Took the Thalys to Rotterdam for a change. Have just experienced the shittiest service of all time: the internet provision in the Thalys. 6 Euros buys you an hour. An hour is exactly what it took to register, pay, and discover that every time you click a link in the Amazon site, it returns you to the Welcome on Board page.
Why do they bother offering such a totally fucked up service? Not smart: we now expect this to work easily, and get very angry when it doesn’t.
Oh, well: at least I managed to write this post bitching about it.
Thalys S U C K S!!!
January 24th, 2012Books
December 31st, 2011
The three Vintage editions of 'The Road to Freedom', bought in 1980.
In the books I saved, I find the self I was when I read them. Only a diary matches old books’ ability to re-evoke so clearly the feel of a past phase of life.
I was 21 when I bought these Vintage editions of Sartre’s ‘The Road to Freedom’ trilogy. Then, I saw in the protagonist Mathieu a hero fighting a lonely battle to keep some measure of freedom. Nine years later, at 30, I saw Mathieu as a coward who failed himself and everyone that mattered to him. The other characters all seemed too flimsy and contrived to take seriously. Now, at 52, only a few bright moments are left intact: the visual resemblance of the scenes of his estrangement from his friends Daniel and Brunet to a Surrealist painting, a few of the dialogues.
I still like the covers.
Vernacular typography: improvised house number
December 29th, 2011
House number in Gasthuismolensteeg in Amsterdam.
Kind of interesting: the house painter drew this number freehand.
120,000 protesters in Moscow
December 24th, 2011What I find most striking about the recent protests in Russia is the political sophistication the protesters are showing across the board, from organizing, to dealing with state-hired goons, to fighting the propaganda war and collaborating with independents and rivals. ‘Connectedness’ (‘Young and Connected, Office Plankton Protesters Surprise Russia‘) may be multiplying the force that brought tens of thousands of a new breed of politically active Russians into the streets today. But I wonder if it wasn’t created by something more mundane: the experience of working in mid-level positions for large, modern capitalist organizations.
The modern company as political training ground
For almost two decades now, young to middle-aged Russians have been working for modern companies – many of them multinationals. There, they have become acquainted with something that they never encountered before: politics. Not the Big Politics of the past. Rather, the everyday business of negotiating one’s position, forming strategic alliances within the organization, securing benefits, and anticipating and surviving the bigger shifts caused by external forces and higher-level decision-makers.
This has ‘politicized’ them in an indirect, but powerful way: it has de-throned an older, dysfunctional conception of politics they’d inherited from Soviet times. One in which they were essentially helpless.
Absurdity and suffering
This concept of ‘politics’ was captured well by ethnographer Nancy Ries in her book Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. As one reviewer put it: “Dire stories about poverty, hardship, and social decay recited constantly during perestroika served to fabricate a common worldview–conveying a sense of shared experience and destiny, and casting Russian society as an inescapable realm of absurdity and suffering.”
Those of us who spent time in the 1990′s in Russia, remember how difficult it was to challenge that view. Any suggestion that perhaps – just perhaps – some of the pragmatic politics that worked elsewhere, might also work in Russia – was met with derision.
And with fabulous explanations of politics, each more melodramatic than the last, spiced with vast conspiracy theories, stereotypes of the eternal ‘suffering people in hate/love with their tsar’ which would rise like a phoenix forever from the ashes of change, the eternal Russian (or ‘Soviet’) mentality, which was simply averse to individualism, capitalism, etc. etc. etc. Fact-checking was waved away as a silly Western illusion. Rather, these stories were supported by ancient, archetypal lore. I remember one explanation of the Russian character (alcoholic, spineless, incapable of initiative) based on a ‘collective’ technique of felling trees practiced by serfs. Like all good fish stories, these had to end with a bang, which usually took the form of predictions of ‘polnaya razrukha’ (total collapse).
Greedy guys in suits
Watching the crowds today, I wondered if all those middle-class people hadn’t been schooled in an entirely new kind of ‘politics’. They probably realize that the ruling classes are simply the same greedy guys in suits that they see in the workplace, fighting for influence, with or without brains, money, ethics, connections and all those other things that everybody else has or doesn’t. And the new Russian middle class is well acquainted with strategy, in both action and communication. They see how lumbering and out of touch the regime is. They take heart in the fact that they’ve outwitted it in some ways already. (The regime’s suggestion that US money was behind the protests, was ridiculed by protesters with signs with slogans ‘demanding’ their pay from them US State Department.)
Let us wish them all well, this holiday season, and hope their protest becomes a movement which transforms Russia for the better!
The blogger Dmitrii Chernyshev provides a great page of pictures.
Chocolatl, second session: Organiko mint
November 19th, 2011Visited Chocolatl again, ready for chocolate, coffee, sketching.
As the Japanese say: ‘Food is first eaten with the eyes’. We study all the wonderful packaging and settle on a cylindrical can of Sath organic Spanish mint bon bons.
The typography makes an initially sober, almost classic impression but upon closer examination, contains much play with symmetry and reading directions. The word ‘BOM’ is studying its reflection with a tilted ‘O’, but is assymetrical because of the two languages.’CHOCOLATE’ is doing a U-turn. The two languages are handled neatly in the Serif caps.
After a sample, we’re ready to start our coffee, chocolate and sketching session.
The Moleskin flat black pencil and Zhenya are in an intimate symbiosis, she has forgotten everything but her drawing. I work on some new figures for a stakeholder map infographic. I love the music here: not too loud, Coltrane, jazz ballads, perfect for drawing.
The little bon-bons are a kind of ultimate version of after dinner mints. They’re small, but quite an explosion of taste. This little can will go a long way.
The address, for those who might be in the neighborhood:
Chocolatl
Hazenstraat 25-A
Amsterdam
Telephone: 020 755 5047
Time to go. Next stop: the hatmaker’s shop, where we’ll look for a new winter hat for Zhenya.
Chocolatl
October 29th, 2011
Twenty paces past the shop, my ‘invisible gorilla’ strategy to distract Zhenya failed. Her peripheral vision had picked it up anyway: the chocolate packaged as a fish in a sardine can. The beautiful black and white interior. The exhibition of beautiful packaging, seemingly endless variations on a rectangular theme, all saying: chocolate.
Zhenya's typical 'just forgot the world' position: studying the chocolate products in the shop.
Inside the shop, I wonder: how could anyone have ever doubted that it’s the packaging, not the product, that produces our response to it? Here, both are so good that you can let them to a kind of one-two.
One: let the graphic design of the products do its magic. The visual feast makes it lots of fun to make a choice!
The magic of beautiful graphics, great chocolate products.
Two: pick one kind and then order tea or coffee, and enjoy it at the logwood table in the back of the shop. The shop’s low-key interior lets you focus your senses on the chocolate: unobtrusive music, chalkboard black and dull white walls, ceiling, shelving, practical but nicely-design silverware, cups, accessories.
The shop from outside, in the Hazenstraat in Amsterdam.
So this is the new tip for our friends visiting Amsterdam: Chocolatl, the shop with hundreds of extraordinary artisanal chocolate brands, friendly owners, well-designed, close to the center. Extra tip: a great place to buy gifts which are special, not too costly, and easy to carry.
Address:
Hazenstraat 25-A
Amsterdam
Telephone: 020 755 5047
Tea and chocolates, served.
Love
February 4th, 2011
Powerful surges of imagination, longing, memory. A kind of hypnotic, maybe even mild psychotic state in which the border between one’s self and the object of one’s desire seems to dissolve.
Where do we experience this? Cortina Papier, the shop in the ‘Nine Streets’ section of Amsterdam.
It’s always fun watching my girlfriend Zhenya lose self-control. Her gaze goes a little fuzzy, and then focuses on one object at a time, as much as to say: Odd, how could I have never noticed THESE?
We leave an hour later, with new, inspiring sketchbooks, pens, a clever eraser with its own shield to keep it clean, refills for our FAF memo blocks. Some new ink colors. Always something.
The images – hundreds of styles, characters, little graphic experiments, diagrams – flow right from Zhenya’s brain into the books. Mine stay empty, except for the FAF pad I make our editorial concept sketches on. I can never bring myself to deface the books with my drawings. I draw on recycled paper. I only use the sketchbooks after I’ve worked up a specific idea.
Zhenya selecting colored inks.
Speaking of affordances…
February 4th, 2011
The doorbell - which is the button to push to ring it?
A nice example of strange ‘affordances’ in a design. Does the metal triangle thingy look like a button you would push?
Dark, cold, broken train: the Dutch high speed rail experience
January 12th, 2011
At roughly 0700, the 6:26 express to Rotterdam went dark and stood still
“The engine driver is trying to restart the… em… locomotive…we’re having a technical problem… In a few moments, we hope to continue the journey.” This was the first in a series of announcements which accompanied the four-hour wait in this dark, cold train which was supposed to arrive at 07:10 in Rotterdam. A voice came from the seat behind me: a fellow passenger who told us what was really happening, and what was going to happen.
Locomotive calls helpdsek
“Ah, that will be the software. This is where the loc has to switch from 1500 DC to 25,000 AC – the software must have glitched again. They’ll be calling the helpdesk at Bombardier soon…”
I turned around and made introductions: this guy sounded like he knew a lot more than the train personnel making the announcements. Turns out he’s not an engineer: he’s a document manager who has been doing a six-hour commute daily (gasp) for many years, between his home up north and his job in Dordrecht.
Me: “25,000 volts… and you say the software is glitchy?”
Him: “Yes. This is the spot where the train has to lower and raise the pantograph. We’ll probably be here for at least three hours.”
25,000 volts… I imagine what the train will look like if the loc makes a mistake.
Loudspeaker: “Our engine driver cannot restart the, uh, software.”
Me: “Why three hours?!”
Him: “The helpdesk won’t be able to help them.”
I imagine the young call-center worker in India with the perfect American accent, taking the engine driver’s call. “No, sir, we don’t make any products for Windows. Oh, REAL windows… and doors? They don’t open? Oh, I see… Hold down the shift while you restart…”
Me: “How do you know this?”
Him: “I take the express train every week.”
Loudspeaker: “We’re sorry. We’ll be calling the Bombardier helpdesk, hopefully we’ll be back on track in a couple of minutes. We apologize etc. etc. etc. free coffee etc. etc. etc.”
Him: “They’ll have to find a locomotive somewhere to come get us. They don’t have enough themselves, so they’ll haggle with another company over the price. Then they’ll send one. It will come from Watergraafsmeer in Amsterdam, though, and it will take a while.”
Sunrise
At around 0930, we heard that a locomotive was on the way to tow us back.
The train is now icy cold, and we’ve discovered common interests (me information architect, him document manager). We while away the time exchanging stories about the journey that kilometers of paper archives are making into the digital realm.
It seems that everyone on this early express knows each other very well. (I wonder why?) A woman across the aisle (works in a shop) is explaining that the pilot of the trans-European rail system has failed and that the French are refusing to have any part of it. Amazing how much these people have learned by just sitting in broken trains.
Loudspeaker: “I’m afraid the helpdesk has not fixed the problem. A locomotive will tow us back to Schiphol airport…”
Him: “If we’re lucky, we’ll make the connection right after 10:00 to Rotterdam.”
Me (thinking about my 11:30 class): “What train is that?”
Him: “The same as this one, a Fyra express. But it’s not clear where they’ll tow us.”
I call the school and cancel the class. If his calculations are right, we’ll never make it. And besides, if it’s a Fyra express, there’s a chance I’ll spend ANOTHER four hours in the train.
He turned out to be exactly right, except that we missed the connection to Rotterdam.
Bonus payments
Him: “Oh, well, I’ll collect some more compensation.”
Dutch rail pays subscription holders like him 7 Euro’s for each hour they’re late. “A colleague made 800 Euro’s like this last year.”
Down, down, down
People who think corruption and bad governance don’t hurt us, here’s your answer. A high-speed network of sorts is coming into being, but look at this sad jalopy it has produced, after literally decades of planning and promising. It’s not even an integrally designed new train! It’s old rolling stock, refurbished and attached to a powerful loc that just pulls it a bit faster. For 40 minutes. Between 2 cities. If you’re lucky. Where did the money go?
In the meantime, we read about 1000′s of miles of new high-speed rail lines in China. Not to idealize, but certainly in tiny, infrastructure-rich Holland, they could have established at least two or three lines between major cities? One died after ten years of discussion. The other is being towed back to Schiphol.
The heating has re-started, and the toilet flushes again.
Maybe I’ll start seriously thinking about tele-teaching.
Why students hate books (and what to do)
November 26th, 2010
As part of a user profiling exercise in class, students interviewed each other about reading as part of their learning activities. Many of them not only hate reading, but have actually refused to buy the course books or read them unless forced by the threat of exams. The tone of their answers varies from impatience to indignance and outright anger that reading is included in the program.
What they said: a selection
Question: “What role does reading play in your learning activities in school?”
Student 1: “None. I learn more from practice than reading. I don’t remember what I read. The reason I don’t remember is that I don’t like to read.”
Student 2: “Not much of a role. I don’t really have many books. We don’t get many assignments requiring us to read, and I wouldn’t read something on my own. Unless I found it interesting.”
Student 3: “If it’s absolutely necessary, I’ll read something in a book for school. But I’m not in favor of it.”
Student 4: “I don’t read in my free time… I wouldn’t know where to start.”
There were dozens of answers like these.
To put all this in context: many of the same students turned out to read about some kind of subject they were interested in, and many had complaints about the way the books were used in course activities. They also complained that English was a second language and that teachers underestimated the difficulty – and the difficulty of the material. And many said that too much of the content of the books wasn’t really used for the course, so they felt they were throwing away money on extraneous information.
The question: why read books?
But there is a real problem here. Let us older teachers refrain for a moment from expressing our horror at all this and just calling them dummies.
Supposing 18-year-old design student asks you: “Why should I bother to read the book?” And follows this with reasons that have a certain validity:
- you can learn the same things better from practical exercises
- search engines cut out all the fluff and you get the same info quicker
- you can learn the same things better from live interactions with students and teachers
- information on internet is more up to date
What would you answer?
My answer to my students
Actually, the use of ‘book’ to mean ‘paper book’ is outdated – there are sites and e-publications and all kinds of new forms of professional literature, linked or not. But amid this growing ‘hyperliterature’ (Willem Velthoven’s term), the question is still valid. Why read a pre-selected, large, ordered collection of texts by a single author, in advance of any obvious practical use for it?
Students: here’s the reason you have to read the course book. I’m heavily indebted to cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham for the precise wording of all this.
1. It will develop your ability to think (and solve problems)
Our brains are not designed for thinking. They’re designed more for seeing, moving and using memory to act correctly in our environment. So most of what we call ‘thinking’ is actually accumulated memory, put into action at the right moment.
Facts and procedures in long-term memory play a key role in your ability to solve design problems. The key facts and procedures have been collected in the book.
Example:
So if you don’t know that there is something called design research, that it contains several methods, and so forth, you will not be able to quickly produce this knowledge at the right moment to solve a problem. (Like when the client asks: Are these visual designs and functionalities right? For our target group?)
2. Search engines only work when you know enough to form effective search queries
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but in four years, I’ve never seen a first-year student find enough valid results in Google to help them. Whereas over-50′s like me always find up to 20 more useful results than they do. Why is that? The accumulated knowledge allows me to quickly re-formulate many valid variations on search queries. And: I have a framework of topics like ‘design research’ which allow me to filter and narrow down results quicker.
The only exception is specific answers to questions on software skills, but our profession demands much, much more than software competence.
The source of that knowledge is books. (And articles and reports and all kinds of other literature, on- and offline.)
Example:
You didn’t know the names or work of people like Wroblewski and Laurel. Now you do. Each of those people is a magic portal to the exact terms, titles, concepts, project names, etc. you need to do an effective search. And they all offer great work and examples. Often, the best result a search can give you is another person.
3. The ability to read quickly and put the knowledge to use is an essential competence
Example:
When working for clients, you will have to:
- read extensively to understand who they are and what they do
- filter out the essential points for your commission
- offer them the latest relevant theories, authors and sources
- find out what a new trend involves (‘user-generated content’, ‘social media’) and give a qualified opinion on it
And don’t forget: to graduate, you will have to do research and write a design rationale.
I’ll leave it at those three for now.
Now, about that required reading list in the website…
The good news: we don’t require you to read every single section of the book. In fact, the requirements are pretty modest. (We integrated most of it in translated form into the lesson activities.)
The bad news: we’re going to treat every class and required reading like an exam. You can be required to do a test at any moment, on any of the material.