Hasta La Ideas

We had the pleasure of meeting Paul Barbera at Creature of Comfort’s beautiful shop on Mulberry Street. Against that backdrop, over a few glasses of senselessly fine tequila and surrounded a fastidiously attired fashionistas and artists, we chatted with Barbera about why he sought out moments in direct contrast with our carefully curated surroundings. For his new book Where They Create, Creature of Comfort’s Paul observed that one of his biggest issues was getting his subjects not to clean house.

Each one of us presents a façade to the world, endeavoring to convey our idealized selves to others. Interior photography generally follows the same mold. Clutter is cleaned away and multiple photo exposures are taken to balance the light that comes through the windows without underexposing the detail against the walls. The creative process, however, is far messier. Barbera’s early career included fashion photography, advertising, editorial and interiors, but it wasn’t until a chance cancellation led him to shoot the working space of his friend Jeb’s studio in Italy that he found that an abrupt and unguided tour of the workspace of creatives could offer unguarded insight into their process. Over the next two years, he photographed those spaces and posted them to his website until a chance meeting with Alexandra Onderwater led to the publication of his book. Inside, over 30 creative spaces are photographed using natural lighting and more importantly, without the help of a broom.

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The Class of 2012 in Industrial Design at the University of Cincinnati had a problem our book reviewer can sympathize with: ID books rarely show process, yet portfolio presentation requires the viewer to understand the underlying thinking in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, most ID schools don’t run those students through the paces of Photoshop or InDesign that is requisite for putting their work in the best light. With their new book The Portfolio Handbook, the University of Cincinnati Class of 2012 asked people in-the-know how a portfolio should be structured so you wouldn’t have to.

The book begins with a light tone, framing portfolio design questions as coming from little South Park-headed personas asking (and answering) naïve questions. Each section is introduced by the talking heads and often followed with shots of students working on prototypes or huddled around walls of Post-it notes. Those shots serve to illustrate that the students have done the work they’re explaining, and that the same structures that underlie classroom teaching and presentation apply to portfolio layout.

Four years of work is difficult to condense into a single portfolio, so they begin with a survey of working designers. The designers they surveyed placed the highest value on quality of ideas and conceptual sketches, placing less importance on finished designs, renders, 3D models or prototypes. Those are the same skills most non-specialized employers require, but portfolio construction is slightly more complex. Communicating the quality of ideas requires two other skills that don’t score so highly: storytelling and graphic design, so the Handbook spends the bulk of its pages on that foundation.

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Thomas Thwaites opens his recent book with a quote from Mostly Harmless, the last book that Douglas Adams wrote in his Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series: “Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that’s it.” The protagonist, Arthur Dent, finds himself stranded on a planet of limited technological sophistication and after initially hoping to impress the locals with his technical knowledge, he rapidly realizes that all of his knowledge is predicated upon preexisting technology. Somewhere between a travel romp and an investigation of the modes of production in a modern capitalist society, The Toaster Project tracks his quest to build an entire appliance “from scratch.” The sad little toaster he built appears on the cover and looks more like a poached egg than a modern convenience, but by the time the narrative is finished, it’s pretty clear that it was a quickly-scrambled quest to get it to look like anything at all.

Henry Petroski’s The Pencil is the most well-known examination of a seemingly simple technology, but Petroski catalogued the manufacturing process rather than actually mining and building a pencil. Thwaites is more ambitious, though his enthusiasm leads to compromise before nearly every insight. He begins simply enough, by reverse engineering the cheapest toaster he can find (3.94 British Pounds), only to find that it has 404 different parts. He catalogues those parts into 5 different materials (steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel), and then sets about making a comparable appliance with a clear set of rules. The remainder of the book reads as a travelogue of the resultant exploration.

The following pages could just as easily be read as a comedic exposé, a mad quest towards a seemingly unattainable goal, or a philosophical indictment of the complexities of modern life. Thwaites’s voice is most suited to the first two, and those are the pieces most likely to captivate most readers. Industrial designers may find themselves wishing for slightly more technical insight, particularly at the end, but even with those compromises towards the lay audience, for those of us who cobbled together foam models and PowerPoint slides for our thesis projects (like myself), it’s pretty tough to cast the first stone at someone who actually explores what it means to make something.

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Having read Naomi Klein’s No Logo several years ago and been stirred by her central thesis, we were cautious about Debbie Millman’s Brand Thinking, but it didn’t take long before we realized that the subtitle “and Other Noble Pursuits” was rather tongue-in-cheek. When Millman says “brand thinking,” she means thinking, but she doesn’t give the same weight to “noble.” Capturing interviews with the likes of Grant McCracken and Malcolm Gladwell while getting Karim Rashid to admit that he was embarrassed by some of his older designs for preposterously expensive couches, Brand Thinking encapsulates the conflict inherent in branding today.

These aren’t easy questions. What is a brand, and what does it mean? Millman points out that the first brand as a trademark was Bass Ale, according to the 1876 UK Trademark Act. Bass happens to taste fantastic (IMHO) but it also sells at a premium. Buying a Bass “says” something about the buyer (e.g. you’re not a teetotaler, but also not likely a Nascar fan). At the same time, the origin of the Louis Vuitton “LV” logo pattern was created based upon Victorian Orientalism, but was ultimately patented and succeeded at avoiding counterfeiting as well. Now Louis Vuitton has moved from painstakingly crafted leather trunks to being a small part of the megalithic LVMH it has drastically reduced quality in favor of quarterly profits. LV “branded” counterfeit products can be found at fractional prices from Canal Street to Shanghai, where the projection of brand identity has become paramount to the underpinning quality. We wonder though, once quality ceases to define a brand, what fills the void?

The British “chav” subculture has pursued brands to the point that Burberry plaid “became” their identity, not the other way around. Cristal champagne was wholly embraced by hip-hop culture, until a brand director quipped “We can’t forbid people from buying it” and yet that’s precisely what many luxury brands do with their pricepoints. The looming trouble for many of these brands, however, is that modern technology makes superficially luxurious products more affordable. Dana Thomas’s Deluxe presented a detailed chronology of the devaluation of brand in world culture and examines directly what Millman ascertains in interviews. Nancy Ectoff’s Survival of the Prettiest took Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class to its logical conclusion, explaining that wasteful adornment that took thousands of man-hours to make connotes social status. The question of what brand means in the modern era of mass production is far more ineffable. Every day, how we adorn ourselves makes a statement about the sort of person we are.

Even more amazingly, though, brands are shaping our culture. In interviewing Grant McCracken, Millman reveals not only that the Coke bottle is an iconic shape, but also that Coke’s Christmas campaigns gradually changed jolly old St. Nicholas from a green-attired woodsman to the red and white “Santa Claus” of today. Red and white are the colors of Coke. What does that say about Coke? More troubling, what does that say about us?

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Images and review by Daniel Stillman

With 30 years of origami experience, one of my first concerns in reviewing Paul Jackson’s newest book Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form is the fact that origami is a 3D art. Translating 2D instructions into form is no trivial matter. Like Ikea instructions, origami diagrams are a language into themselves. This book is the distillation of years of teaching this material to design students. To get some practical benefit from it, I would suggest that you spend at least several hours, playing with the forms and techniques introduced here. As part of my review, I’ve asked my friend and leather jewelry designer Melissa Zook—someone with zero origami experience—to print out some templates, make some folds, and get inspired by the book.

Part One: Why it is Awesome

As soon as I saw this book cover, I was excited. Paul Jackson has been pushing the boundaries of origami for years. As a boy, I geeked out to many of his awesome models—his horse from an equilateral triangle first offended me for its lack of purity (origami was from squares!) but won me over for its elegance. His lidded box taught me how to divide a square into fifths using my eyes and an algorithm. Both were committed to memory at one point in my life. While I loved his representational designs, I was amused and bewildered by his more artistic endeavors that played with form and shadow, but had no legs. More and better representational origami was my main goal, and the goal of much of the origami world. Then I grew up, and so did origami.

Peter Engel’s book, Origami from Angelfish to Zen, was the first origami book that blew my mind. It showed me that origami was about form, topology, creativity, dreams and math. And nature is math. So I began to realize that my paper doodlings were pointing at something deeper—something about the real nature of the world. Engel got me reading the work of mathematical biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and thinking about my own origami designs. Creation was about algorithms, reflection, repetitions, alterations. Nature finds a good nugget of design and uses it over and over again, riffing on it like Jazz. We’re all made of cells. Origami is just made of triangles, really, and those triangles can multiply like bacteria across a sheet, creating new organisms as they multiply.

This book is a deep meditation on those cells and all the ways they can be combined and recombined to make forms.

Years ago, Jackson wrote an Encyclopedia of Origami and Papercraft Techniques which showed me the power and breadth of the medium of paper. This book is pushing way beyond that. Paper is just one type of sheet material. Anything thin—leather, metal, fabric—can be explored using these techniques. When you break the plane, you create dimension and form. And the study of form should be of interest to any designer. I think it should inspire the reader to take something good—a sketch, a form “module” if you will—and find out how far it can go, how else it can be applied and transformed.

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