Writing

I have got to start writing here again. I took some time to read some of my earlier posts, and I really like most of what I wrote.

Here goes nothing...

Interaction Design

I'm going to start posting once a week. I'll design a piece, based on a topic I've been thinking on and wish to write about, and I'll publish both. I've found, partially because of my senior project, that I have a lot to say (whether or not anyone wants to hear it is another story). And I hope that writing these ideas down may help me to understand them better. Design plays a wonderfully important role in the communication of ideas, and helping people (including myself) to make their ideas heard and understood is one of the driving forces behind my passion for design.

The preceeding image for this post is a rhetorical question, but I'll throw my answer out there.

Yes.

I was watching "Objectified", the Gary Hustwit documentary, yesterday and I was incredibly inspired. To hear fellow designers (yes, they were mostly industrial designers, but I think that is beside the point) saying things that I have thought and felt about design and the world in general for years was awesomly satisfying. I can see many future posts taking inspiration and quotes from the movie. I think it stands high above "Helvetica" conceptually. I hope he does more movies like it (I did like Helvetica).

"Nowadays, Interaction Design mainly refers to the software on the screen... But the way I think about it... designing hardware, things that we can touch... solid objects...is all Interaction Design" says Naoto Fukasawa, a Tokyo-based Industrial Designer. I think this statement can be directly applied to type and typography as well.

I'm not only talking about rotating type, or shrinking it, or embossing it, or animating it, or any other of the millions of ways designers manipulate characters to evoke a physical or mental experience from the reader. I'm also talking about the way in which the reader is often affected by the content of what is written and how the design of it reflects said content.

The ability to place in the reader's mind an image or thought is the first part of interaction. A typographic piece that allows the viewer to expand on this image or thought and actually do something becomes a very real example of typographic design as interaction design.

I want to learn to design successfully in this fashion. The driving force behind my desire to design is becoming more and more an eagerness to educate and inspire human beings to expand upon and better themselves and their surroundings. I believe that thinking about all fields of design with respect to the idea of interactivity is a necessary step in acheiving successful, positive, and meaningful design.

Thank you.

An entertaining hermaneutical exercise

I was thinking about the different ways in which people interpret, cherry-pick, contradict, and ultimately blaspheme against their own religious texts or belief systems simply to justify a certain point of view. And as I was thinking, I remembered a passage I read in The End of Faith a while back. In this passage, Sam Harris wonderfully illustrates the futility of defining any One True religion based on a text, correct in all of it's "teachings".

Derek I know you never finished this book, so here's an excerpt from the notes. And to others, I think this is an interesting and entertaining point. From Sam Harris' The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason :

"... One can interpret every text in such a way as to yield almost any mystical or occult instruction.

A case in point: I have selected another book at random, this time, from the cookbook isle of a bookstore. The book is A Taste of Hawaii: New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific. Therein I have discovered an as yet uncelebrated mystical treatise. While it appears to be a recipe for wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish, we need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence:

snapper filet, cubed

3 teaspoons chopped scallions

salt and freshly ground pepper

a dash of cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons chopped fresh ginger

1 teaspoon minced garlic

8 shrimp, peeled, deveined, and cubed

1/2 cup heavy cream; 2 eggs, lightly beaten

3 teaspoons rice wine; 2 cups bread crumbs

3 tablespoons vegetable oil; 2 1/2 cups ogo tomato relish

The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himself—you and I—awash in the sea of existence. But here we find it cubed, which is to say that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of the body, mind, and spirit.

Three teaspoons chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportions. The import of the passage is clear: the body, mind, and spirit need to be tended to with the same care.

Salt and freshly ground black pepper: here we have the perennial invocation of opposites—the white and the black aspects of our nature. Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe for spiritual life. Nothing, after all, can be excluded from the human experience (this seems to be a Tantric text). What is more, salt and pepper, come to us in the form of grains, which is to say that our good and bad qualities are born of the tiniest actions. Thus, we are not good or evil in general, but only by virtue of innumerable moments, which color the stream of our being by force of repetition.

A dash of cayenne pepper: clearly, being of such robust color and flavor, this signifies the spiritual influence of an enlightened adept. What shall we make of the ambiguity of its measurement? How large is a dash? Here we must rely upon the wisdom of the universe at large. The teacher himself will know precisely what we need by way of instruction. And it is at just this point in the text that the ingredients that bespeak the heat of spiritual endeavor are added to the list—for after a dash of cayenne pepper, we find two teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger and one teaspoon of minced garlic. These form an isosceles trinity of sorts, signifying the two sides of our spiritual nature (male and female) united with the object meditation.

Next comes eight shrimp—peeled, deveined, and cubed. The eight shrimp, of course, represent the eight worldly concerns that every spiritual aspirant must decry: fame and shame, loss and gain, pleasure and pain, praise and blame. Each needs to be deveined, peeled, and cubed—that is, purged of its power to entrance us and incorporated on the path of practice.

That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any text—and that they are therefore meaningless—should be obvious. Here we have scripture as Rorschach blot: wherein the occultist can find his magical principles perfectly reflected; the conventional mystic can find his recipe for transcendence; and the totalitarian dogmatist can hear God telling him to suppress the intelligence and creativity of others. This is not to say that no author has ever couched spiritual or mystical information in allegory or ever produced a text that requires a strenuous hermeneutical effort to be made sense of. If you pick up a copy of Finnegans Wake, for instance, and imagine that you have found therein allusions to various cosmogonic myths and alchemical schemes, chances are that you have, because Joyce put them there. But to dredge scripture in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a literary game."

Just some food for thought. I actually found it rather hilarious the first time I read it.

-z

Pilates

Ok, so I'm going to do a post on Pilates. Hear me out.

I know the stereotypical Pilates student, I see them all the time. I lived above a store (lululemon) that sells clothing to these people. But Pilates is about so much more than them. I know I am being a bit of a snob, making a statement like that. But honestly, Pilates is one of the best physical (and mental) exercise disciplines I have ever learned about or participated in.

In May 2009 my girlfriend Ashley began training to become a Pilates instructor, so most of my knowledge on this subject is passed on from her. Before this my only knowledge of Pilates was that it was something similar to Yoga, and pretty lame. I was oh so very wrong. Right from the beginning, at its basics, Pilates is about learning your body. Yes it is about strengthening your core to support the rest of your body. Yes it can help you loose weight. Yes it is about strengthening and lengthening your muscles. Yes it is about becoming more flexible and more physically healthy. But it is also an amazing technique in becoming more aware of your body. There are so many visualizations that the instructors use to help you imagine what your body is doing. When you sit up from lying down, you curl up, deliberately lifting each vertebra from the mat after the preceding one. When you place your arms above your head to begin one of several stretches, you align your shoulder blades with each other and your ribcage. You learn how your body is supposed to work. In Pilates you align and correct your body, reverting and fixing bad posture and physical habits. It has been said that if you meet someone that you have not seen for some time after doing Pilates for while, they will have a hard time recognizing you as the same person. While I am unsure of how true this really is, I can completely understand the concept. Imagine your friend has terrible posture and walks incorrectly. Now imagine seeing them for the first time after a year of Pilates in which they have learned to stand upright and take long strides because of the realignment their body has gone through. I could imagine that being a rather remarkable sight.

I've participated in a few different sports and exercise/workout techniques throughout my life, and Pilates is one of the few pure and positive ones. I received my Black Belt in Korean-style American Karate, and that is the only one that comes close to the dedication and positive focus of Pilates. I have seen so many articles and news stories on athletes who need surgery or physical therapy for one reason or another. There are an incredible amount of MLB pitchers who receive surgery on their elbows and shoulders for constantly throwing a ball (however fast, curved, or game-winning) incorrectly compared to how their body works. I cycle a lot, and it can be bad for your knees, neck, and back (if you are doing it incorrectly). Sure, athletes at pro levels are very fit (most of the time) and can have great looking bodies. But as for longevity of the body, these activities just don't hold a candle to the type of positive reinforcement that Pilates can provide.

Everyone remembers the Star Wars Kid. He grabbed a video camera and a pole, and started flailing about in his room. My friend Greg and I had a discussion about him once, concerning bodily awareness. It's easy to make fun of that kid. He looks silly. But he was learning how to wield a weapon. He was learning how his body functions. Who knows, maybe in the years since then, sans video tapes, he has mastered a style of martial arts. I have seen many people so completely disconnected from the physicality of their presence in the world it's laughable and saddening. They could take a hint from the Star Wars Kid.

I think Pilates is an incredibly important tool in awareness, and I have had conversations with Ashley about this very idea. This sort of attention paid to one's own body can easily translate to many other parts of life. The more aware you are of the systems in your own body, the easier it is to become more aware of the systems surrounding you.

Until another time,

Thank you.

-z

p.s. This blog post is now the #1 Google hit for "star wars kid pilates" (without quotes). How am I the first person to make that argument? /sarcasm