Looking for a great, quick-to-read design book? Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School takes less than an hour to plow through, but its multitude of ideas, quotes, and counter-points reinvigorated my design thinking this week. Each page is a single distillation of insight into architecture with an accompanying sketch to illustrate, and even though the title says architecture you could apply most of these nuggets of wisdom to any of the design disciplines. The advice ranges from broad suggestions like #17 (this is one of the more verbose entries, by the way):
The more specific a design idea is, the greater its appeal is likely to be.
Being nonspecific in an effort to appeal to everyone usually results in reaching no one. But drawing upon specific observation, poignant statement, ironic point, witty reflection, intellectual connection, political argument, or idiosyncratic belief in a creative work can help you create environments others will identify with in their own way.
Design a flight of stairs for the day a nervous bride descends them. Shape a window to frame a view of a specific tree on a perfect day in autumn. Make a balcony for the worst dictator in the world to dress down his subjects. Create a seating area for a group of surly teenagers to complain about their parents and teachers.
Designing in idea-specific ways will not limit the ways in which people use and understand your buildings, it will give them license to bring their own interpretations and idiosyncrasies to them.
to the tersely practical, like the drawing advice from #50:
Windows look dark in the daytime.
When rendering an exterior building view, making the windows dark (except when the glass is reflective or a light-colored blind is behind the glass) will add depth and realism.
Things I Learned is another of those books that I wish someone had handed me in early art school, before I moved beyond the foundational 2D and 3D design classes. (I found it via a quote used in the Music of Interaction Design talk given at SXSWi 2011 by Cennydd Bowles and James Box, which is also well worth listening to if you need some design inspiration.)
Any other titles along these lines that I should keep an eye out for? What simple primers have inspired you lately?
I just finished reading through The Gothic, a recent essay collection from the Documents of Contemporary Art series published by MIT Press. The book stitches together a variety of short essays centered on discussion of classic gothic literature and contemporary art, tapping into the thoughts of well-established artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Wall while also reflecting on younger members of the field like Banks Violette, David Altmejd, Aïda Ruilova, and Sue de Beer. Crammed within its scant 230, large-typeset pages you’ll find writing on Edgar Allen Poe (any book on gothic literature and modernity needs to have lots of Poe!), Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Freud and Lacan’s theories of the uncanny (unheimliche), deconstructions of 1980s slasher movies, psychoanalytic musings on duality and transgression, bits of cyberpunk from William Gibson, and more! When I was younger, I was thrilled reading Poe, Shelley, Baudelaire, et al., without realizing until recently how much of an impact their writings had on art and literature, continuing even today as the art world emerges slowly out of post-modernism and back towards theatricality and the sublime. Highly recommended.
Looking for an image for last week’s entry on shadows I turned to art history databases JSTOR/ArtSTOR, ECCO, and the WGA (academic database people seem to have a penchant for initialism). After getting badgered with various login options, access restrictions, rules for use, off-campus policies and so on, I turned to the hoi polloi: between Google Images and Flickr’s Creative Commons search I quickly turned up a worthwhile painting, free to use. Three news items from today confirmed that I’m not alone in thinking that keeping academic publishing behind university paywalls is a bit counterproductive.
The New York Times ran a piece detailing a proposal presented today to the faculty at Harvard. Their scholars’ academic work could soon be automatically published online, publicly available, on a surprisingly opt-out basis. While many professors already publish their work online at one journal repository or another, this could become a compelling centralized resource. This kind of no-cost open access has the journal and database publishers a bit worried, and for good reason. I haven’t been able to turn up any info yet on whether the proposal passed or not, or when exactly it’s up for vote (if that’s the way it works). Will developments like this kill niche journals that rely on their sibling publications’ high subscription fees? Will this change the business model of scholarly journals?
Next, Professor Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame writes that the “Legal Commons” project has seen their first release of case data, available as CCØ-licensed XML. This organization seeks to bring 1.8 million pages of federal case law into the public domain before the year is out, available for free for any use or purpose. It’s an ambitious goal, especially considering the clout of the expensive subscription-based alternatives, but a worthy one. After all, shouldn’t the word of the law be in the hands of the public?
Finally, I came across a post on the O’Reilly Radar blog about a newly announced non-profit service called CK-12. Their system provides a UI that will allow educators, students, and the public to assemble their own textbooks using open data and resources. Right now it sounds like it’s mostly limited to flat text, but in the future they plan to incorporate more dynamic items like RSS feeds, videos, and widgets. A bit of Web 2.0 for the classroom. I hope that it catches on with a least a few tech-savvy teachers. I’ll have to browse through the other news coming out of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference to see what else is going on along these lines in the publishing world.
UPDATE: Looks like Harvard’s faculty overwhelmingly accepted the proposal. There are more open law projects cropping up (like The Public Library of Law, which includes some commercial links) and public.resource.org’s archive is being picked up on legal information sites like Justia.
I’ve been surrounded by stories of shadows lately, especially stories of people separated from their shadows. It hasn’t been intentional. I’m midway through Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I recently found the Faust-like tale of Peter Schlemihl, and shortly before that, His Dark Materials (I guess “Peter Pan” will have to be added to the list eventually). Figuring that there must be something to this, I checked out a copy of Victor Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow for a bit of enlightenment. The writing is at times trying, full of academic language and awkward phrasing (just like my writing!), but that can be forgiven as it’s a translation. The meat of the book is worth the effort.
A Short History presents a compelling look at the development of the Western art tradition, a series of essays framed around artists’ use of shadow and simulacra as allegorical devices. Stoichita wanders from Pliny and Quintilian’s early explications of painting’s history (departing loved ones captured by silhouette traced on the wall) to the optical and philosophical experiments of the Renaissance to the modern investigative works by Kazimir Malevich, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol.
The common threads of these stories are fascinating: shadow as a powerful double of the human form; specular reflection as a evanescent ‘other’; shadows bearing the indication of a man’s true nature; the emptiness of a person bereft of their shadow. All themes I’ve been encountering in other writing lately. Shadows have always been much more than devices for the simple rendering of volumes, and this book is loaded with examples.
A fairly recent interview with Stoichita conducted by Cabinet Magazine is available on their site, summarizing many of these essays.