New forms of communications

2 Replies

I will be speaking at the NCCJ’s BRT on New Forms of Communications. Here is the flyer. The presentation is on 14th February from 8:00 to 10:00 am, at the Deshima Lounge at the Dutch Embassy.  Register here

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies."
From: The cluetrain manifesto.

Communication is a process of transmitting and/or exchanging information. Today, due to rapidly changing technology this exchange of information is reaching, literally, new heights. We only have to think of the rise of the use of email, blogs, social networks, newsgroups and chat.  The changes that the new technology brings with it is having a significant impact on the way we do business.  We will need to change the way we talk to not only our customers, but our subcontractors and employees as well.
Martin van der Linden, the Communications Committe Chairman of the NCCJ, will during this presentation show some examples of these new forms of communication technologies. Finally, he will present case studies of how these new forms of communications can have a positive impact on your business.

Chess, Design and the Jury.

Leave a reply

In 1990 while waiting for a river boat to take me into Guatamala, I played a game of chess with a Danish guy who was waiting as well. The setting could have come straight out of a Werner Herzog film, the borderpost was nothing more than a wooden hut with a covered veranda in front and a couple of gringo’s  playing chess.  Somehow, I was confusing my Danish opponent at the beginning of the game, as he kept proclaiming: " that’s an interesting move." He was a keen chess player and was very, very hard looking for patterns. Alas, I play as patternless chess as my grandmother bought shoes (sometimes too small, sometimes too big). I left him little time to remain confused, as my pattern is one of no pattern. I  think that design is somehow similar to playing chess, some see patterns while others can’t seem to find them, however hard they look.

The reason I bring this up, is that one of the award wining projects of The Great Indoors was won by Item Idem. The award went for their design of the Bernhard Willhelm flagship store in Tokyo for Bus Stop Co. The project seems to be following my chess playing pattern in their design. The jury’s report says absolutely nothing: " [the] interiors illustrate a refusal to acknowledge the existence of the immediate surroundings". (Could be said of any interior in Tokyo). I think Item Idem are trying to fabricate an anti-design, anti-pattern by creating a seemingly disorder while disorganizing the products within the space. (OK, that can be said about anything in Tokyo).

But hold on, the road here leads into two directions: a jury or a client reading something that I suspect was never intended in the first place by the one initiating it (but because the game did not have to be "played all the way" could get away with it.) And then there is the deliberate choice of selling shit as shit not unlike Piero Manzoni or Marcel Duchamp did. Nothing wrong with either approach. The video on You Tube reveals a lot of the Bernard Willem’s shopkeepers, the Japanese girls don’t understand questions in Japanese so they answer in English, but that does not matter. 

The question really is whether Item Idem consciously tried to go patternless? (Let’s call it "The Guatamala Opening Move") Or is it the jury who has been lost in the game? Not unlike my Danish opponent who was completely at lost with my anarchistic chess moves? Will we ever know? My mind goes back to that game on the sunset drenched Guatamalan riverbed which, to my shame, lasted only 15 minutes or so. But imagine our boat had arrived 5 minutes in the game, today I might be a chess legacy in Denmark.

Why is Tokyo so ugly, but how can it still generate such fantastic architecture?

Leave a reply

The question for 2008, and here is my (easy) answer:

1. Japan has the highest pro-capita rate of architects, of the 1.2million registered architects world-wide Japan has over 300,000,

2. There are very few aesthetic regulations: anything goes,

3. In the chaos architects work hard to make their buildings stand-out,

4. Tokyo has some of the world’s most daring and cash-rich clients,

5. Japanese construction companies (not only the major ones) are the world’s most advanced,

6. Buildings have an average life-span of around 30 years,

7. The city has been destroyed many times over (and most likely will be again soon).

Architecture and methodology

Leave a reply

When one thinks about architecture and methodology "architectural programming" or brief formulating" come to mind. These are the techniques for formulating a creative process. As Robert Kumlin has written an excellent book on the subject of architectural programming, so I will not touch on it here.

The creative process is only one issue of the spectrum I have in mind when using the word methodology. At Waseda I thought for six years methodology to first year students, and we looked at the various methodological ideas and systems, such as Aristotle’s method of induction, phase space or Kepler’s backflips to make mathematical relations fit natural phenomena.

What I am interested in as I write about methodology and architecture, is to see the shifts that have been taking place within the process of architecture as a system. (I have written about this in the book: eBussines and Workplace Redesign) When we talk about architecture as a system then we need to look at what is happening both within as well as at the forces outside of architecture. I believe that there have always been two, opposing forces in place: internal and external. With internal and external I don’t mean the interior and the exterior of the space, but an entangled kind of yin-yang duality that pushes the process of architecture along. And with process I mean a persistent structure or a quality that follows a Darwinian path. This stucture is an evolutionary process that modifies the hierarchical elements of architecture slowly but at certain points the structure takes on catastrophic proportions. Our main interest thus should be towards these "modifiers". The internal and external forces are what create the shifts within the system.
Even though the system will remain open ended, in itself as a methodology it is closed. It is however important to take into consideration that these internal as well as external modifiers have always been dormant within the system, there is nothing new, and as such the system is complete. The changes are taking place only in the hierarchical interrelationships within the system.

The question of architecture and methodology really is: What is driving the formulation of our spaces?

Let us for example look at Buckminster Fuller’s methodology. Here we can see how internal and external factors shape Bucky’s design, and through his 4D thinking we can see that internally his focus has been on ways to reduce materiality while creating higher structural strength, what he calls “tensegrity”. External factors are, for example, his ideas for the Wichita house where a factory assembly line that during WW2 was building bomber planes, Bucky envisioned to be changed to a house-building plant.
I will add some more examples later on, as I think this is unchartered territory. It will tell us from a historical perspective the contribution certain architects have had on the progress of architecture. I wonder whether we would be able to able to pinpoint the catastrophic shifts within the system when we map enough of these modifiers?

What’s my word worth?

Leave a reply

When I was in high school, I showed some of my early (rather pathetic) scribbles to a friend to get his comments. He said: "why do you do this? Why spent time writing, when you say you just do it for yourself? I can’t see the point." He probably still thinks the same of this blog (and can hear him saying: "the only comments you get are spam"), or my other writings. It is true, I don’t do it for money, one doesn’t make money writing. (Or better, I don’t make money writing, I am not J.K. Rowling). I do this for me, not (only) for Mr Ego but as my intention that I want to bring about active change to the perception of the work environment and secondly design that is based on this approach (My Harry Potter). Should I thus label myself as an Activist? WorkVitamins after all is first and foremost an idea to bring about change, and this idea will need an active voice (my blog). Lyotard in Postmodern Fables had this to say about activism:

"…insofar as these practices [of activism] are authorized and even encouraged by legislation or, at least, by the formal and informal rules that regulate that status. Society permits us, requires us to act accordingly: because it needs us to contribute, in that order that is our own, to the development of the global system. In this way we can keep the feeling that our struggle for emancipation is being pursued."

Are we all pretending to be activists, global citizens, taking on personal as well as social responsibilities? The individual voices are growing everyday, witness the rise of blogs, wikipedia, facebooks etc…Now that everyone has the chance to make, report, news, everyone all of a sudden believes, rightly or wrongly, that he or she has something meaningful to add to this virtual society of analysts, commentators and Google philosophers. We are moving towards a society where everyone takes on the role of an intellectual who according to Edelman is being trusted more than the "real" intelectual.
Lyotard again:

"Everyone must be able (to excercise the right) to bear witness. Institutions see to it that we are all stationed on the edge of ourselves, turned toward the outside, benevolent, ready to listen and to speak, to dispute, to protest, to explain ourselves. Through inquiries, interviews, polls, roundtables, "series", "case files", we see ourselves in the media as humans busy fulfilling the duty to assert our rights. "

By being able to spill-out words and thoughts this easily: setting up a blog takes 15 minutes et voila: witness my unbearable lightness of being. Some blogs are like porn or born again Christians (the same to me), who are so obsessed with this one thing in their life: Jesus or Vagina. Their main subject becomes their main object of expression.

We, the people almost feels like we have to excercise our rights to join the conversation. "Doctor, I think you are wrong about this, as I read on this medical website that you can, instead of an open repair do an All-arthroscopic repair, which allows me to go home two hours after the operation. If you prescribe me Vicodin or Oxycontin, I’ll promise not to drive. And I will not eat any Boursin before the operation as I read on your blog that you hate patients with garlic breath."

Let me give the final word (for this post at least) to Lyotard: (all the quotations come from his excellent "Postmodern Fables")

"From my earliest days of youth I had had the notion that every person has his own no-man’s land, a domain that is his and his alone. The life everyone sees is one thing; the other belongs to the individual, and it is none of anyone else’s business."

Who am I?

Leave a reply

To the question "Do you know what you are?" Frank Zappa answered: "You are what you is… You ain’t what you not. So see what you got…" etc…The funny thing is that these days the answer is shifting towards what you (we) are not and how we can get what we don’t have. Reminds me of another song called Desire by Tuxedomoon: "Makes you go where you can’t go. Makes you want what you can’t have, Desire."

I am not trying to be the anti-capitalist moralist here. However these thoughts came into my mind after seeing this commercial in the train the other day:

 

Are people fueled by a new form of self-expressionism, something that requires a great number of credit cards? I shop therefore I am?