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We’re in the season of wishing. A year ago, I Wish This Was began in New Orleans by Candy Chang and was inspired by vacant storefronts. There are a lot of them where Candy lives in New Orleans. Imagine being able to voice what we want, where we want it? Imagine insprine something we think is beyond us to reach? (more…)
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Last weekend we went up to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture a non-profit farm and education center in Pocantico Hills, NY. While known for the partner restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns as well as a cafe the Center has far more to offer than just eating. Stone Barns is a fully operational 80-acre four-season farm that sits on the Rockefeller Estate. Their mission is simple to “improve the way America eats and farms”. (more…)
There hasn’t been a creative company, process or individual on earth during the past 30+ years that wasn’t in some way inspired, vexed, awed, flummoxed or just plain mesmerized by Steve Jobs and his instinct for innovation. Including us. So thanks Steve, for the inspiration we have taken from your work and for the work it may continue to inspire.
Well, maybe not really cocktail music – more like can of beer and shot of Beam. But that’s not the point. Something about beautiful, clear, blue-sky summer days – like the one we are luckily enjoying today – always make me think of rolling down the windows and loading up the Brothers. Enjoy!
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I go back and forth on the idea of prefab housing. On the one hand, it seems inevitable that as more people jockey for less materials, their use in construction will become more tightly regulated. In that same vein, it makes sense to me to be out in front of that regulation – if it is going to be useful, then work to make it beautiful ahead of time. On the other hand, I find most prefab housing to be completely soul-less – the worst type of minimalism that considers warmth and coziness to be expendable excesses. So it was really nice to discover NORD’s Shingle House in Dungeness. While certainly not a statement in excess, The Shingle House is warm and human in both its scale and use of materials. The spareness perfectly reflects the coastal English desert-scape of Dungeness on the Kentish coast. Perhaps then it is the suitability of the minimalist design to a comparatively minimal landscape that makes the concept less jarring? Wonder what Hemingway would have thought.
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These days we seem mired in the pragmatics of looking for solutions to our many challenges – as consumers, as citizens, as cohabitants of the planet, as people. So much more the reason that we must remember to dream. Big if possible. And every once in a while, really, really big.
Procrastinating…
Decided it was high time I followed up a link I saw earlier this month on some new minimal wristwatches from superstar German design brand Braun.
They’re very nice – just what you’d expect. You can check’em out here. This is my fav.
But – unexpectedly – I saw some cool new updates of Braun designers Dieter Rams’ and Dietrich Lubs’ perfect travel alarms clocks right next door to the wristwatches and was immediately transported back to about 1985. My father did a lot of travel for business in the 80′s and brought me back one of these from a trip to Japan. Aside from the Japanese affinity for the world of great design and Braun’s obvious inclusion in said world, I am not sure how a trip to Japan resulted in a German clock. Must ask. Anyway, used it non-stop until I lost it during college – I am sure it is still working somewhere. Buying a new one. Now.
And that, my friends, is why it pays to procrastinate.
0 commentsIn that there is a strong link between the emotional, the psychological and the aesthetic, David Brooks’s op-ed today on modesty offers some worthwhile points that can be extended to the world of objects and design. Namely, is there perhaps something in the continuing search for objects that befit our sense of “station” which leads us as consumers – and the producers that try to anticipate their whims – down a path of newer-is-better materialism? Is there really a destination, or is it the pursuit that counts? If newer is not better, how does that change the way we interact with objects and the sometimes enjoyable process of acquiring? Something to think about I suppose.
The Modesty Manifesto
March 10, 2011
By DAVID BROOKS
Go to the original article.
We’re an overconfident species. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. A survey of high school students found that 70 percent of them have above-average leadership skills and only 2 percent are below average.
Men tend to be especially blessed with self-esteem. Men are the victims of unintentional drowning more than twice as often as women. That’s because men have tremendous faith in their own swimming ability, especially after they’ve been drinking.
Americans are similarly endowed with self-esteem. When pollsters ask people around the world to rate themselves on a variety of traits, they find that people in Serbia, Chile, Israel and the United States generally supply the most positive views of themselves. People in South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and Morocco are on the humble side of the rankings.
Yet even from this high base, there is some evidence to suggest that Americans have taken self-approval up a notch over the past few decades. Start with the anecdotal evidence. It would have been unthinkable for a baseball player to celebrate himself in the batter’s box after a home-run swing. Now it’s not unusual. A few decades ago, pop singers didn’t compose anthems to their own prowess; now those songs dominate the charts.
American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests. But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.
Students in the Middle East, Africa and the United States have the greatest faith in their math skills. Students in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan have much less self-confidence, though they actually do better on the tests.
In a variety of books and articles, Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia have collected data suggesting that American self-confidence has risen of late. College students today are much more likely to agree with statements such as “I am easy to like” than college students 30 years ago. In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a “very important person.” By the ’90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were.
In short, there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion.
Writers like Twenge point out that young people are bathed in messages telling them how special they are. Often these messages are untethered to evidence of actual merit. Over the past few decades, for example, the number of hours college students spend studying has steadily declined. Meanwhile, the average G.P.A. has steadily risen.
Some argue that today’s child-rearing and educational techniques have produced praise addicts. Roni Caryn Rabin of The Times recently reported on some research that found that college students would rather receive a compliment than eat their favorite food or have sex.
If Americans do, indeed, have a different and larger conception of the self than they did a few decades ago, I wonder if this is connected to some of the social and political problems we have observed over the past few years.
I wonder if the rise of consumption and debt is in part influenced by people’s desire to adorn their lives with the things they feel befit their station. I wonder if the rise in partisanship is influenced in part by a narcissistic sense that, “I know how the country should be run and anybody who disagrees with me is just in the way.”
Most pervasively, I wonder if there is a link between a possible magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship.
Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.
Perhaps the enlargement of the self has also attenuated the links between the generations. Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending onto future generations. But no generation has done it as freely as this one. Maybe people in the past had a visceral sense of themselves as a small piece of a larger chain across the centuries. As a result, it felt viscerally wrong to privilege the current generation over the future ones, in a way it no longer does.
It’s possible, in other words, that some of the current political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a more comprehensive shift in values.
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After an amazingly hectic summer – evidenced by the near total neglect of our beloved blog – it seemed like the right idea to tie our new resolution to get back to writing with the first glimpses of fall color. This picture was taken first thing this morning from the little deck outside our back door with a cup of coffee in hand.
We had our first Teroforma warehouse sale this past weekend. Leading up to it, we were worried that we didn’t really have any sort of useful countertop where people could stack their selections without lugging them around while they shopped. One of the drawbacks of operating your own warehouse is the profusion of shipping palettes that build up over time. Turning negative into positive, the picture above is what Andrew did to solve both the counter dilemma and the shipping palette plague: 24 palettes, 57 sq ft of 5/8 plywood, 23 2.5″ woodscrews, some swearing and a band-aid = Teroforma’s Eiffel Counter. The sale was a hit and at least one person asked us who made our cool checkout countertop. I’m pretty sure Andrew has added it to his bio somewhere 