Archive - February, 2009

Recycled Words

February 26, 2009 in Catalysts with 0 Comments

Will Ashford

Will Ashford's Recycled Words
“Like an archeologist I hunt for the words that speak to me with new meaning. Intuitively, one word at a time, they turn into a kind of haiku or philosophical poetry that I can call my own.

“At some unpredictable point along the way, in my mind, the images start to invent themselves. Using colored vellums, graphite and or India ink to highlight or obscure my words; I create the image of that invention. Though I strive to make each document visually engaging I find it is the words that I value most.”

—Will Ashford’s Recycled Words
(via coudal)

The No Stats All Star

February 16, 2009 in Catalysts with 0 Comments

The No Stats All Star

The No Stats All Star
This weekend’s NY Times magazine features a brilliant article by Michael Lewis that takes a look at the career of NBA forward Shane Battier, a player who on paper appears unremarkable: a low scorer with few rebounds or blocks to his name. But upon deeper investigation, by stepping outside of the normal stats and figures and looking at more abstract reports on player performance, what becomes remarkably clear is this one indisputable fact: when Battier is on the court, not only does his team play much better, but the opposing team plays much worse.

What Lewis determines through his article is that Battier is an unselfish player in a game that creates endless opportunities for selfish behaviour. He compares the game of basketball to that of baseball where, in contrast, the decision that is best for the single player is almost always best for the team. In basketball however, there is a far less defined path en route to scoring points. Decisions are made constantly fed more by ego than by strategy, more by contractual expectations than by rationale.

Battier plays a different game, one based on a sharp attention to detail, a cerebral understanding of opponents’ behavior and a strict adherence to process. His decisions on the court are not influenced by anything outside of this process. He will ask not to start if it means that he will be on court more often against the player that he most needs to guard. The blocks he makes happen before the player he is guarding raises the ball above his shoulders and therefore do not statistically count. He will work tirelessly to keep a superstar like Kobe Bryant out of his shooting zone all evening with the knowledge that when the game is over, all his work will be lost in the statistics: Bryant will still be the game’s leading scorer; but it will have taken him twice at many shots to get there.

This all got me thinking about how such a process could benefit the way that the teams that I work with interact. How many decisions are made every day in the design world for reasons outside of that strict adherence to process? How does ego or the simple need to “be billable” affect our behaviour? More importantly, how can I as an individual act unselfishly in order to improve the overall performance of my team?

Then and now…the CCTV Building in Beijing

February 9, 2009 in Catalysts with 0 Comments

CCTV Building Fire

CCTV Building Fire
“…the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism—turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.”

–Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker

CCTV Building Fire
“Word has it that the building is close to explosion. Whole thing pretty much toast, all in all.”

–@DavidFeng

“ceci c’est ne pas une canard” or, the many ducks in my daughter’s life

February 3, 2009 in Catalysts with 0 Comments

this is not a duck

this is not a duck
“Here we explore whether children can generalize in both directions. Specifically, can children apply a label learned for a real object to a picture of the object, and vice versa? Our interests were twofold. First, are there differences in infants’ generalization of a label from object to picture versus from picture to object? Second, what impact, if any, does pictorial realism have on infants’ ability to generalize between pictures and real objects?”

From a study entitled “Infants’ Generalization of Information between Picture Books and the Real World” by Megan Bloom, Patricia Ganea,. and Judy DeLoache

this is not a duck
“Doing a double take, one realizes that, of course, this is not a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe. Our philosophe is able to detect some significance in this precious banality, for does not Magritte’s statement that the painting is not a pipe disturb the very illusion of presence that ”realistic” representation pretends to effect? Perhaps the statement also curls in on itself to say, ‘This sentence is not a pipe.’ “

From Flint Schier’s Review of Michael Foucault’s “This is not a pipe” for the New York Times

this is not a duck
“In two studies, 9-month-old infants were shown a video of a series of stationary and moving objects. The infants directed the same kinds of behaviors toward objects on a video monitor as children of this age in earlier research directed toward color photographs: They hit at and attempted to grasp the items depicted on the screen. As with pictures, a decline in manual behaviors and an increase in pointing and vocalizing toward the video were found with 15- and 19-month-olds. These results support the notion that very young children must learn about the dual nature of depictions (that pictures are both objects in themselves and representations of something else) and the typical ways in which adults respond to such symbols.”

From a study entitled “Video Verité: Infants’ manual investigation of objects on video”, Sophia L. Pierroutsakos and Georgene L. Troseth

this is not a duck
“The first type of symbolic object infants and young children master is pictures. No symbols seem simpler to adults, but … infants initially find pictures perplexing. The problem stems from the duality inherent in all symbolic objects: they are real in and of themselves and, at the same time, representations of something else.”

From Mindful of Symbols, by Judy S. DeLoache, Scientific American