512 Pixels: One Hell of a Learning Curve 
A good reminder from Stephen Hackett that even those we least suspect may be barely keeping back the darkness, and a lesson for when life’s troubles get overwhelming.
As Scottish poet Ian MacLaren said so well, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” (And usually, a secret one.)
· Pause ·
The warm sun baked the pavement under my shoes in Chittagong’s dusty, yellow heat, and I looked at the old man lying in a puddle on the sidewalk about 15 feet in front of us. He was naked except for a ruined pair of shorts, and his rough, dark brown skin looked more like a filthy, crumpled canvas draped over nothing but bones than the flesh of a real body. Behind him was the cement railing of the sewage-filled canal that ran behind our house, so there was no real way to get around him without stepping into traffic. My mom turned toward the street, looking for an opening so we could cross. I kept looking at him.
His long hair and beard were matted with what I took to be his own shit. I guess It could’ve been mud from the canal, though. Wouldn’t have made much difference in the smell.
I was 10, and we crossed the street so we could walk on the other side. I thought of the story of the Good Samaritan, and how I wasn’t him. I thought how whoever the Good Samaritan helped probably didn’t smell so bad.
· Pause ·
7 years later, I drew a picture of that old man. It got me an “A” in my Grade 11 correspondence art class. It also made me think about where that man might be. Dead, probably.
I thought of how I fell into a sewage gutter once while playing tag with the other kids after church, how I lay stunned in a puddle at the bottom of that cement trench, “canal mud” mixing with wet blood in my hair. It occurred that as a kid I was nearly as skinny as that old man, really. I had nicer clothes though. And I had a mom to wash the blood and shit from my head in the church bathroom sink.
The blood kept coming long after my mom washed the mud away, but luckily I had that friendly nurse who lived in the flat under the church, who brought out a first aid kit. And I had that lady surgeon, travelling through Asia by motorcycle, who happened to stop by that night for the church service. She sewed up my head on the nurse’s kitchen table, and I was good as new.
After the stitches were in, we probably still went out and bought chicken tikka from the barbecue stands the way we did every Friday night after church, and all was good in my life as I gorged on the flesh and bones of a creature that had to be more well-fed than that old man was.
As I thought over the mental picture of myself crumpled over in the bottom of that sewage gutter, I started to see myself in that old man. It made me stop remembering him as a sack of stink and bones and instead, as an alternate version of me. Somewhere deep in my head, a gear went *click*.
I’d like to say making that connection between myself and the old man made him become more human to me. In a way, it did, but, mostly it made me become more human.
· Pause ·
The parallel visuals I recognized between myself and the old man might have been superficial, but making the connection was important, because ultimatelly it lent me a glimpse of deeper truth.
We think and feel with variety and complexity because we see, hear, smell, taste and touch that variety and complexity in nature and culture, and in our interactions with other people’s minds and craft. Yes, creative flow is mostly drawn from abstractions, but it is abstraction of what’s been absorbed from our world. It’s a mingling and extrapolation of the truths and impressions and deceptions and outright perversions of experience. Creativity is breadth making depth.
Only when experience collides with unconnected experience does an idea form, birthed by conflict and common ground. It awakened me. It can awaken you. It can give you an idea for something new; it can make you a different person (for better or worse) and allow you to produce things you could never otherwise have thought of.
· Pause ·
We’ve all experienced this creative awakening to one degree or another, and it’s addictive, especially when it’s your job to be creative. But the resulting, continual thirst for inspirational fuel can also lure us into a trap. We can start to depend on downcycled inspiration.
I’ve found that my creative concepts can only go as deep as I’ve already gone in my absorption of the greater environment around me. Interaction with all possible angles of space and time and argument is what gives richness and nuance of creative expression, so if my ideas are shallow, it’s almost certainly because I’m drawing from shallow experience. And of course, even where I’ve experienced deeply, memory of experience fades.
So, when I reach inward to draw from “the well” and come up dry, I run to the easy fix — the shared scrapbooks of our social web. I flit across flickring pools of images and ffound artwork, tumblring streams of words and gif animations, and as I do this, my brain is either moving within that shallow experience and cultivating equally shallow creative capital, or it’s delving into those merely as portals to a richer thing that I’ve already experienced in more fullness.
A tidbit of media can either be a memento, triggering deeper experience and therefore deeper abstractions and extrapolations and revelations, or it can be a mere postcard, doing little more than making me frustrated and jealous.
Getting inspired takes getting out of your seat and out of your head. It’s in that same large world outside that all of the greats of history lived and walked and created, and it’s there that you’ll meet things solid enough to sustain your creative spirit. Until we’re rooted in deep breadth, the addictive tidbits of experience our favourite media outlets funnel at us are just saccharin in place of sun-ripened fruit. Whatever you’re baking won’t be good unless you can draw from what’s real.
· Pause ·
So my resolution is this: stop chasing digital saccharin. We can’t experience it deeply enough to find revelation. We’ve got to go into the real world among imperfect places, hurting/hurtful people, stupid logic and awful situations. We must flounder, stretch, breathe, argue, and absorb. It may not be pleasant. In fact, if we’re really getting out there, it definitely won’t be entirely pleasant. But then, and only then, will you have the raw fuel needed to create something really worthwhile — and more than that — to live a life worth your while.
This piece was originally published as Issue 8 (2011-05-24) of the Read & Trust Newsletter (now Read & Trust Magazine). So, if you liked this, you might want to subscribe.
Well-said: "Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic"
As follow-up to my last post, I thought I should link to this article by a mysterious figure known only as Kontra, which is perhaps the best commentary I’ve seen on the whole Mac OS skeuomorphism debate.
It gives a fantastic rundown of real interaction problems Apple’s various software products have — the bulk of which very obviously have nothing to do with the presence or absence of skeuomorphism in the products, and will not be fixed by any aesthetic-level-only rehaul.
I was directed to this New York Times article today which is interesting for two reasons.
First, it presents to the wider masses the ongoing design battle over the appropriateness and usefulness of Apple’s (or more pointedly, Steve Jobs’) fondness of real-life metaphor in their software’s visual style.
[W]ithin the circles of designers and technology executives outside Apple who obsess over the details of how products look and work, there has been a growing amount of grumbling in the last year that Apple’s approach is starting to look dated.
The style favored by Mr. Forstall and Mr. Jobs is known in this crowd as skeuomorphism, in which certain images and metaphors, like a spiral-bound notebook or stitched leather, are used in software to give people a reassuring real-world reference.
That this pretty obscure design wonkery tête-à-tête is getting mainstream attention is another sign of the growth in significance that interaction design is being given in our society. A welcome sign of it, regardless of which side of the argument you’re on.
But secondly, this line of thought attributed to University of Washington design professor Axel Roesler stood out to me:
Apple’s software designs had become larded with nostalgia, unnecessary visual references to the past that he compared to Greek columns in modern-day architecture.
This architectural comparison is apt, and it immediately recalled Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. I’ve been reading some of Rand’s works as part of an attempt to better understand the outlook of that part of the population who seem to hold her books second only to the Bible in importance. Like the capitalist zeitgeist of Atlas Shrugged, the ideas in The Fountainhead are also reflections of a dominant stream of twentieth century power shifts — in this case, the urban and architectural design schools most often generally referred to as Modernism.
Rand’s protagonist, an undervalued and misunderstood Modernist architect, fights against an architectural old guard who only see value in designs that incorporate heritage styles. The book’s argument against traditional architectural styles is much the same as the one against skeuomorphic software — that function, purity, and efficiency trump warmth, comfort, or culture.
Now, Modernist and brutalist buildings have their own beauty and place in our history (and as many of the best examples are now being torn down, I’m one of those lobbying for better preservation), but a look at 1940’s to 1990’s before/after photos of nearly any downtown core in North America immediately exposes that we swung too far toward supposed Platonic ideals and too far away from values of human scale, liveability, walkability, and respect for history and place.
Thankfully, our architectural and urban design disciplines seems to be slowly swinging back around to a more nuanced pairing of innovation with the human cultural stream, moving beyond the extremes of the Modernist schools and back toward a newly synthesized point of view that values heritage and cultural aesthetics as not just obstacles to progress or nostalgic crutches clung to by the out-of-touch, but as essential tools for creating quality of life.
So the question is: is this same pattern now repeating in software? Will we swing too far toward Metro vectors, white space and “Minority Report” gestures, eschewing all old-world interaction metaphors in favour of unadulterated forms, and then find we’ve lost something? We are, after all, merely highly-molded mud that barely a few hundred years or so ago were doing little more advanced than molding other mud into pottery. Will our search for ideal function and design purity cost more than we’ve bargained for?
I wonder if this part of Steve Jobs’ ghost will end up haunting us a little more than most.
Yoani and our coffee farmer, Gus, talking with Steve at Speakeasy Roasteries over thousands of pounds of green coffee.
Last night I saw multi-instrumentalist songwriter Owen Pallett play at the wonderful Supercrawl art festival in Hamilton, Ontario. I’d sort of lost track of him over the years, so almost didn’t go, but it turned out he was spectacular. Suddenly, I remembered why I loved him so much after seeing him play my beloved Ford Plant in 2005. Anyway, it prompted me to look him up today, and I noticed this on his Wikipedia page:
In 2007, the song “This Is The Dream Of Win & Regine” was used in a commercial for Wiener Stadtwerke without Pallett’s permission. Instead of litigation, Pallett and his booking agent Susanne Herrndorf approached the company for sponsorship for a music festival of their curation. The resultant Maximum Black Festival featured Final Fantasy, The Dirty Projectors, Deerhoof, Frog Eyes, Max Tundra, Six Organs Of Admittance and others. It played Vienna, Berlin and London.
Now there’s a solution. I have no in-depth knowledge of the situation, but it appears a little sense, creativity, and willingness to not hold grudges and to work with others ended up getting all parties a lot further than getting adversarial would have. And instead of lawyers getting the main bulk of benefit, musicians got paid, fans got value, and even the business who made the original mistake ended up with additional benefit (and probably an amazing project to have been involved in).
Think of it. Someone wrongs you, and instead of hiring lawyers and “suing their ass”, you take an “enemy” and make them a friend and collaborator. More of this, please.
P.S.— If you don’t know Owen’s stuff, I suggest you watch this live video of him playing in a rainstorm.
How frail is man,
how few his days,
how full of trouble!
He blossoms for a moment
like a flower
— and withers;
as the shadow of a passing cloud,
he quickly disappears.
—Job 14: 1-2
For every way in which technology has taken us further away from that social village life the human animal’s natural habitat seems to have consisted of for thousands of years, there’s another way it can bring us back. Glad to see this German city’s decided to inject a little fun and social interaction into what would otherwise likely be little more than a cold, impersonal shoulder-brushing of strangers at a cement street-corner.
People often complain of a lack of decent coffee while traveling, but there’s really no need for this to happen to anyone, even if you’re hundreds of miles away from the nearest espresso machine.
If you have coffee beans and can get hot water (ie. at least 80ºC — whether that’s gas station tea-water or campfire pot-water), this grinding and brewing combination is really all you need to brew fantastic coffee to your own taste. (Incidentally, also toning those forearms and keeping your wallet nice and fat.)
Both are light, durable, and don’t require electricity.
Additional notes:
(Apologies to any international readers for my only posting product links for Canada & the U.S. Email me if you know of good folks e-retailing the Hario Slim or Aeropress globally.)
I’ve written pieces for both the “Creativity” and “Travel” issues of the brand new, gorgeously formatted Read & Trust e-magazine. Available issue-by-issue or as a monthly subscription, it’s taking over for the Read & Trust premium email newsletter we were publishing before. Lots of fantastic writers and well-crafted content.
An excerpt from the Travel issue article, “Walking in Floodwaters”, where I talk about the effect my risk-taking missionary parents had on me:
I admired them for taking their five kids trekking in the foothills of the Himalayas for New Years, and to the Taj Mahal for Christmas, instead of sitting at home on a couch by the TV. Sometimes all we had to eat was rice and lentils (which I hated), and sometimes I couldn’t go outside because I was too much a target for kidnappers or lynch mobs. But though I might have complained about things at the time, looking back, it was worth it.
Because of their choices, I grew up with a capacity to live with little, and to take risks…
And later, on the nature of travel and its benefits:
Though physically moving your body to another part of the world is a wonderful experience, not all of us can do it very much. Something around 95% of this planet’s population have never take an airplane ride, so if you can’t globe-trot, you’re in good company(1). (Some first worlders purposefully do this, in environmental and social solidarity with the large majority of the world.)
But having travelled frequently for large portions of my life, and then having not travelled much through the years following high-school, I can tell you, it’s not the distance that makes the experience…
By the way, the #00 “Creativity” issue (with my “The Creative’s Chemotherapy” article) is absolutely free, so give it a shot!
Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces — to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What’s thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it — and makes it burn still higher.
—Marcus Aurelius
Not nearly enough people have watched the awesome video for Ethical Coffee Chain that Lillian Chan animated for us. It’s like a mini master-class on coffee supply chains, fair trade (and of course, us!) Pass it on if you like it!
And if you’ve got ideas for what we should do in our next video, let me know!
$18 Peanut Butter. What’s wrong with this picture?
My old housemate wrote this — good look at another terrible situation in Canada’s north. Surely, things don’t need to be like this? Canada has a resource economy based largely on harvesting the north of diamonds, oil, metals, and more, yet its only inhabitants profit nothing. Sea to sea to sea?
