly with strange markings next to their words. 

But reading textbooks are pulling my eyeballs out! I am still unable to read normal spaced books without the lines blending into a starry mess occasionally. I need a leading of at least 20pt for a 12pt text to be really comfortable.

Do you find speech superior to writing? Or vice versa? 

A school of thought is that much of western languages are phonetic built and therefore a poor rip off of trying to reproduce sounds on paper. Which is an interesting thought since such languages have a particular set of phonetic alphabets that you rearrange to create new sounds like music notes. But either way, the entire span of vocabulary will always be limited to the base sounds which defines a language. 

On the other hand, ideogram based languages like Chinese or Sanskrit are more or less like polished forms of pictograms where a specific image can mean a whole lot of context. You can either see this as a more primitive form of communicating, or a more sophisticated alternative to writing down sounds. 

Which ever way it is, ideogram languages may be more romantic and culturally relevant but the business world will never give up speedy efficient grunts and squeaks.

Illustrators play with the synapse

Oskar Fischinger - work 1920s to 1940s 
http://www.tudou.com/v/PvmbCzO1q48

Nothing is Original.


Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows, select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent, and don't bother concealing your thievery - celevrate it if you feel like it.


In any case always remember what Jon Luc Goddard said:


"It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."

Jim Jarmusch