Business of Design: Four Start Ups

This week our Business of Design class has been asked to do a little research about four startups which will be visiting class tomorrow.

In short here is what I've learned about each and some questions which I'd like to have answered during class.

Town Squared: has a great little explanatory claymation on their homepage which went a long way to quickly explain the value they offer.  Is it the Facebook for small business?  I used to be a small business owner and being an untrained business person I had plenty of questions about what I was doing which might have been answered simply by being connected to other small business owners.  I like their idea.  They mention they are a private community and that they vet members...so the natural question is, what do you require of a member to join your community?

Share Some Style: personal style consultancy seems like a very practical thing to offer, especially in a city filled with such young money.  This is particularly interesting to me because I have a friend in Seattle working to launch the very same service.  They way I understand their website is that it serves as outreach alone.  Once I am there I would like to to serve me as more than just a contact point.  I realize in some sense they can't offer all their tips for free though I wonder; have they considered the possibility of including blogging or interactive fashion tutorials?

Skully: heads up display and smart helmut.  As a motorcyclist I would be all over this thing.  My only question is how much is this going to cost me?

Mosey: Yelp / Pinterest / Facebook for places and people? This company is perhaps the most intriguing of the 4, if only because it is the most vague as to what it is.  Though this isn't a great thing, it is allowing me to fill in the gaps with my imagination.  I have this dream that it can map itineraries based on selected points of interest...that it can curate an adventure for me...that it can connect me in a spontaneous feeling way with similar people.  But I don't understand what this company does, so what are you, Mosey?

Looking forward to seeing what answers I get and what start-up energy feels like on stage tomorrow.

Business of Design: Sitting on Your Laurels

Jules Bastien Lepage, "Le Foins" 1878 oil on canvas

As team Pape'ete we have begun the process of designing a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique commercial spaces around the world; online or from a mobile phone.

So far we have done well according to various the metrics of this class.  However, if I recall correctly, a point was made of last year's team who earned the most support at the first pitch only to go on and falter.  I think if there is one challenge my team is facing it is that there is some sensation that we can sit back and not put our all into it.  Let's call it gliding.  I should clarify however, that we are doing our work, it simply doesn't line up with the level of urgency I feel it requires.

Perhaps time in the real world has injected a healthy sense of urgency in me.  There is no sitting back without falling back.  That is just the way things are.  As I've mentioned in other posts, I worked for a small sustainable business up in Seattle.  We were constantly operating under the sense that our work directly translated into keeping the business going.  Each project landed offered increased security.  As a result I've developed some internal pattern which equates my level of urgency and attentiveness with an equal level of revenue...might be unhealthy though I don't think so.

My approach to this has been to inject this point of view into our group discussions.  I get some support for it and some pushback.  It is a fine line.  I don't want to alienate myself from the team; especially because I really admire and respect the work they do.  I think they are a really talented bunch of folks and feel lucky to be with them, though in a perfect world we would push even harder than we are.

Business of Design: Rode Trip

The process of making unfolds a sturdy mechanistic version of myself.  It's me but faster, smoother and more confident.  It’s who I prefer to be.  So making is what I want to do.  That realization came to me in my studio a year ago.  I was staring blankly at a wall, exhausted, tired and thirsty.  It was dark out and I hadn't eaten or had water since I started working that morning.  Full engagement had pulled me through an entire day without a hint of hunger or thirst.  I didn't notice until my body rose up against me. 

Unknowingly, I've been training for a career in design my entire life.    

Since my early childhood I've been living a life immersed in good design.  As an Italian-American, I come from a culture which invites beauty and practicality into everyday life.  It was all around me in my home.  My Grandfather, a machinist, had a shop in his basement.  One of my earliest memories is of him giving me a chunk of wood and a chisel.  I must have been about 6.  Together we hacked at this piece of wood to make a toy canoe.  Instead, I destroyed the thing.  However, I discovered the properties of wood.  The material was so hard to control it shocked my early mind.  It chipped and tore, resisting alteration even under razor sharp blades.  We made a mess.  It was formative.

It changed the way I saw the world.  Suddenly everything in our built environment flashed with the mystery of hidden processes; a vast history of difficult puzzles and ingenious solutions.  Everything I’ve designed and built since, in one way or another, has been a participation in and an unraveling of, that mystery.  Through a degree in sculpture and years as a contract oil painter, my overriding interest in problems and their solutions pulled me through.

After my degree, I went out into the world as sponge like as ever.  While I can say there are designers and artists who speak to me, (Charles and Ray Eames, TurrelI, Thonet, Kundig, Eli Reich, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin to name a few) I think culture has influenced me most.  So while I continued to dabble in art, I really worked to travel.  I immersed myself in language and craft and labor to live.

I lived abroad, first in Spain then Italy.  Through these places I discovered variations on all the usual objects I had grown up with.  Doors, chairs, cars and stationary all had a metric foundation which lent a slight otherworldly quality to them.  It is no great leap from the fact that design is constrained in part by a system of measurement to the notion that it is shaped by every aspect of the culture from and for which it arises.  Good designs persist when they are elegant and appropriate; economically, functionally, technologically, linguistically, ecologically, geographically, et cetera, et cetera.  

Imagine the example of porcelain pottery.  At first glance it is mundane, but it represents a design solution so robust it has echoed across millennia and geography.  These types of reverberations are all around us.  They link us to the past and help direct our future.  To be awake to them is nothing short of exhilarating.  Surely as we move through the early stages of the information age something comparable to porcelain pottery is taking a foothold now (I've read about it being called "Spime").

Like some great decongestant, global awareness has opened the airways of my mind and there is no undoing it.  I have a hard won knowledge based on life and culture which gives me a unique glimpse into the design opportunities inherent in our present moment.  This fills me with a sense of urgency to participate.  I want my very real passion for design to be included in my community.  If it isn’t there already, I want to be the one who brings it.

In July of 2013 I was still the Salvage Services Manager and Senior Estimator for Second Use Building Materials, Inc.  Daily, I was called into more Seattle homes slated for demolition or remodel.  I assessed the quality and salvageability of everything our company had found a secondary market for.  I noted every light fixture, furnishing, plumbing item, flooring system, cabinet, appliance or coat hook...ad infinitum.  It's as though I'd been researching the spectrum of our region's good and bad design throughout the past 100 years.  During my 7 years there I never stopped making things; stools, tables, knives, light fixtures, storage cabinets, sculpture and more.  Yet doing so in my off hours seemed quixotic.  Why not do it full time?

The obvious next step was to participate in a vibrant, intellectual and practical community like the CCA.  I'm here because it promised access to the tools, experience, and community which could help me span the gap between my little world of private making and the larger world of professional design.  

Business of Design: Macro Trend and Me

I think it is fair to say I have been sucked into the Environmental Movement.  I am not sure why.  I am not particularly fond of housekeeping.

Isn't that an apt analogy for environmentally conscientious action?  The main difference between actual housekeeping and ecological housekeeping being simply one of urgency.  Imagine your house laden with candles and over run by dust bunnies.  That would certainly provoke a sense of urgency in me anyway.  Like the rest of us, I have some deep reptilian synaptic structure in me which can perceive danger and provoke a survival response.  Perhaps it is that simple.  I am interested in the continuation of a good life for myself and those around me.  

Before coming to CCA I was immersed in the unusual field of Building Materials Salvage.  I worked for Second Use Building Materials out of Seattle, a national leader and innovator in the industry.  They are a for profit company and the largest no strings attached donor to Habit for Humanity.  They have been the first to leverage the web by creating the first online inventory and are working on creating online purchasing and shipping.  Each day, over 90% of the material Second Use diverts from the landfill is recorded, described, photographed and published on the web for purchase.  You really need to see the place to believe it...

It was a right livelihood; a livelihood which causes no harm.  By working there I was taking a direct role in slowing the degradation of our planet.  It provided me a wage and a tangible way to contribute to the health of our environment.  I was responsible for managing a crew of guys who would physically remove salvageable goods from residential and commercial properties slated for demolition or remodel.  But I spent the bulk of my time assessing properties for salvageable goods, securing contracts and managing the relationships associated with those contracts.

It was thoroughly engaging.  Empathy was requisite for success.  Our clients had problems which needed solving and it was my job to figure out how they could be solved while protecting the bottom lines of both Second Use and the client.  I stayed there a surprisingly long time.  If you measure it against my overarching interest in design and making, you might consider it a diversion.  Yet, in an unexpected way it became a channel for my design thinking.  I found myself increasingly fascinated by WHY our clients might or might not choose to work with us and was given the freedom to critique and tweek the model the salvage wing of the company was operating under.

I'll miss that place...

Form: Breaking One Thing, Repeatedly

At the beginning of this semester, I was instructed to find new qualities, (week after week), hidden within a roll of twine.  At certain moments the process of repeatedly achieving new insight was thoroughly opaque.  My mind wanted to believe there were no other possible ways to see this object.  I wanted to stop looking.  In some ways it reminded me of learning academic painting.  As you look into the shadow turning over the form of a persons face and then mix and apply color, it is not uncommon to miss...to get it wrong.  You can get it wrong for years before you gain stride and feel confidence.  It is tedious and exhausting.  The only thing which keeps you going is a love of the thing.

Thankfully, the demands of exploring form are different from painting.  In form studio I was not confined to translating reality with the type fidelity required in painting.  Somehow, it was more about finding as many ways to break a thing as possible.  By "breaking" I mean that both physically and semiotically.  It is simple to destroy twine physically by tearing it, disassembling it, burning it, etc..  The products from that type of breaking can be visually intriguing but are mostly predictable.  Yet, if you begin to imagine attacking its semiotics you open a seemingly endless pathway.

For example twine is soft and remarkably malleable.  Breaking the idea of malleability is a new entry to unexpected discoveries, because really I never think this way.  Twine has many more semiotic qualities to depart from than it does physical.  It is fractal, frayed, load bearing, asymmetrically durable, varied in color, contaminated (with bits of sand from somewhere), course, multi-purposeful, inanimate, flammable, wicking, etc., etc..  Each of these qualities are things to push against.

They pose new questions to explore.  Can I make twine ridged? Can it be made non-load bearing? Can it be made pure, inflammable, fine?  What is the opposite of fractal?  Can it be made into that?  Follow these ideas and you will certainly find new, sometimes compelling understanding of a form.  I think this class can be called great.  I don't mean that lightly.  I will be referencing what I learned in this class for the rest of my creative life.

Bravo, Martin Venesky for synthesizing your hard won insights into this curriculum and bravo to Scott Thorpe for instructing it well.    

Design Research: Why?

“I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.” 
― Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal

I agree with Ionesco and I think his sentiment here lines up well with something which has been put forward recently in my Design Research course.  A sequence of five whys is a strategy to get at the real meat of an interview.  Though I can't say I agree with it entirely, I'm told it should go something like this:

Me - So Jane, why do you paint?

Jane - Well I like it...it brings me pleasure 

Me - Why does it bring you pleasure?

Jane - I think it helps me to stop thinking so much

Me - Why do you think it helps with that?

Jane - Well its like my attention is demanded to be on things like color, motor control and things like this...but in real time...in the moment. 

Me - Why would that fact that your attention is on things like color and motor control be better than thinking?

Jane - It's a relief of sorts...you know? I just don't want to live constantly in a world in which I am thinking about bills or the anger I have over that little torn bit on my dryers lint trap...Thinking is overrated, I want to spend less and less time there.

Me - Why is thinking overrated? Don't we need to think?

Jane - Of course its necessary.  I just have come to believe, there is no peace there.  As I get older, I realize living a good life is not about drama and excitement.  A good life is about living peacefully.  That is what I am shooting for.  I don't need to run around and drink til I'm blind and end up in bed with some half alive frat-boy who has bad body odor and strangely dim eyes...I think I could have been a monk in another life...maybe I still could be...maybe I am a monk...Oh god...should I be painting?  I am not sure. 

Me - So is it fair to say you should stop painting to become a monk?

Jane - I'm not sure...I'm scared. 

Great! See that?  It works! (At least it seems so in creative non-fiction.)  I think it is actually a little obnoxious to push repeatedly with -why- after -why- in this manner.  Perhaps I'm slightly over confident that I can get to the gold within another persons answers without a tactic like this.  Yes, let's keep asking why, but let's not get carried away with the format, people.  I'm sure we all have some ability to continue asking -why- without actually attacking an interviewee with such annoying repetition.

Design Research: Mythical Beasts in Your Data

Margaret Atwood said "War is what happens when language fails," and I would add that after language has failed, both sides see nothing but an imaginary beast in the other.  This is true for me and it motivates my tendency towards patient decision.  It has helped me become an excellent listener.

I recall a bizarre moment in my older brother Ian's kitchen.  That day we were in the process of making our grandmother's widely loved ravioli recipe.  It's remarkable that we were in his kitchen making ravioli because, this is a guy who used to attack me on a regular basis.  He was attempting to apologize for years of the torment he put me through.  It was mostly ordinary older brother type stuff, but some of his antics were downright medieval.  It is easily the most conflicted relationship I've ever had in my life.  He told me he was sorry and that he had always just wanted to play with my little brother and I.  The only way he knew how to engage us was to physically attack us.  Almost unbelievable.  My mouth must have dropped wide open when I heard him say that.

Why decide that a person across the table holds true animosity towards you?  It is an easy illusion to believe in.  I think it is better to wait for the person behind the behavior to reveal themselves.  It can be hard to remember that many displays of aggression stem from a desire for love and acceptance.  Some people will claim that they are simply mean...that they just want to watch the world burn.  I don't buy it.  I think it is actually extremely rare for a person's character to be misanthropic at the core.  I believe there is a small frightened child inside every aggressor; one who lacks the language to understand his own emotions.  Inside my brother there is a deep human hunger for love and connection, and that's in most everyone.

In interviews we have many layers of perception to see through before we might actually be able to glimpse something real about an interviewee.  My life experience with my older brother has informed everything (as sibling relationships tend to do.)  It is how I know to wait for people to arrive.  I think this makes me an excellent interviewer.  It is not seeing through your interviewee that you are attempting to do.  It is seeing through your own preconceptions...it is seeing beyond the mythical beast so you might see the child.