Mere retinal art Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity. Architecture of our time often appears as mere retinal art. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses A set of potential photographs architectureimagesadvertisingpsychology
Designer + Developer Workflow An Article by Dan Mall danmall.me The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy. The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this: “Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.” Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us? collaborationmakingholismadvertisingcreativity
Hacking is the opposite of marketing An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com One of my favorite definitions of “hacking” is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraft’s red bricks to create a calculator in the game. The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan you’ll use to make omelettes, and you’ll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: it’s you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends. All sorts of ways to use the machineIn ways you didn't anticipateStretching the product toolsadvertisingcreativityutility
Home Star An Article by Geoff Manaugh bldgblog.com I am a sucker for stories in which seeds of cosmic revelation are found hidden inside everyday materials, especially when those materials are architectural in form. In this case, it was “the imprint of a rare solar storm” that left traces in the rings of trees cut into logs by Vikings and used to build cabins 1,000 years ago on the Atlantic coast of Canada. …While there is obviously more to say about the science behind this discovery—all of which you can read here—what interests me is simply the idea that astral events, cosmic storms, stellar weather, electromagnetic pulses from space, whatever you want to imagine, leave traces all around us. That in the depths of our buildings, in our walls and floors, even in the wooden dowels of mass-produced furniture, there can be evidence of immensely powerful and beautiful things, and I would like to remember to look for that again. It’s been a miserable couple of years. melancholytime