This has been a great year for works about graphic design that offer entertainment and insight for not only for designers but for the rest of us.
The most extraordinary example is Helvetica, a delightful documentary about the 20th-century's most ubiquitous typeface. It's also about modernism, postmodernism, and whatever came after--and about the eternal aesthetic tension between the classic and the expressive. The film made the festival circuit last year, including a stop in Dallas, and director Gary Huswit has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. The film also deserves an Oscar nod. It's now out on DVD
. I'll have an interview with Hustwit on The Atlantic's website next month.
I'm also a big fan of Michael Bierut's Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, many of which originally appeared as longish blog postings on Design Observer. As my niece Rachel, now a design student at Carnegie Mellon, said, "He's so funny." (His moment in Helvetica brought down the house.) He's also charming and smart. Here's a passage from essay 11 that should interest plenty of readers who think they don't care about graphic design:
I just reread The Fountainhead, and I was curious to see how fifteen years of work in the real world would change my take on it. The book is viewed with, at best, kindly derision by most practicing architects and designers I know. But Roark's view toward clients still seems to describe the secret yearning harbored by most of my fellow professionals whether they care to admit it or not; they too might declare, "I don't intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build."
I was also reminded again how simple the world of design was in 1943, when the book was published. In the tenth grade, when I read Roark's declaration that "A house can have integrity, just like a person, and just as seldom." I could clearly imagine the kind of house he was talking about; it looked like the pictures I had seen of Fallingwater. I had yet to read Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture, which would confuse things a bit by making a fairly persuasive case for things like blue metal balconies.
What surprised me most were the descriptions of the compromises Roark was asked to make. When I read these at twenty, they seemed like impossibly grotesque caricatures: surely simpering clients didn't actually babble nonsense like, "Our conservatives simply refused to accept a queer stark building like yours. And they claim that the public won't accept it either. So we hit on a middle course. In this way, though it's not traditional architecture of course it will give the public the impression of what they're accustomed to. It adds a certain air of sound, stable dignity...." Today this sounds exactly like the kind of quite reasonable stuff I listen thoughtfully to and--God help me--acquiesce to, every day. And at this I began to feel a little depressed.
The book's version of the essay is better, but you can read the original blog post here.
Michael Bierut is one of the prominent graphic designers interviewed in How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman, a branding consultant who hosts a weekly Internet radio program called "Design Matters." (I've been a guest.) Reading a book, I was struck by how it portrayed, through graphic designers, the life of anyone engaged in creative work, particularly those of us who tend toward the unbalanced life. You can read a review of the book here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 09, 2007 • Comments
As long-time readers know, I'm on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE. FIRE's blog, The Torch, is full of good stuff, including a detailed report by FIRE president Greg Lukianoff on his appearance at University of Delaware to discuss the school's invasive residential life educational program, which featured such things as one-on-one interviews in which residential advisers demanded that freshmen give detailed answers to questions like when they first realized their sexual identities. The program got lots of negative attention from bloggers and others, leading the university to discontinue it--at least for now. To give you a sense of the reception, Greg titles his post "Taking My Licks at the University of Delaware."
Not all of FIRE's cases get as much attention--How much have you heard about Hampton University's refusal to recognize a gay and lesbian student group, in direct contradiction of the university's nondiscrimination policy?--but the very existence of the organization gives students and faculty a reliable ally to turn to when academic freedom is under attack. Take, for example, the absurd but true case at Valdosta State in which a student was expelled for peacefully protesting plans to spend $30 million in student fees to build new parking structures.
The best way, by far, to keep up with FIRE's work, and the ideas behind it, is to check out The Torch on a regular basis. And when you're making your year-end charitable donations, please support FIRE. Gifts earmarked to support FIRE's new New York satellite office will be matched by a generous donor.
UPDATE: Blogger Fritz Schrank recounts his experience with a fundraising call from the University of Delaware.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 09, 2007 • Comments
This gallery of mid-century Soviet space illustrations demonstrates that the retro-future wasn't all that different behind the Iron Curtain. (Via Design Observer.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 29, 2007 • Comments
Tyler Cowen calls for more anthropology, in this case of ideology. Grant McCracken, who teaches ethnographic techniques, suggests anthropology as a second career.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 29, 2007 • Comments
Daniel Weintraub captures the sad--and fearful--state of the presidential race. (Registration required but this site used to cost $500 a year.)
Wow.
I tuned into the CNN/YouTube Republican presidential debate Wednesday night and was surprised to see so much fear. I thought the GOP was supposed to be the "daddy" party -- all strong and manly. But these guys were quaking in their loafers about any number of threats to our safety and livelihoods. From Islamic terrorism to Chinese manufacturers, European farmers, Mexican laborers and even Canadians (yes, Canadians!), the Republicans seem to think the world is about to take us down. Their solutions vary. Some want to curl up in a little American ball to shield ourselves from attack. Others want to "stay on the offense" with the military to keep the bad guys at bay. Nobody really conveyed a sense of confidence in the future, or in the American people's ability to prosper peacefully in a more competitive world.
Of course, the Democrats are not much better. They deny that the Islamists are a threat but see even bigger monsters in the economic closet and are even more eager than the Republicans to protect us from competition and change.
The sad thing is that these candidates must know that a lot of voters share their insecurities, or they wouldn't try so hard to feed them. But doesn't anybody on the campaign trail speak for dynamism, the creative spirit, innovation, and the potential of individuals to do great things? Doesn't anybody running for president think that Americans can compete -- even thrive -- by participating in, not fleeing, a growing global economy? This is the dawn of the Information Age. The world is changing fast. Yet these folks all sound as if they think it's 1955. The Cold War and the Red scare all over again.
I work in what's commonly thought to be the 21st Century equivalent of the buggy whip industry, yet even I have a far cheerier outlook about the future than any of these guys exhibited last night. It was almost as if they were trying to channel Lou Dobbs, or they were hypnotized by that great CNN fearmonger on their way into the studio.
PS to my Republican friends: I know CNN did a lousy job picking the questions and half of them came from people with links to Democratic candidates and causes. But they didn't pick the answers. The candidates still had their say. And in two hours of yakking, I don't think I heard a single sentence expressing confidence in the ability of individuals to pursue happiness on their own. Isn't that what the Republicans are supposed to be all about?
If you prefer horse-race analysis, check out Robert A. George's debate blogging.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 29, 2007 • Comments
The always-interesting historian of science Peter Galison, author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps and Image and Logic, has a new book called Objectivity, co-authored with Lorraine Daston. Examining scientific atlases from widely diverse fields, they trace the overlapping histories of three different scientific ideals: "truth-to-nature" (representing the underlying type of, say, a particular species of plant), "mechanical objectivity," and "trained judgment" (finding patterns and "family resemblances" in many samples). Objectivity, they argue, only emerged as an ideal in the 19th century:
Like almost all forms of moral virtuosity, nineteenth-century objectivity preached asceticism, albeit of a highly trained and specialized sort. Its temptations and frailties had less to do with envy, lust, gluttony, and other familiar vices than with witting and unwitting tampering with the visual "facts." The relation of this particular form of disciplining the self and the kind of image desired was close: just insofar as one could restrain the impulse to intervene or perfect, one could allow objects--from crystals to chrysanthemums--to print themselves on the page. Put conversely: Seductive as it might be to "see as" this or that ideal, the premium for objective sight was on "seeing that," full stop. But in the view of late nineteenth-century scientists, these professional sins were almost as difficult to combat as the seven deadly ones, and they required a scientific self equipped with a stern and vigilant conscience, in need not just of external training but also of a fierce self-regulation.
Mechanized or highly proceduralized science initially seems incompatible with moralized science, but in fact the two were closely related. While much is and has been made of those distinctive traits--emotional, intellectual, and moral--that distinguish humans from machines, it was a nineteenth-century commonplace that machines were paragons of certain human virtues. Chief among these were those associated with work: patient, indefatigable, ever-alert machines would relieve human workers whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled. Where intervening genius once reigned, there, in the nineteenth-century scientists proclaimed ever more loudly, hard, self-disciplined and self-restrained work would carry the day.
In addition to the sheer industriousness of machines, there was more: levers and gears did not succumb to temptation. Of course, strictly speaking, no merit attached to these mechanical virtues, for their exercise involved neither free will nor self-command. But the fact that the machines had no choice but to be virtuous struck scientists distrustful of their own powers of self-discipline as a distinct advantage. Instead of freedom of will, machines offered freedom from will--from the willful interventions that had come to be seen as the dangerous aspects of subjectivity. Machines were ignorant of theory and incapable of speculation: so much the better. Such excursions were the first steps down the slippery slope toward intervention. Even in their failings, machines embodied the negative ideal of noninterventionist objectivity.
Eventually, this ideal became untenable and was succeeded by trained judgment. While we often equate objectivity with science or truth, Daston and Galison argue convincingly that it is only one of many, sometimes contradictory, scientific virtues.
Objectivity is one epistemic virtue among several, not the alpha and omega of all epistemology. Objectivity is not synonymous with truth or certainty, precision or accuracy. Sometimes, as we have seen in concrete instances, objectivity can even be at odds with these: an objective image is not always an accurate one, even in the view of its proponents. Objectivity is neither inevitable nor uncontested. Indeed, juxtaposed to alternatives, it can even seem bizarre. Who knowingly prefers a blurred image marred by artifacts to a crisp, clear, uncluttered one?
Why, then, is objectivity so powerful as both ideal and practice? How did it come to eclipse or swallow up other epistemic virtues, so that "objective" is often used as a synonym for "scientific"?...
All epistemology begins in fear--fear that the world is too labyrinthine to be threaded by reason; fear that the senses are too feeble and the intellect too frail; fear that memory fades, even between adjacent steps of a mathematical demonstartion; fear that authority and convention blind; fear that God may keep secrets or demons deceive. Objectivity is a chapter in this history of intellectual fear, of errors anxiously anticipated and precautions taken. But the fear objectivity addresses is different from and deeper than the others. The threat is not external--a complex world, a mysterious God, a devious demon. Nor is it the corrigible fear of senses that can be strengthened by a telescope or microscope or memory that can be buttressed by written aids. Individual steadfastness against prevailing opinion is no help against it, because it is the individual who is suspect.
Objectivity fears subjectivity, the core self....[T]here is no getting rid of, no counterbalancing post-Kantian subjectivity. Subjectivity is the precondition for knowledge, the self who knows.
This is the reason for the ferociously reflexive character of objectivity, the will pitted against the will, the self against the self. This explains the power of objectivity, an epistemological therapy more radical than any other because the malady it treats is literally radical, the root of both knowledge and error. The paradoxical aspirations of objectivity explain both its strangeness and its stranglehold on the epistemological imagination. It is epistemology taken to the limit. Objectivity is to epistemology what extreme asceticism is to morality. Other epistemological therapies were rigorous: Plato's rejection of the senses, for example, or Descartes's radical doubt. But objectivity goes beyond rigor. The demands it makes on the knower outstrip even the most strenuous forms of self-cultivation, to the brink of self-destruction.
Reading the book, I began to understand why I've never embraced my own profession's celebration of objectivity. Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. With all due respect to C-Span, good journalism in fact requires trained judgment: about what's important, what's interesting, what's worth telling. Good journalism includes story telling and analysis, even in straight news stories and all the more in features or analytical pieces. Mistaking fairness or accuracy for "objectivity" only confuses journalists, their audiences, and their critics.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 29, 2007 • Comments
| Your Superpower Should Be Super Speed |
 You're quick witted and fast to act.
Your mind works at warp speed. From your perspective, everyone else is living in slow motion.
You get so much done, people have accused you of not sleeping.
Definitely not a couch potato, you feel a bit crazy if you're not busy doing something.
Why you would be a good superhero: You're be the first on the scene... and likely to finish the job before anyone else shows up
Your biggest problem as a superhero: Being bored by everyone else. Including other superheroes! |
What Should Your Superpower Be?
Actually, I sleep all the time, especially lately.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 28, 2007 • Comments
And why is such an ugly site so successful? Rob Walker asks the question, and it's a good one. Do the kids just like the clutter?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 28, 2007 • Comments
This puffy LAT piece on young celebrities' brand-building activism--"Many in Young Hollywood, especially actresses, are aligning themselves to social causes like never before"--just proves there's nothing new in Hollywood. Here's a parallel passage from Margaret Farrand Thorp's 1939 book America at the Movies.
Even further from the original base of glamour are two new qualities: culture and an interest in serious social problems. If a star in the 1920's dressed expensively to suit her type, drove a high-powered car, rode fearlessly, and swam well it was not at all necessary to assure the public that her Hollywood villa had a library or that she knew something of art and music; but just run through a fan magazine today:
"There is little of philosophy, psychology, matters political or sociological that Bob Montgomery has not read and studied. He is Duco-ed with the drawing-room manner. He might, superficially, seem to fit in with the Hemingways, the Noel Cowards, all the Bright Young People. But he can also hold his own with scientists, engineers, medical men, learned professors."...
Deanna Durbin is a pacifist. She showed a reporter her school history book with a paragraph which she had underlined with red pencil. "It was Nicholas Murray Butler's estimate that for the money spent on the World War every family in ten countries could have had a $2,500 house, $1,000 worth of furniture, several acres of land [and so on]. 'Isn't it dreadful?' said Deanna. 'Not so much the money, as the millions of people killed.'" Ten years ago such a statement would not have added to the glamour of a youthful star, but at least it is safely away from present conflicts.
That last line is quite the understated zinger. (Here is Time's 1939 review of the book.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 26, 2007 • Comments
Thanks to the many readers who've sent their good wishes for my recovery from breast cancer. I've now had three rounds of chemo with three more to go, one every three weeks. (Most of my hair fell out about two weeks after the first round.) On the whole, the treatments haven't been as traumatic as I feared. Thanks to drugs to prevent nausea and boost white blood cell production, I haven't suffered the two worst side effects of chemo: nausea and immunosuppression. Mostly I've just been exhausted for the first week or so after each round.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 26, 2007 • Comments