“It’s not just the number of hours we sit at a desk that determines the value we generate”.

Tony Schwartz for The 99 Percent with a great article on work hours and the law of diminishing returns. Schwartz speaks directly against the design studio culture of long days and late nights. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that rest and renewal increase productivity – my personal experience confirms this – and yet here we sit hour after hour.

Full article.

Stephen Fry on Christopher Hitchen’s love of the craft of argument:

With a deep understanding that the connection between style and substance is absolute; that a true thing badly expressed is no more than a lie.

I have two things in common with Christopher Hitchens: a great passion for well crafted discourse and we had both been diagnosed with cancer at about the same time. I took comfort in reading Hitchens so well articulate an experience similar to my own:

To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

While I would never claim to have anywhere near the intellect and wit of Hitchens, few could, today I learned, sadly, that I’ve faired much better than he with cancer.

Christopher Hitchens died today at 62 and with that passing we’ve lost one of the great defenders of humanism of this or any generation. We’ve also lost a craftsman of the highest order.

I’m a designer. I solve problems or, more accurately, I craft solutions. Simpler still, I argue. Design is argument. At its simplest, a house is an argument against homelessness. A logo is an argument for disambiguity and recognition. A well planned neighbourhood is an argument against traffic congestion, alienation and sprawl.

Reading Hitchens, or listening to him, is a master class in crafting an argument, in concision, efficiency and clarity. Hitchens hones every sentence; his arguments are exquisitely designed tools as beautiful to behold as any well crafted chef’s knife or carefully appointed garden.

The field of design, so easily swayed by fashion and ideogical tribalism, is sorely in need of the kind of carefully reasoned discourse that Hitchens was so passionate about. The kind of robust and human rationalism that Hitchens employed should be the first tool we reach for as designers so that we may find deeper solutions for our troubled times.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.

Hitch.

On location.

The single greatest barrier to creating a Vancouver that’s the “Greenest City on Earth” is a city most can’t afford. The very people we need to build a 21st Century world-class city are leaving or avoiding the city all together.

Via Sandy Garossino.

INFORMATION

Consider:

1. By 2050 we can project that about 70 percent of the world’s population will live in urban centres, and the majority of urban growth will occur in developing nations. ¹

2. By 2050, to feed a global population projected at nine billion, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000″. ²

6.3 billion urban dwellers, mostly in poorer nations, within the next 40 years. Urban growth and sustainability depends not only on rural sustainability, but on imbrication of producer and consumer systems – the two must be considered as a whole. Initiatives like the New City Market are the beginnings of a re-imagining of our food systems based on an understanding that there can be no urban/rural divide in a strong food economy. Indeed, that this divide, which assumes consumption as separate or even as wholly divorced from production, is the root of our failing food systems. The competition for resources and land between cities and farms only exacerbates this.

Forward-looking urban policy must understand and incorporate food systems as a primary and foundational precondition to any and all growth. This change can not be limited to just land-use issues, but institutional food procurement policies, tax and fee incentives, waste management, urban food production, transportation infrastructure, regulatory change, downstream/storm water pollution abatement and so on. An urban system based on an understanding of, and integration with, its surrounding food systems can work as an engine of food security instead of an ecological and economic liability.

We not only need to think of the food economy as an endangered ecosystem that exists right on the borders and shores of our cities and act as if a city’s continued prosperity depends on the survival of that system (it does), we also need to act with the understanding that cities are a part of and can strengthen that system as well.

UPDATE: This timely video from the WWF illustrates the above mentioned situation with stunning efficacy.

More videos here.

Look at this:

It’s harder to find a more fitting image of a design asking the wrong questions. Surprisingly this gem made it to the front page of several popular design sites. Instead of asking why aren’t there any large unsightly power cubes on our night stands we should be asking ourselves why are we still designing dwellings and furniture as if we still weren’t sure that we were ready to commit to using electricity occasionally?

I think it’s safe to say that electrical power will be a standard utility for the perceptible future and it’s okay and safe to include it in your designs. Most designers, however, still see power outlets as an afterthought. Imagine if your plumbing needs were relegated to the baseboard behind your sofa. The only piece of furniture I’ve owned with a built in, conveniently located power bar was an engineers drafting table – why not every nightstand, computer desk, credenza…?

Image credit: Brand Stand Products.

Meanwhile, Andrés Duany, whose New Urbanism is a form of postmodern city planning, noted that what the New York intelligentsia belittles as postmodernism is really the style preferred by the vast majority of Americans. If most buildings with traditional motifs are poorly executed, he said, it is because the architectural elite has refused to design them

Ah yes, the New York intelligentsia. Interesting how someone, allegedly progressive, uses the same anti-intellectual boogeyman as the likes of the Tea Party. Another great argument is the suggestion that since a style is “preferred by the vast majority of Americans” it must be somehow more correct than other less popular styles – how very High School. And, just in case you missed the opening anti-intellectualism, Duany rounds his argument off with a stab at the “architectural elite”.

What a maddening waste of time. Dormers aren’t going to solve climate change. Conferences where “experts” discuss the architectural equivalent of angels dancing on pins are not going to house the homeless. It’s astonishing to think that these types of discussions still take place in these times. Are we really going to worry about offending “the vast majority of Americans” architectural taste when considering the catastrophic impact of rising sea-levels?

If Postmodernism has achieved anything it has been the elevation of the absurd and the trivial at the expense of the serious and meaningful.

Link.

Karl Gerstner: “I see graphic design as a matter of solving problems; art as a matter of inventing them.”

More.

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme — the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before. Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.

That last sentence is, with out a doubt, my favourite piece of design commentary for 2011.

The rest of the article can be found here.

The thing that’s so wonderful about using beautiful, appropriate tools is that they become an extension of you, your body, you fingertips, and your mind. They get out of the way and let you directly interact with the problem you are solving.