Tomorrow in class we're talking about storytelling and prototyping, and no one has done these quite as eloquently, throughout their whole careers, as The Eameses were designers, and husband and wife, best known for their furniture. But they designed anything and everything, houses, curricula, exhibits, communications, film -- and are revered inside and outside the world of designers for the things they made and for their professional practice, the Eames Office.
For a couple hours I've been jotting lessons we can learn from the Eameses in preparation for discussion tomorrow.
Some companies have a culture of prototyping; the Eameses took the culture of prototyping to an extreme. They lived their lives that way, professionally and personally, and then they told the stories in films and photos. For example, they built their own home, a prototype of a do-it-yourself, modern house designed to bring the good life to the general public by integrating high and low art and modern materials and construction technologies.
Then they made a film titled House: After Five Years of Living.
There were no boundaries between life and work for them, which is probably why the Eames Office only took on projects that they were intensely interested in. That Charles was interested in.
For a project to be successful, there needs to be vision. At Pixar, this is the job of the head writer(s) and director, like John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird.
So what I mean is, there has to be an aspirational vision that you believe in to keep you going.
Something about believing that design can really do good, or can push the world toward progress, or create a new profession, or make lots of money, or raise the consciousness of the audience.
Talk up to your users. Believe in them.
Design is some of the hardest work there is, because when you're making something there are no shortcuts. Constraints come as close as anything to shortcuts, though.
Constraints are a designer's friend.
It's a great idea to be that picky about projects -- only do what intensely interests you -- but you have to be really, really good to earn this right.
Prototype like mad and maybe you'll make something really, really good.
Hire great, really talented people and manage them heavily with vague direction so you seem like a god.
Solve the problem: bring something special of your own to the table to make it not just good, not better, but great and unexpected. (From Eames Design, by John and Marilyn Neuhart: Although clients usually brought to the office fixed notions about what they thought they wanted, Charles more often than not redefined the project and expanded its scope. )
To do this, you often have to make unexpected connections.
Synthesis. Where I come from, we like to think that doing research makes this happen faster, with more appropriate outcomes. We can learn from the Eameses that research isn't limited to user research and business and cultural research.
Research can include going to the ballet or the Art Institute or to Steppenwolf or taking a walk along the lake picking up fallen leaves in different colors, and reading New Science Magazine, or an article in the Times about a bird fossil with a skull similar in size to that of a horse; inputs, inputs, inputs! The Eames were the king and queen of inputs and outputs. Connect two unlikely things and then.
..
.
..prototype the synthetic explosion.
Tell the story, and tell the story, then make it. Write it down. Draw it.
Fabricate a scenario. Build it out of foam core. Describe it to a friend.
Tell the story.
Dear Iona,
As I write this it's 4:30 and the light is slowly leaving the sky, earlier in the day now. Minutes ago it was coming in the windows, so golden I didn't have the heart to turn on the interior lights, so now it's a bit dark in here.
The Halloween tree, which is just a big fake stick in the front window strung with orange lights, looks almost nice.
You are playing with the big kind of Legos, making a tall giraffe and lying on your front and making the Lego giraffe talk to the Lego elephant. Sister, where are you!
you call. Goodbye Mommy, goodbye! The plush dog chimes in, claiming the Magna-Tile house.
Ruff, ruff! That's my house! I really don't like you in my house!
Why do you say something and you broke my house! I don't care, and I don't want to! Suddenly the house is no more, it's flattened, and now you are crooning like Ariel.
You have been associating strongly with Ariel lately because I gave you The Little Mermaid movie on Friday, and you are going to be Ariel for Halloween in two days. You're concerned because your costume skims the floor and you've been asking me to pin it up. I've been putting this off.
You come up to me as I sit typing. Mommy? Um, um, I want to um, um, to, I want to, um, to play with Play-Doh, I want to play with Play-Doh!
So off I am going upstairs to find the bin of Play-Doh, which is all mixed up, no color is true. People care about keeping colors of Play-Doh separate at about the same time they stop being interested in playing with it. As I sit here typing (instead of finding the Play-Doh) I think, I should take you to Lill Street to do some real clay work before we move.
There's nothing quite like real clay. Though, following that thought I think, there's nothing quite like the smell of Play-Doh, the aroma of childhood.
You're back.
Do you gots Tinkerbell?
Didn't I give her back to you?
No.
I put her in your pocket. I had them in the quarium. I had them in the quarium.
Mommy, I had them in the quarium.
You mean the Nature Museum.
You nod as if to say yes, obviously, that's what I meant.
I'm busted. I have no idea where Tinkerbell is. Time to find Play-Doh.
You are reaching down the neck of my shirt, patting my skin. I love when you touch me. I wonder if you are looking for Tinkerbell.
I say, Whatcha doing?
I was just. Nothing.
You find Tinkerbell on the kitchen counter. I get the Play-Doh.
The last five weeks you've been learning to swim.
We go on Thursday nights after school, and it's so relaxing because you're taking private lessons with the lovely, young, enthusiastic Natalie who wears her YMCA-issue suit over another suit. Hip. We don't have to shuffle around with all the other kids.
We don't have to fight for locker space. It's often just us in the family locker room. The young pool staff plays rock music while you have your lesson.
It's warm in the pool area as I crouch and watch you with amazement as you move through the water on your back and your front, reaching, reaching, and you actually almost swim. After just five private lessons the instructor tells me you are ready for Eels, a step up from Pikes, which is the lowest swimming class. I would have probably kept you in Pikes until you turned thirteen.
Sometimes it takes someone objective to point out your progress.
We recently had parent meetings at school. Your teacher told your Daddy and me that when you're focused, you can really do things.
Your reading is spot-on. But you're easily distracted, and a little bit dreamy.
You role-play constantly at home.
Anything can be a character: a plastic rat, a Playmobil horse, a carrot stick. You make up different voices, falsettos, deep rumbly voices, soft kind mommy voices. You are sometimes stern with your Playmobil Knight, whom I named Fight Girl so you would know that girls can be tough and not always princesses who need to be rescued by princes.
Today you said, Some girls like pink and some like purple. I said, I like green. You said, You must be a boy!
You talk a lot about death, using the words killed and died. The other day you came upstairs, agitated, and told me a lot of people were killed! In Australia!
You heard it on the radio! I looked at the news but there was no tragic event in Australia. I'm sure the radio was talking about Iraq.
I wonder if you will have memories of this terrible war. I turn the radio off a lot lately in the car and at home, now that you're paying more attention. Another thing you learned from the radio: Mom!
Georgia is a city and Georgia is a person!
We occasionally read book-books, rather than picture books. We tried Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH but it was too advanced so we are reading about Mrs Piggle-Wiggle and Pippi Longstocking.
Pippi has fiery red hair that she wears in pigtails that stick straight out on either side of her head, and she has one black stocking and one brown stocking, and she wears men's black shoes are twice as long as her feet, and she is very strong. She can lift her own horse off the porch. Pippi is different, Mom, you informed me.
So are you! I said. No, no, no!
you said, laughing, as if I were simple, or had made a funny joke.
Right now you are sticking your Playmobil figures and Tinkerbell into a multicolored Play-Doh base. What is that, Iona?
I ask. That was a ship, you say without turning around, barely skipping a beat in the conversation your characters are having.
We do this thing where I ask you if you know how much I love you and you spread your arms out wide.
I take your arms and try (gently, gently) to stretch them out longer, and say, Now if we could just make your arms long enough to go around the galaxy twice, maybe that would be how much I love you, and I tickle you under your arms and you giggle.
The truth is, twice around the galaxy still wouldn't be enough.
I love you, Iona!
wow _ I get to be world famous!
aren't you already? i thought that's why I married you
hmmm.
.. grimes reading his photo in his brain
what are we doing here -- so are we moving or what?
kindof - me first, then you both
kind of is two words, you know
well, we can live in one of those apartments or with your parents - you choose
golly, i love my parents! they're great babysitters!
ok, but aside from babysitting you and telling you how to parent.
...
they are very good about not telling me how to parent, most of the time
ah well, guess we'll be moving in there as the cheapest option - there's the basement, you know the one with the long, odd sofa and the ping-pong table...
along with the stereo that pre-dates 8 tracks!
that sofa is called MODERN, and it's OURS as soon as we move, so you better fall in love with it pretty damn fast
modern if you born pre 1950..
.it's good for guy fawkes night
okay, let's talk about us and our foibles. do we have any?
can this marriage be saved? can we really move away from the place of our meeting, courtship, conception and birth of our child, not to mention OUR FAVORITE BAR?
DAMN, here we go
where are we going?
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment. (Dorothy Parker, 1929)
jeez! I was trying to be wry and literary in this time of stress!
coping mechanisms! do you know nothing, man!
yeah, uh, eh.
..
this is all your fault.
most things are. the lost items are in the basement, in the room of lost toys. but they got there themselves - nothing to do with me.
I just watch the news.
it's a metaphysical thing. clearly you've not been drinking enough.
..
and with that, I think I'll go get another wass of gline
schlick.
..gooshwine, yessh.
..and Notre Dame won today and University of Michigan?
!
huh?
Since I don't have any fiction I'll post about what's been on my mind.
Ewan and I talk all the time about moving back to Seattle. We always put it this way, "moving back to Seattle," though he's never lived there. I have and had to let go of the moving back mentality around the mid-90s because I wasn't embracing the vitality of Chicago and all it had to offer, and because when I finally let go of Seattle I found it within myself to buy a sofa upon which I could actually nap.
Still, Ewan and I talk all the time about moving back to Seattle to be close to my family, to be near the smell of the sea and to have fresh seafood whenever we want it. Last time I was home it was always on my mind, moving back, and I was as moody as an incumbent Republican. I kept asking myself, can I move back and still be myself?
I have a teaching job here that keeps me sane for a few scant months. How fast will my family put a contract out on me? Can I really run in a city with actual inclines?
Damn.
But, until just recently, the moving back conversations have been academic.
Then Ewan mentioned moving back on Wednesday night and I suddenly had a feeling of dead certainty that we are going to move back, it was inevitable, and this sense was accompanied by an immediate feeling of dread.
The conversation was a late-night one, so it was fraught with extra meaning and drama. I wept. How can I leave our friends?
The Our beloved, smelly, troublesome hunk of a building? The new garage floor? You can see why there would be the tears.
When I woke up with puffy eyes the dread was gone. After all, it might not happen. If it does, it will be a while, like summer, when it's hot and unbearable and humid and sweaty with fruit flies.
If it does happen, if we do move back, I have amazing people, including family whom I miss every day. I have the sea and and The best coffee in the world. And lots and lots of memories.
Can we talk about Milton Glaser? He's this guy I've never met but for whom I have reverence. Oh yeah, that's a prerequisite for revering people in my book, not knowing them.
Anyway, Mr Glaser is a designer, but his real magic is that he's an effing good illustratrator. And he designed the I heart NY logo and that psychedelic Bob Dylan poster.
There's something oddly sexy about Mr Glaser.
Oddly, yes, but sexy, yes. (I had a little glass of chardonnay, yes. But still, he is sexy.
)
I am avoiding my real teaching work; that is, avoiding telling my students what they think they want to know and think they need to know by telling them what they must know. Which, in this case, is Milton Glaser's speech, posted here, very abridged, ENTIRELY without permission:
- You can only work for people that you like.
- If you have a choice never have a job.
- Some people are toxic avoid them.
- Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
- Less is not necessarily more.
- Style is not to be trusted.
- How you live changes your brain.
- Doubt is better than certainty.
- Solving the problem is more important than being right.
- Tell the truth.
Okay, in bullet point form it doesn't amount to much.
I really do think you should to read the whole thing.
While you're at it, click and buy a poster. I don't know these fabulously hilarious and talented people either, but they did this likeness of Mr Glaser (see below, if you please) and I'm using it without permission and, dammit, it's sold out or I would buy THREE.
Illustration of Mr Glaser by in Madison, WI
I went to a play by myself this evening, The Pillowman by at Steppenwolf. I don't go see that many plays, though I finally, after fourteen years of talking about it, bought season tickets to Steppenwolf. By chance the last play I saw there was another by McDonagh, .
Dark, both plays are very effing dark. I had a hard time with McDonagh's darkness last time, but this time I was on my feet when the cast came out for a curtain call. The Pillowman is a fantastic play and the acting tonight was splendid.
Lots of emphatic spit-talking. Plus there's a cool factor to Steppenwolf Theatre Company that has always turned me on.
The Pillowman is about a writer who writes horrible stories about children being killed in various ways.
He's terribly proud of his stories, and it's believable that they're good stories in spite of the dreadful subject matter, and he's adorable, so when he's interrogated by cops working for a totalitarian state I found myself pulling for him, then for the cops, then for the writer's brain-damaged brother. It was cool the way they did that.
I loved seeing the play by myself, though it would have been nice to have a drink with someone at intermission.
As it was I had no drinks and no one to talk to or share laughs with throughout the performance, and this made the experience intense. I'm half-tempted to donate my other ticket to someone I don't know for the rest of the season because of that intensity. It's all you, baby, and you don't have to think about how the other person is reacting, whether or not they like the story, whether or not the gruesomeness is freaking them out, and you don't have to laugh out loud if you only feel like laughing inside.
This morning I dropped Iona off at school promptly at 8:36 and it was so beautiful I went for a run. Hackneyed as it sounds, I kept thinking, the air is kissing me as I ran from Iona's school to the lake. It was blissful.
The sky was blue with cute fluffy clouds. The atmosphere and I were having a thing. I ran for fifty minutes and loved it.
By 1:30 we had dime-sized hail.
Now, at ten, I'm listening for our sump pump and putting off going into the basement. Flash flood warnings are running across the bottom of the news.
The bright flaring and loud banging outside are making the cat anxious.
But Chicago weather changing every five minutes is not news. Here's what I've learned recently:
1.
It seems men cannot control their compulsions. Look at Mark Foley (rehab isn't going to redeem you or Mel, buddy). Okay, to be fair, look at Bill Clinton too.
And I'm not talking about Perhaps he is redeeming himself; go read Then there's . I think it's okay to call him shit-for-brains.
2.
If close friends get married it's best to show up. Especially since I missed it the first time around, and key people (like the bride) are converting from Judaism to Catholicism for love. The stakes are high.
Oh, and then there's the fact that they traveled 3,800 miles for our wedding. So off we go to Boston on Friday.
3.
Loneliness is something we can count on. Loneliness, that cunning little ferret, waits until I can't remember what it looks like; waits until I think I like it when my partner goes and leaves me in full control of the remote, and then it clocks me in the head with a cast-iron skillet.
4.
Torture's the new black! It's best not to get comfortable because that makes the whole torture is okay with us thing feel more like, well, and . Thank you, I guess, to and for kicking my ass out of its complacency.
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