Teresa DiCairano

Musings from my bookshelf, experiences and conversations!

[teresadicairano]

How to Make the Perfect Cup of Tea: George Orwell's 11 Golden Rules

[teresadicairano]

On being modern: Perhaps fortunately for Chanel, her awful, desperate childhood only served to nurture her penchant for leaping before looking, then figuring out to what use she could put the clouds on the way down. She was never hobbled by the allure of nostalgia, because her past had been so dismal. If she had a knack for living in her own time, it was because there were no good old days, as how could there be? Her Proustian madeleine was a nasty bowl of porridge served at the charity table in an underheated orphanage. She repudiated the past and lied about where she came from; now was always a better place than then. This attitude also served to make her seem completely modern.

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel, Karen Karbo

[explore-blog]

The world according to Americans, and other stereotypes mapped by Bulgarian designer Yanko Tsvetkov, who previously gave us these ingenious maps of European stereotypes. 

(↬ Coudal)

[explore-blog]

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon (via explore-blog)

[explore-blog]

The Isle of Knowledge – Marian Batjes maps “the known beyond which lie monsters.”

[innovationcultures]

On Alberto’s Alessi’s Theory of Borderline: The borderline is about risks. One of our distinguishing characteristics is that we choose to work very close to the borderline. This line marks what people find intriguing and appealing and will buy, from what leaves them unmoved and therefore remains on the shelf. If you work too far from the borderline it is disastrous. For example in car production, where no risks are taken, all cars grow to look the same and the market is deafened. Adding piquancy to the borderline is the fact that it cannot be seen. You can feel it, almost smell it, but it is not clearly drawn - and keeps moving. And there are perils associated with treading too close to the edge - you can lose your footing and fall. This produces a ‘fiasco’, a product that is too far away from what the consumer will accept. This can be a positive thing… As you fall on the other side your way is lit for an instant by a flash of bright light. For one second it’s possible to clearly see where the borderline is, and that can prove very helpful for the other projects.

Alessi - Art and Poetry, Fay Sweet (via innovationcultures)

[explore-blog]

Artist and writer Austin Kleon on 10 things he wishes he’d known starting out, which no one tells young creators. 

[teresadicairano]

What does an artist do?

I came across one of the better answers to this question from Robert Olen Butler in From Where You Dream - The Process of Writing Fiction.

As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses. Everything else derives from that.  You are creatures of your senses. All that follows - all the stuff of the mind, all the analysis, all the rationalization, all the abstracting and interpreting - follows that point of contact, in the moment, through your senses.

If you live in the moment, through your senses, your first impression certainly will be that of at the heart of things is chaos. God knows we had a a very clear example of that in September 2001. You can be sitting on the ninetieth floor of the World Trade Center on a beautiful late summer morning, smelling your Starbucks coffee, glad they brewed Sumatra today, and someone with visions of seventy-two virgins waiting for him in the heaven flies a United Airlines jet through your window. That is the paradigm of the human condition.

Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning; behind the flux of the moment-to-moment experience there is a deep abiding oder.

The artist shares his/her intuition of the world's order with the philosophers, the theologians, the scientists, the psychoanalysts - there are lots of people who believe there is order in the universe - but those others embrace the understanding and expression of that order through abstractions, through ideas, through analytical thought.

The artist (or the artistic mind) is deeply uncomfortable with those modes of understanding and expression. The theologians have their dogma and the philosophers their theories and the scientists their scientific principles and the psychoanalysts their Jungian or Freudian insights - but to those modes of expression and understanding the artist says, "This doesn't make sense to me. Those are not the terms in which I intuit the world."

The artist cannot understand or access his/her vision of the world in any of those ways. The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered-that is, moment-to-moment experience through the sesnses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, recombining it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself: a record of the moment-to-moment sensual experience, an encounter as direct as those we have with life itself. 

Only in this way, by shaping and ordering experience into an art object, is the artist able to express his/her deep intuition of order.

The author further pleads to aspiring writers (and artists):

Please get out of the habit of saying that you've got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you.

This reminds me of the differences between left-brain and right-brain modes. But whether we call it right-brain thinking are 'thinking like an artist', the implications for both artists and designers is to begin with the moment-to-moment experience.

-Teresa Di Cairano

[teresadicairano]

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk - the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. We need both these programs. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from the outside to motivate behavior, the second can wilt if not cultivated.

Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[teresadicairano]

People will talk about interesting designs.

[teresadicairano]

Design we love and why we do.

At a recent shopping excursion with my fifteen-year-old fashionista daughter, she not only pronounced her unending love for a pair of Jeffrey Campbell1 shoes but finally declared “I want to marry these shoes!”.

Now, I probably spend too much time trying to persuade my busy customers that they really should separate themselves from their money and attend my next course, or even better our executive online innovation programs.  And you may even be one of those willing souls that have participated, but I wondered if I could ever get my customers to love any of my products that much.

So what is it that makes us love the design of some products? 

Emotional design, both a concept and book by Donald Norman, provides some insight into this notion. Norman is an academic and consultant in the field of cognitive science, design and usability engineering. Much of his initial book The Design of Everyday Things2 focused on the concept of user-centered design, a sort of natural segue to the form-follows-function design philosophy that came out of the Bauhaus, except Norman’s initial focus was on  the ease of functionality for the user. Along with human factors, ergonomics and other user-centered concepts, we certainly were on track to better-liked and more user-friendly designs.

But love? Hmmm, maybe we need another framework for design we love. It turns out, not surprisingly so, that emotions play a crucial role in our understanding of the world and how we learn new things. As Norman notes in his book, Emotional Design3, aesthetically pleasing objects appear to the user to be more effective. 

Do attractive things really work better?

“In the early ‘90s two Japanese researchers, Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura, claimed just that. They studied different layout controls for ATMs. All versions of the ATMs were identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they operated, but some had buttons and screens arranged attractively, the others unattractively. Surprise! The Japanese (research subjects) found that the attractive ones were perceived to be easier to use.”4

Norman’s studies on emotion, along with colleagues Andrew Ortony and William Revelle, professors in the Psychology Department at Northwestern University, led to some insight on affective processing.

They suggest in fact three levels of processing by the brain: visceral, behavioral and reflective. The visceral level is fast and makes rapid judgments of what is good or bad. It relies on sensory input and is the start of affective processing.  The part of the brain that controls everyday behavior is known as behavioral level and the contemplative part of the brain is the reflective level.

How do these three levels impact different aspects of design? Norman offers an admittedly simple but ‘good-enough’ way to incorporate these levels into design:

How levels impact design:Visceral design >>AppearanceBehavioral design >>The pleasure and effectiveness of useReflective design >>Self-image, personal satisfaction and memories

The relative importance of each of these will also of course vary from person to person and from culture to culture. But they do provide a way to design and interpret objects in a more meaningful way.

Here are a few designs I fell in love with - and well, yes - may have spent more money than needed.

Almost any product from Alessi is a good example of operating on several levels.  Originally a metal craft factory from Northern Italy, Alessi5 keeps no designers on staff but commissions well-known architects and designers to turn their everyday kitchen accessories into whimsical, functional and attractive objects.

6  7

The Anna G. corkscrew, by Alessandro Mendini for Alessi, works smoothly and sits beautifully in my kitchen – and seemingly from her smile, getting on well with the bottles of wine she shares the shelf with. It gets high points for both visceral and behavioral aspects. The toaster, also by Mendini, has a streamline influence of the early 1920’s and 30’s and what futurist doesn’t want to start their day with a (retro) modern feel.

Another favorite of mine is the Louis Ghost chair designed by Philippe Stark8 for Kartell.

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A humorous take on the ‘emperor has no clothes’ to the ‘emperor has no throne.’ Here the reflective and intellectual aspects of doing away with the stuffiness of bourgeois seating, with a modern transparent polycarbonate chair, are brought forward.  I don’t know how comfortable these chairs are for long periods of sitting, but they do have one additional functional benefit – they add very little weight to small spaces.

People will talk about interesting designs."

Another characteristic of design that operates on many levels is the kind of conversation it strikes. People will talk about interesting designs.

What design objects do you love? And if you are creating new products or services this year, what can you incorporate into your design to make everyday experiences - like banking, using a software application, or doing laundry for that matter - something people will love and want to talk about?

- Teresa Di Cairano 1. Jeffrey Campbell – because if you are anywhere near my age, you might not have heard of him: http://www.jeffreycampbellshoes.com/collections/ 2. The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, 2002 3. Emotional Design, Donald A. Norman, 2004 4. Emotional Design – Attractive things work better (chapter one) 5. Alessi – history/production - http://www.alessi.com/en/company/production 6. Anna G. Corkscrew: http://www.alessi.com/en/2/3354/bar-and-wines/aam01-r-anna-g-corkscrew 7. Alessi/Phillips Toaster: http://vdm.io.tudelft.nl/fda/mendini/mendin95.htm 8. Phillipe Starck - http://www.starck.com/en/ 9. Louis Ghost Chair: http://www.dwr.com/product/louis-ghost-armchair.do?sortby=ourPicks 10. Louis Ghost Chairs: http://www.housetohome.co.uk/dining-room/picture/eclectic-dining-room