As my mind was racing last night after a whirlwind Christmas holiday, I decided to glance through my notes from the beginning of my thesis journey. Besides getting even more confused about what I want to do, I may have stumbled upon the overall meaning of my work.
I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut on a standard parcel of land somewhere in the backcountry. We barely interacted with our neighbors, and my parents seemed quite content about that (they grew up in the bustling neighborhoods of the Bronx, so maybe the peace and quiet was ideal for them). On my road there wasn't a community in the sense that people waved to each other and chatted about their kids, borrowed cups of sugar, or planned holiday get-togethers. I didn't have a group of neighborhood kids that I could run outside and play with anytime. My brother and sister are ten and twelve years older than me, and they were off to college by the time I was eight. I grew up feeling like an only child, and even though I had a lot of friends from school, time for play dates had to be well-planned.
Greenwich is a beautiful town, but once I moved to the city when I was twenty-one, I realized how much character the streets, buildings and neighborhoods could have. Since New York is a very pedestrian city, I was constantly impressed by the street art found on the walls of old buildings, and hidden doorways and various nooks and crannies found in the older settlements. Greenwich, like most suburbs, consists of long main roads and shorter side roads, and you need to take the car to get anything done. While the town has a character of its own and I lived there for twenty-one years, it's not something I grew a strong attachment to.
Both of my parents passed away by the time I was twenty-one years old, and settling in the city was a way to grow roots somewhere. The city became a constant character in my life, and I've grown an attachment to it that I can't fully explain. Thus my intention with thesis work is to tell a better story about what I love about New York City, and to offer alternate ways to experience it. My attachment to the city's landscape and character has also activated a fear - the fear of losing anything that makes New York what it is, whether it's the authenticity, energy, or diversity.
The conclusion I finally come to after all of this thesis stuff is finished will have nothing to do with preserving the way things are, or nostalgia for the way things were. New York City is constantly being transformed - rebuilt and recreated by its people. That may be the thing I love the most, and the thing that makes New York City what it is today.
SOME THINGS THAT MY THESIS IS NOT ABOUT:
While corporations with out-of-place branding is deplorable in historic neighborhoods, that is not something I want or need to tackle. I feel that corporations like McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts should have flexible branding strategies for their retail outlets, in order to connect with the community and enhance the beauty of the built environment, but this is something that needs to happen at the top levels of management. Many neighborhoods welcome chain stores because of the economic contribution, or convenience of easily grabbing a latte, gadget, or cheap shoes. Only a few community boards will completely block chain stores from opening in their neighborhoods, and some will place strong restrictions on signage to maintain visual integration.
The greater issue is the lack of historical and contextual awareness of retail stores, but costs would skyrocket if research and attention to context were required for every outpost. The responsibility is with the corporation to make a meaningful contribution to the community they enter, and many already have policies for employee volunteerism and grant programs. In this new age of social responsibility, maybe every globalized behemoth will make an effort to integrate visually and also with their community. In fact, it may even bring in a new customer base.
Also, I'm not trying to place meaning where there is none. Branding is a giant industry that tries to create beauty from the banal; to create meaningful experiences from trivial ones. I'm not interested in making the everyday beautiful, just to understand that the quotidian is enough. I'd like to uncover the truth in what is already there, and find my own meaning in the city I'm surrounded by every day. Maybe once I find truths hidden in the cracks and shadows of New York City, they can be applied to other cities around the globe.
So there you have it - a quick psychological interlude. Also it's my personal context that helps explain where I'm coming from and the color of glass that I'm peering through.
Showing posts with label banal beauty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banal beauty. Show all posts
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
Manhole Covers, The Naked City and Paul Klee
In class two weeks ago, I read a thesis from 2001 called 'Manhole Covers and Other Art Underfoot'. I was mostly interested in discovering how to create a thesis out of a concept so abstract. The author found that upon transitioning to a pedestrian lifestyle after moving to New York City, she began noticing and appreciating so many details in her surroundings. I definitely had a similar experience of waking up to the beauty of our city, even in the most banal everyday things.
'While the exotic may raise our eyebrows, it is the mundane that is truly engrossing, and from which the most can be learned. It is in the everyday that we find insights and miracles, in what's under our noses... and under our feet.'
New York City at one time was dotted with cast-iron foundries that produced everything from decorative railings, staircases, doors, building fronts, weathervanes, lampposts, boot scrapers, and manhole and coal chute covers. In the thousands of miles of sidewalks in NYC you can find the names of these foundries with handiwork from as far back as the late 1800's intact. Also, one of the most beautiful aspects of the Gramercy Park neighborhood are the cast iron gates surrounding the buildings.
It is definitely interesting that these manhole covers signify an old-fashioned time in New York City. A time when we burned coal for heat (oh, we still do that) and had to access the reservoir from downtown, and when there were many fine craftsmen available to make beautiful designs for our buildings out of cast iron.
The most interesting part of the thesis was an historical section that examined the Situationist movement and derive. The Situationist work focuses on the urban environment and it's interaction with human behavior. Derive is "a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences, one that entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects." This is all so related to urban planning, and some of the articles I plan on reading for thesis research are within this field. I am only interested in this subject with regards to how welcoming a space is to bring people together to interact with each other and their environment.
It is so interesting to think that the experience of our place is so dependent on the maps that guide us. Guy Debord and Asger Jorn offer an entirely new perspective with 'The Naked City', a map of Paris that weaves together parts of the city based on their psychogeographic importance. In the map they offer an antidote to being "swept along by crowds... bound by an artificial imperative of speed... rushing toward sites of alienated production or consumption." It is possible to create a map for residents and tourists alike that suggests drifting through the cities backwaters to enjoy the sense of encounter, and highlighting unique aspects of the city beyond the standard tourist attractions.
This reminds me of a book I just read actually. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), which diagrams in detail the many points, lines and planes that are available to the artist simply from referencing our environment. In my Visual Communications I class with Professor Mark Sanders, one of our first assignments was to find a modular structure in our walk to class and create a pattern out of it. The concept originated in the Bauhaus philosophy, and more specifically Klee's philosophy "that rested on empathy with the created world, accepting everything that is with equal love and humility. As a very young man he had spoken of his art as "andacht zum kleinen" (devotion to small things)... Through observation of the smallest manifestation of form and interrelationship, he could conclude about the magnitude of natural order." This text is found in the devotional introduction to the book by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and in the concluding notes she quotes Novalis in the hopes that Klee's book will inspire others to:
"...give sense to the vulgar,
give mysteriousness to the common,
give the dignity of the unknown to the obvious,
and a trace of infinity to the temporal."
'While the exotic may raise our eyebrows, it is the mundane that is truly engrossing, and from which the most can be learned. It is in the everyday that we find insights and miracles, in what's under our noses... and under our feet.'
New York City at one time was dotted with cast-iron foundries that produced everything from decorative railings, staircases, doors, building fronts, weathervanes, lampposts, boot scrapers, and manhole and coal chute covers. In the thousands of miles of sidewalks in NYC you can find the names of these foundries with handiwork from as far back as the late 1800's intact. Also, one of the most beautiful aspects of the Gramercy Park neighborhood are the cast iron gates surrounding the buildings.
It is definitely interesting that these manhole covers signify an old-fashioned time in New York City. A time when we burned coal for heat (oh, we still do that) and had to access the reservoir from downtown, and when there were many fine craftsmen available to make beautiful designs for our buildings out of cast iron.
The most interesting part of the thesis was an historical section that examined the Situationist movement and derive. The Situationist work focuses on the urban environment and it's interaction with human behavior. Derive is "a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences, one that entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects." This is all so related to urban planning, and some of the articles I plan on reading for thesis research are within this field. I am only interested in this subject with regards to how welcoming a space is to bring people together to interact with each other and their environment.
It is so interesting to think that the experience of our place is so dependent on the maps that guide us. Guy Debord and Asger Jorn offer an entirely new perspective with 'The Naked City', a map of Paris that weaves together parts of the city based on their psychogeographic importance. In the map they offer an antidote to being "swept along by crowds... bound by an artificial imperative of speed... rushing toward sites of alienated production or consumption." It is possible to create a map for residents and tourists alike that suggests drifting through the cities backwaters to enjoy the sense of encounter, and highlighting unique aspects of the city beyond the standard tourist attractions.
This reminds me of a book I just read actually. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), which diagrams in detail the many points, lines and planes that are available to the artist simply from referencing our environment. In my Visual Communications I class with Professor Mark Sanders, one of our first assignments was to find a modular structure in our walk to class and create a pattern out of it. The concept originated in the Bauhaus philosophy, and more specifically Klee's philosophy "that rested on empathy with the created world, accepting everything that is with equal love and humility. As a very young man he had spoken of his art as "andacht zum kleinen" (devotion to small things)... Through observation of the smallest manifestation of form and interrelationship, he could conclude about the magnitude of natural order." This text is found in the devotional introduction to the book by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and in the concluding notes she quotes Novalis in the hopes that Klee's book will inspire others to:
"...give sense to the vulgar,
give mysteriousness to the common,
give the dignity of the unknown to the obvious,
and a trace of infinity to the temporal."
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Some Ramblings on Community
I'm at a point in my thesis research development in which there are so many ideas bouncing around in my head that I'm having trouble narrowing down to a specific direction for primary research. In terms of secondary research, the sources I have range from visual intelligence, resource sharing systems, sustainable cities, community building and place marketing.
My idea is that through love for banal everyday occurrences, objects and situations, we slow down enough to appreciate our city and experience our place in a new way. Through this new perspective we will build stronger communities by creating valuable programs and services. Why build community? As an antidote to the isolation of globalization, to reduce consumption and share information.
'Walk', project by Constantin Demner of Studio Elastik
An intervention in public space in East London, UK, using the language of street art to bring local history to life in the imagination of passers-by.
This project captured my imagination because of my interest in street art as a portal to the essence of a city, and representation of the more subversive side of it's population. Street artists, however, are not community-builders - they are vandals at worst, and political activists at best. Projects like Walk balance between those two sides and unite them to deliver a strong message about how we view our surroundings, and offer a suggestion on how to explore different ways of seeing. Demner's focus on local history is a great example of creating a connection to the community, something that residents would find valuable. I think there could be a lot more information in the signage for this project in order to get the most value out of it, but it definitely makes a statement on seeing the city in a new way. I especially like the part when the music stops and we take a look at the historic building across the street for a few seconds - that is a beautiful observational moment.
This concept does not address the 'how' of building community however. There must be programs and services put into place to add value to our neighborhoods. Things have changed so much since my parents generation. They grew up in 1950's-60's Bronx neighborhoods, which I picture as the idyllic example of community. You knew your everything about your neighbors, and when you had to run out to the store you asked them to keep an eye on your kids playing stick-ball in the street. My great-grandmother was a real estate maven - she owned 6 or 7 buildings and rented out the apartments, while my great-grandfather had a beautiful garden in the backyard of their house, with overflowing tomato plants and even chickens!
I grew up in Connecticut on an isolated street that was nothing close to being a neighborhood. If we needed something, we got in the car and drove to the store - we rarely spoke to the neighbors much less ask them for a cup of sugar. I used to envy the kids that could run across their yard and get their friend from next-door for a playdate, since my mom had to call and make arrangements well in advance.
Society is moving closer and closer to internet dependence, and there are many opinions on the effect of this on our social interactions. Does it make us more or less isolated to be plugged in to 'social software' like Facebook, Ning, and Foursquare 24 hours a day? I don't know the answer to this, I can only give my opinion which is that there is NO WAY a computer screen will ever replace being with a person in real time. Then again it's possible that an online community can strengthen connections between people because they know each other well enough to say hello. John Thackara writes at length about this - most recently on Change Observer.
The transition toward sustainability is not about messages; it’s about activity. It’s not about proclamations; it’s about practices. Many professional designers are in the representation business, so their default response in recent times has been to design a poster about sustainability. Or maybe a website filled with green things to buy.
But projecting more signals into an already cluttered environment is like throwing confetti into a snowstorm. Advertising folk respond to what they call “the clutter problem” by adding to it. Social media? They’re part of the clutter conundrum too. Online communications are a mode of publication, not of conversation. The number of bloggers is growing at 35 percent annually; the number of people using the internet is growing at 10 percent. Do the math!
Emitting messages, however clever and evocative they may be, is not the same as being with real people, in real places, who are changing their lived material reality. That’s why I have a radical proposal: Consider speaking your words in a place rather than pressing “send.” Ivan Illich believed that our culture started to go off the rails in 1120, when monks stopped reading texts aloud to each other and became solitary scholars.
Are social media playing a similar role today? For Illich, there was a huge difference between a colloquial tongue — what people say to each other in a context, with meaning — and a language uttered by people into microphones. Or typed onto a Facebook page.
When someone we trust tells us to our face that a thing is important, we pay attention. Conversation is usually a more powerful medium for provoking change in behavior than pre-packaged messages projected at us by media. Conversation matters more than content. Out there in the bioregions, and especially among folk like the Transition Towns groups, face-to-face is key.
There’s continuity here between today’s social radicals and the avant-garde of art in earlier times. For years, artists fought to bridge the schism in Western culture that separates the creator from the spectator. The Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettrists and Fluxus artists all fought in different ways against the idea that art was about the creation of beautiful, static forms.
As Guy Debord put it: “Representation separates life from experience.” The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is a process in which an active body enters into a “communion” with its surroundings. I empathize especially with the Lettrists, who invented a technique called hypergraphics, or super-writing. Their technique merged poetry as text with more graphic ways of communicating such as painting, illustration or signs. Rather as traveling storytellers have been doing in Rajasthan for 2,000 years.
I apologize for practically transcribing the entire article by John Thackara, but it is just so pertinent to the point I'm trying to make. I'm reading 'Society of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord, a provocative 1960's book on cultural theory. He describes the spectacle, 'In all its specific manifestations - news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment - the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.' He argues that we want what we are told to want by the governing bodies of this 'spectacle', which in modern times means the advertising industry and any other governing body in control of our cultural experiences (film, art, music, etc.). He also laments society having downgraded from 'being into having' - this successfully describes the cause of alienation in a globalized world. The one way communication of mass-media adds to our consumerist society and potential feelings of isolation and apathy.
So let's talk about some solutions! My teacher showed me this great link to an Italian craft fair, Unconventionall Holiday Market, where they are bringing artists and designers together from around the world to create better souvenirs for the town. The creative agency Unconventionall accepted submissions from artists for a minimum of one week stay in the town and they expect over 150 artists over the course of the summer. This is a really unique way to create value in the community, and stop the manufacture of cheap knock-off not-made-here souvenirs.
I've also done some research into 'Use Communities' and I can't believe how many there are out there! It's a great way to limit environmental preaching (which no one really listens to) and actually do something to reduce consumption. It is related to the idea of reuse of materials, which I've posted about numerous times. It is the idea of providing services without requiring ownership, from car-sharing to dress rentals. There are many online resources that provide the link between individuals in a community, rather than consumers renting services from businesses. Here are a few: Neighborgoods, Rentoid, I Let You, Building Bulletins, Gogo Verde, Bright Neighbor and Barterquest. Even more sites offering product sharing include Swaptree, Techtain, Loanables, Sharer!, FreeCycle, RentAThing and Return My Pants. Shared office space sites are WorkSpace, The Hub and Aula. Thank you WorldChanging for this great list!
Borrowing from friends and strangers can help build community, and using an online network to do so can eliminate the awkwardness of knocking on someone's door. Need I also mention that this saves money and the need for storage space? This requires a critical rethinking on what the American Dream really does to the Earth, and to really consider the side effects of our lifestyles. If we visualize the negative backstory (and future) of the products we are using, it will change our behavior, and could change our relationship with objects from one of ownership to one of use.
My idea is that through love for banal everyday occurrences, objects and situations, we slow down enough to appreciate our city and experience our place in a new way. Through this new perspective we will build stronger communities by creating valuable programs and services. Why build community? As an antidote to the isolation of globalization, to reduce consumption and share information.
'Walk', project by Constantin Demner of Studio Elastik
An intervention in public space in East London, UK, using the language of street art to bring local history to life in the imagination of passers-by.
This project captured my imagination because of my interest in street art as a portal to the essence of a city, and representation of the more subversive side of it's population. Street artists, however, are not community-builders - they are vandals at worst, and political activists at best. Projects like Walk balance between those two sides and unite them to deliver a strong message about how we view our surroundings, and offer a suggestion on how to explore different ways of seeing. Demner's focus on local history is a great example of creating a connection to the community, something that residents would find valuable. I think there could be a lot more information in the signage for this project in order to get the most value out of it, but it definitely makes a statement on seeing the city in a new way. I especially like the part when the music stops and we take a look at the historic building across the street for a few seconds - that is a beautiful observational moment.
This concept does not address the 'how' of building community however. There must be programs and services put into place to add value to our neighborhoods. Things have changed so much since my parents generation. They grew up in 1950's-60's Bronx neighborhoods, which I picture as the idyllic example of community. You knew your everything about your neighbors, and when you had to run out to the store you asked them to keep an eye on your kids playing stick-ball in the street. My great-grandmother was a real estate maven - she owned 6 or 7 buildings and rented out the apartments, while my great-grandfather had a beautiful garden in the backyard of their house, with overflowing tomato plants and even chickens!
I grew up in Connecticut on an isolated street that was nothing close to being a neighborhood. If we needed something, we got in the car and drove to the store - we rarely spoke to the neighbors much less ask them for a cup of sugar. I used to envy the kids that could run across their yard and get their friend from next-door for a playdate, since my mom had to call and make arrangements well in advance.
Society is moving closer and closer to internet dependence, and there are many opinions on the effect of this on our social interactions. Does it make us more or less isolated to be plugged in to 'social software' like Facebook, Ning, and Foursquare 24 hours a day? I don't know the answer to this, I can only give my opinion which is that there is NO WAY a computer screen will ever replace being with a person in real time. Then again it's possible that an online community can strengthen connections between people because they know each other well enough to say hello. John Thackara writes at length about this - most recently on Change Observer.
The transition toward sustainability is not about messages; it’s about activity. It’s not about proclamations; it’s about practices. Many professional designers are in the representation business, so their default response in recent times has been to design a poster about sustainability. Or maybe a website filled with green things to buy.
But projecting more signals into an already cluttered environment is like throwing confetti into a snowstorm. Advertising folk respond to what they call “the clutter problem” by adding to it. Social media? They’re part of the clutter conundrum too. Online communications are a mode of publication, not of conversation. The number of bloggers is growing at 35 percent annually; the number of people using the internet is growing at 10 percent. Do the math!
Emitting messages, however clever and evocative they may be, is not the same as being with real people, in real places, who are changing their lived material reality. That’s why I have a radical proposal: Consider speaking your words in a place rather than pressing “send.” Ivan Illich believed that our culture started to go off the rails in 1120, when monks stopped reading texts aloud to each other and became solitary scholars.
Are social media playing a similar role today? For Illich, there was a huge difference between a colloquial tongue — what people say to each other in a context, with meaning — and a language uttered by people into microphones. Or typed onto a Facebook page.
When someone we trust tells us to our face that a thing is important, we pay attention. Conversation is usually a more powerful medium for provoking change in behavior than pre-packaged messages projected at us by media. Conversation matters more than content. Out there in the bioregions, and especially among folk like the Transition Towns groups, face-to-face is key.
There’s continuity here between today’s social radicals and the avant-garde of art in earlier times. For years, artists fought to bridge the schism in Western culture that separates the creator from the spectator. The Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettrists and Fluxus artists all fought in different ways against the idea that art was about the creation of beautiful, static forms.
As Guy Debord put it: “Representation separates life from experience.” The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is a process in which an active body enters into a “communion” with its surroundings. I empathize especially with the Lettrists, who invented a technique called hypergraphics, or super-writing. Their technique merged poetry as text with more graphic ways of communicating such as painting, illustration or signs. Rather as traveling storytellers have been doing in Rajasthan for 2,000 years.
I apologize for practically transcribing the entire article by John Thackara, but it is just so pertinent to the point I'm trying to make. I'm reading 'Society of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord, a provocative 1960's book on cultural theory. He describes the spectacle, 'In all its specific manifestations - news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment - the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.' He argues that we want what we are told to want by the governing bodies of this 'spectacle', which in modern times means the advertising industry and any other governing body in control of our cultural experiences (film, art, music, etc.). He also laments society having downgraded from 'being into having' - this successfully describes the cause of alienation in a globalized world. The one way communication of mass-media adds to our consumerist society and potential feelings of isolation and apathy.
So let's talk about some solutions! My teacher showed me this great link to an Italian craft fair, Unconventionall Holiday Market, where they are bringing artists and designers together from around the world to create better souvenirs for the town. The creative agency Unconventionall accepted submissions from artists for a minimum of one week stay in the town and they expect over 150 artists over the course of the summer. This is a really unique way to create value in the community, and stop the manufacture of cheap knock-off not-made-here souvenirs.
I've also done some research into 'Use Communities' and I can't believe how many there are out there! It's a great way to limit environmental preaching (which no one really listens to) and actually do something to reduce consumption. It is related to the idea of reuse of materials, which I've posted about numerous times. It is the idea of providing services without requiring ownership, from car-sharing to dress rentals. There are many online resources that provide the link between individuals in a community, rather than consumers renting services from businesses. Here are a few: Neighborgoods, Rentoid, I Let You, Building Bulletins, Gogo Verde, Bright Neighbor and Barterquest. Even more sites offering product sharing include Swaptree, Techtain, Loanables, Sharer!, FreeCycle, RentAThing and Return My Pants. Shared office space sites are WorkSpace, The Hub and Aula. Thank you WorldChanging for this great list!
Borrowing from friends and strangers can help build community, and using an online network to do so can eliminate the awkwardness of knocking on someone's door. Need I also mention that this saves money and the need for storage space? This requires a critical rethinking on what the American Dream really does to the Earth, and to really consider the side effects of our lifestyles. If we visualize the negative backstory (and future) of the products we are using, it will change our behavior, and could change our relationship with objects from one of ownership to one of use.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
I could have looked at these photos all day
I visited MOMA on Friday for the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition. There were hundreds of his photographs taken over his entire career, beginning in the 1930's. He had an uncanny ability to capture the essence of a situation with detail and rich texture in black and white. "The decisive moment" was his term for that window of time that a photographer needs to be open to in order to fully capture a scene.
Although he photographed many celebrities, politicians and artists, I am most amazed at his ability to find beauty in the most ordinary and banal of scenes. Here are a few examples. I want to go back to the exhibit because I could imagine staring at his photos for hours on end... they are that beautiful.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Color Workshop Wrap-Up (and related ideas)
During this course I began to develop an awareness of subtle colors in my environment. For example, the million different whites that are available or the various different yellows developed from the reflection of sunlight. In my future work as a designer, I would like to explore the concept of beauty in the mundane, everyday observations that are so easy to take for granted. I've discovered that there can be beauty in the most banal of things and I would like to explore my everyday environment more deeply to discover the details, colors and experience that I would normally just pass by.
There are a few ideas that this concept reminds me of. First, Tara Donovan is an incredible artist that uses everyday items in her artwork to create ethereal spaces and environments. She transforms drinking straws, styrofoam cups, scotch tape and fishing wire into billowing, organic shapes and experiences.
Tara Donovan
Second, this concept is loosely connected to a localization movement encouraged by many people including John Thackara (and reinforced by the most recent Good Magazine neighborhoods issue). He emphasizes the importance of place, and where things come from as an integral part of what they are and how we connect with them. (the slow city movement is an interesting side note on this topic. To become a slow city there are certain restrictions so that nothing is outsourced and resources need to come from within the boundaries of the city as much as possible. A real grass-roots anti-globalization effort.)
Lastly, and most relevant to a graphic designer, Thackara encourages people to be with "real people, in real places, who are changing their lived material reality" - this is more beneficial to society than just emitting messages. This is a crucial point for designers, since we may be the biggest message-senders of all.
This also reminds me of a bumper-sticker that I may still have (from my Colorado days)! It is a Margaret Mead quote: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has."
There are a few ideas that this concept reminds me of. First, Tara Donovan is an incredible artist that uses everyday items in her artwork to create ethereal spaces and environments. She transforms drinking straws, styrofoam cups, scotch tape and fishing wire into billowing, organic shapes and experiences.
TTara Donovan
Second, this concept is loosely connected to a localization movement encouraged by many people including John Thackara (and reinforced by the most recent Good Magazine neighborhoods issue). He emphasizes the importance of place, and where things come from as an integral part of what they are and how we connect with them. (the slow city movement is an interesting side note on this topic. To become a slow city there are certain restrictions so that nothing is outsourced and resources need to come from within the boundaries of the city as much as possible. A real grass-roots anti-globalization effort.)
Lastly, and most relevant to a graphic designer, Thackara encourages people to be with "real people, in real places, who are changing their lived material reality" - this is more beneficial to society than just emitting messages. This is a crucial point for designers, since we may be the biggest message-senders of all.
This also reminds me of a bumper-sticker that I may still have (from my Colorado days)! It is a Margaret Mead quote: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has."
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