On a chilly day in December, we gathered in the TransDesign space to explore what sustainability meant to theatre artists and designers in the context of a residency program. Writing as a theatre artist myself, we were aware that this was certainly new territory and a bit of a daunting task to undertake. Beginning with our initial application to the New Challenge, we tried to envision a residency program that utilized strategic design thinking to generate a new philosophy and practice around ideas of sustainability and what that means to an artist.  Would they even be interested in bringing such an ideological, social trend into the context of their work? If so, how would they go about doing it? We posed these questions and others to a willing group of artists who were concerned about the sustainability of performance in a wider social context.

We were lucky to have a workshop group that was not only comfortable but also quite well versed in collaboration. Many work with ensembles that offer company members ample space, flexibility, and the trust to equally contribute to the process of creation. In these environments, wild ideas can take shape and grow from the ingenuity of creative collaborators. These artists, however, are also deeply curious and vigorously invested in honestly representing the current state of the industry—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Within this particular group of artists, there was a consistent interest in exploring how sustainability could be better incorporated into their practice. After all, the basic principles of sustainability are fundamental to the success of their respective theatre communities.

After kicking off the workshop with a brief warm-up exercise and introduction, we split our participants into two groups for a brainstorming exercise that focused on the possible positive and negative outcomes that incorporating sustainability into an artist residency might have on either the work created or the residency program itself. We introduced as little specificity as possible so that a full world of potential projects and complications could be imagined. We organized these into 3 central categories:  artists working within a “cocoon,” context and environment (division between artist and non-artist), and practical concerns. We, then, used these categories to generate potential projects that could be submitted to an operating residency.

In the second half of the residency program, we changed the perspective from that of the artist to that of the residency “producer.” Three teams then proposed three amazing pieces that each addressed one of the categories. In the end, we had a conceptual model of the artist and their struggles with sustainability in the industry.

Perhaps it’s too soon, or too shocking. Some may even say that it’s in bad taste. So before I begin, let me say that there are no words that could adequately describe the horror, sorrow, and anger I felt when I heard about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary. My intention in writing this post is not to offend, but rather to contribute to our discourse around such tragedies, the examination of the events that lead up to them, and how our political system can use such events as catalysts to improve our society.

We are a nation at a political crossroads. Our governmental system, which one might argue was founded on the ideals of agonism—where “democracy is a situation in which the facts, beliefs, and practices of a society are forever examined and challenged”—has devolved into a system where no politician is able to truly take a stand on any issue without jeopardizing his/her political future. Where the original meaning of the term “adversary” (“a relationship that includes disagreement and strife but that lacks a violent desire to abolish the other”) has been twisted into a notion that anyone who disagrees with your political views is an enemy and must be crushed. Our system is not working, and events such as the Sandy Hook shooting, serve as both an opportunity for change and as an example of our failings.

According to Carl DiSalvo, “The purpose of [adversarial design], is not to achieve identifiable form or instance of change but instead to prompt debate and serve as a kind of material evidence in political discourse.” No one can deny that shooting in Connecticut has sparked a great deal politically-slanted discussion. Many might disagree with my assessment, and more to the point might find this line of thinking distasteful, but I believe the shootings can and should be labeled as an act of adversarial design.

According to DiSalvo, “the purpose of [adversarial design], is not to achieve identifiable form or instance of change but instead to prompt debate and serve as a kind of material evidence in political discourse,” given the fallout from the abhorrent event that occurred two weeks ago, DiSalvo’s definition can be neatly applied. From the moment we learned that Adam Lanza shot 20 children and six adults (including his mother), the public discourse has swirled around issues related to guns (and tragically to a lesser extent on mental illness and societal cohesion, but I digress). Shortly after the shooting President Obama created a task-force on gun violence, and we have collectively as a nation been struggling with the question of who should be allowed to own guns; how gun permits should be granted; what type of guns citizens should constitutionally be allowed to own; how we can better implement our laws; and on, and on.

I acknowledge, that in design we often discuss intention, but I believe that we are missing out on opportunities for true reflection, and societal improvement, when we focus solely on events that have been designed conscientiously.  If we look at the Sandy Hook tragedy, the shooting served the most basic purpose of adversarial design as described by DiSalvo, by being an instance of confrontation which provided our politicians and our communities with the regrettable opportunity to examine the current implementation of our gun-laws and our attitudes around personal safety. You might call it tragically bad design, and you would be right. So maybe we need a word or term for instances where an event or object is created, that manifests outcomes/effects similar to those of something that has been intentionally designed. Maybe we as designers, and as a society, need to pay closer attention to these influential events as being both designed and an opportunity for a design solution. Doing so, might just help us move beyond being simply reactive to tragedies such as the one at Sandy Hook.

*All quotes attributed to Carl DiSalvo. (Carl DiSalvo, “Adversarial Design.” In Design Thinking, Design Theory, edited by Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman, 1-26. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012.)

What would Water have to say were she at the design table?

When we make plans to lay more impermeable concrete for a new street, I wonder if Water would agree. I highly doubt it. Perhaps Water might say, “People, I realize you are well meaning but think of me. I will not be able to restore the aquifers that you rely on for drinking water and irrigating your crops. You will have to install heavy construction to bring my nutrients from further and further away. Please think twice and decide differently.”

When we shifted from the Earthen Closet to the Water Closet, I wonder how Water would have weighed in. “Why use me to wash away your shit when you can use it to fertilize the earth?” she might have asked. When we take a step back, flush water toilets are quite suicidal: we are taking the most precious resource in threat of scarcity and using it to rid ourselves of a material that naturally decomposes and fertilizes soil. Indeed, the depth of our human-centered advancement, continues to nourish our unknowing of how to sustainably and abundantly live with the earth.

In case you haven’t heard, nature comes with design instructions. We simply have to study with her. I discovered the garden is a fantastic learning lab. Whole systems (soil quality, water, temperature, etc), scalar thinking (seasons, food yield, compost, etc), iterative processes (seeding, flowering, decomposing, reproducing, etc), and collaboration (plant species, pests, pollinators, etc) are all valuable lessons gained from the garden learning lab.

For all the exciting, optimistic hype surrounding human-centered design we still have a long way to go. Reeling design back in from being a puppet to capitalist interests is definitely celebrated. Expanding from products to services is fabulous. The new passion for good and self-reflection within the discipline is grand. Nonetheless, it is still humans who created global warming. It is still humans who decided to engineer nuclear energy. It is still humans who pack over 500 million tonnes of waste into landfills each year (and these numbers are dated).

It we truly want to grow into our humanity, we need to go past it. We need to seek past our own species and learn from the many other life forms we share our planet with. Pollinators, coral reefs, mycelium, forests. All of these play a tremendous practical and symbolic role in our ability to continue living. The same way Human-Centered Design recognizes the importance of designing with communities for a lasting solution, we must begin designing with the earth and other living species if we seek a sustainable future.

Permaculture offers a robust set of tools that can enable this level of designing with. As a sustainable design methodology I prefer to explain permaculture as the distillation and codification of indigenous wisdom. “The cutting edge of a 10,00 year old technology!” Brock Dolman of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center likes to proclaim. A phrase coined in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holgrem in Australia, permaculture originally referred to ‘permanent agriculture’. It has continued to evolve into a global community of practitioners with increasing numbers of urban residents receiving their Permaculture Design Certificates (PDC), a two-week fulltime intensive in permaculture design skills and strategies. The application of permaculture has also expanded, still rooted in human settlement patterns but increasingly finding application in the design of just communities and social services, also known as social permaculture.

As a framework for sustainable design, Permaculture is grounded in three core ethics: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. These values offer enough openness and cohesion for a rich diversity of practitioners and exploratory practices to nonetheless be working towards a common vision of sustainability. Based on these three ethics, permaculture is further guided by 12 design principles. They are:

1. Observe and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
5. Use and value renewable resources and services
6. Produce no waste
7. Design from patterns to details
8. Integrate rather than segregate
9. Use small and slow solutions
10. Use and value diversity
11. Use edges and value the marginal
12. Creatively use and respond to change

I received my PDC in Summer of 2010. It was a significant paradigm shift. I knew the world, socially and ecologically, was in pretty bad shape, but I had no idea just how bad a predicament we put ourselves. From agriculture to toilets, we had it all wrong. Failing to design with whole systems thinking, we put nature in the periphery and ignorantly centered ourselves. This skewed perspective dug us into a hole we are now scrambling to climb out of. Had I approached the world from a different perspective earlier, perhaps through the eyes of the Amazon Rainforest or maybe the California King Salmon, this new depth of understanding would, most likely, not have been so new.

Equally as shocking however, is how readily available solutions are. Many are still in practice around the “developing world.” Many more are being rediscovered by the industrialized world.  Hopefully we can learn from each other, innovating and reworking old technologies for new scenarios. Most importantly, I hope we find the courage to step beyond “our world” (developing or industrialized) into the greater expanse of life; de-center ourselves and in the process, more fully realize our humanity and its contributive potential to a sustainable future.

When we spoke about Julian Dibbell’s article “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society,” we spoke about the formation of virtual communities and their significance; the good and bad aspects that come along with the freedom of anonymity on the web; and the phenomenon of impactful virtual experience. But we didn’t actually talk about rape. We explored important questions about what makes a group of people a community, and the promise and limitations of the Internet as a space to escape, remake, or assert identity. We didn’t, however, explore the perceptions, definitions, or experiences of sexual violence in Dibbell’s article, or the ideas of victimization vs. agency that influenced it.

This blog post stems from our Transdisciplinary Design Seminar’s conversation, and my belief that if we are to take seriously our role as designers in shaping and reshaping our communities, we must wrestle with the concepts and practices that inform them, including sexual violence. How can we combat sexual violence through design?

A note before moving on: in this post, I look specifically at a feminist theory of sexual violence, which focuses on society’s understanding and treatment of rape (and other forms of sexual violence) as expressions of masculine power over feminine passivity and powerlessness. I will use the terms man and woman, as the conversation I cite has taken place around women’s empowerment. However, I would like to recognize here that both women and men experience instances sexual violence; and that the person in the feminine position of powerlessness is not always a woman, and the person in the masculine position of power is not always a man.

In her essay, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” Sharon Marcus argues for a radical approach to understanding and preventing rape. Marcus looks at Mary E. Hawkesworth’s perspective that rape is one of the real, clear facts of women’s lives—a view of rape that is pervasive—and finds fault in this framework. Marcus contends that Hawkesworth treats rape as a fixed reality in women’s lives, as if “rape has always already occurred and women are always either already raped or already rapable.” Marcus believes this perspective facilitates an environment that assumes men have the power to rape (and must be persuaded otherwise), and builds a language that defines women by our violability. She posits that to prevent rape, we must understand it “as a process to be analyzed and undermined as it occurs.”

Marcus’ argument is both profound and distressing. She suggests that the violence of rape is enabled by social scripts; that to prevent it, we must understand rape not as fact, but as language, subject to change; and that we must recognize women’s will, agency, and capacity for violence in the rape script.

“If we define rape as a scripted performance, we enable a gap between script and actress that can allow us to rewrite the script, perhaps by refusing to take it seriously and treating it as a farce, perhaps by resisting the physical passivity that it directs us to adopt,” Marcus argues. “We can locally interfere with [this social script] by realizing that men elaborate masculine power in relation to imagined feminine powerlessness.”

I find Marcus’ argument compelling, although controversial. It calls for a revision of the framework of sexual violence, which currently defines women as objects of violence and victims of violence. I believe this would create an environment for change. So how can we, as a society, revise the framework of sexual violence, and what role can we, as designers, assume in this effort? Furthermore, how can tools like the Internet be used to change the conversation?

To begin to answer these questions, let’s look at an example of how the conversation about sexual violence is already changing:

In her book Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Susan Brison explores the power of narrative in the aftermath of her own sexual assault. Brison finds that as she continues to retell the stories of her trauma and recovery, her narrative is not linear or orderly. It is being constantly revised; is “permanently revisable.” Brison not only recognizes her ability to revise her trauma narrative, but also the necessity of doing. The narrative adapts as different emotional aspects of trauma are experienced, and as emerging parts of life give new meaning to past experiences.

“Narrative,” Brison says, “facilitates the ability to go on by opening up possibilities for the future through retelling the stories of the past. It does this not by reestablishing the illusions of coherence of the past, control over the present, and predictability of the future, but by making it possible to carry on without these illusions.”

Brison is able to convey the multiplicity of her narrative by retelling and revising it throughout the book. Notably, in opposition to this stands her recounting of her rape during her assailant’s trial. Brison describes the difficulty of preparing for her testimony, which necessitated a recounting of her trauma as a snapshot of the experience—a story unmediated and unchanging, told from the perspective of a detached, objective observer. She says, “There was something deadening about the requirement for truth.”

In Dibbell’s recounting of the virtual sexual assault that occurred in LambdaMOO, an object-oriented multi-user dimension (MOO), he describes the tension between the facts in this virtual reality and the “real-life” facts: the sexual assault occurred in a virtual world with made up characters and through language (since this early MOO was text-based). Meanwhile, those who experienced the assaults, although no physical harm was done to them, had significant emotional reactions to the acts. What is most interesting is that the rapes in LambdaMOO were not only rooted in a language of sexual violence (assailant vs. victim), but took form entirely as language.

The trauma narrative from LambdaMOO is more obviously blurred by the virtual reality vs. “real life” facts than a physical assault, but the LambdaMOO community focused on the snapshot story in order to prosecute and punish the assailant. While this reaction mirrors that of a “real life” community, I believe platforms like MOOs have the potential to complicate and potentially break with the conventions of “real life” communities, thus opening possibilities for new ways of thinking about, understanding, and preventing sexual violence.

If we explore the blurriness of the trauma narrative, we may find other possibilities to fight back.

Hollaback, a movement to fight and end street harassment, uses a digital framework to call out instances of harassment and to ignite public conversations. Using their mobile phones, those who experience harassment can post their stories or pictures of their assailants to the ihollaback website, and others can respond by clicking an “I’ve got your back” button. Unfortunately, this framework has a conventional focus on response (instead of prevention), and promotes the existing script of women as victims. But I believe Hollaback is onto something.

Let’s look at one more example: a woman is on the subway on her way home from a late night at work. A man comes over to where she’s seated, unzips his pants, and flashes her. Instead of looking away, the woman takes a photo of the man’s penis, thus shifting his role from assailant to object.

Now, I’m not calling for crowd-sourced porn. I’m suggesting that we design to change the conversation.

Designers have already created new platforms that complicate conventional “real life” scenarios and understandings. What kind of digital framework can we design to not only encourage mass response from a community, but to facilitate intervention and prevention? How might we crowd-source an initiative that undermines the very script that facilitates sexual harassment and violence? How can we use technology—mobile phones, apps, the Internet—to shift agency and power from the assailant to the traditional victim? When designers take on these questions, I believe we will be able to combat sexual violence in new and profound ways.

I’m an electronic products fan. I immerse in pursuing the various electronic products, which provide me with a high quality, and come to pervade every aspect of my live. My room is full of computers, cellphones, flesh drivers, and tangle USBs. Those electronic products are upgrading at a speed which is unprecedented, new generations emerging constantly. I can’t resist the attraction of new electronic products, so I purchase new products to eliminate old. Then the old products accumulate in the corn pose a major headache for me ——How to deal with them in a proper way?

It does not surprise me to discover that most people keep old electronic products at home because they haven’t figured out better solution. It is a waste of resource if old electronic products don’t be recycled. Every electronic product undergoes a long procedure from design to  production to sell. It costs resources, time and people’s effort. As mentioned in the UN Environment Programme panel, “The world is already running out of cheap and quality source of some essential materials such as oil, copper and gold, which in turn need rising volumes of fuel and water to produce. ”It is enlightening us that natural resources are limited, we should undertake the due obligations of reducing consuming in this booming society.

Recently, I present my DC camera to a friend before ordering a refurbished DSLR camera. However, some people don’t like used products, the reason is that used products may have been damaged, and the appearance is unattractive. I consider the refurbished camera as a character that amends his shortcoming. I should give him another chance to accompany with consumer, and to record wonderful moments. Get down to business, as far as I know, some people sell old electronic products in second hand market. Whether the purposes for doing so, they are trying to find an appropriate way to deal with them. Whereas, selling old electronic products to untrustworthy individuals or stores is not a viable permanent solution. The electronic products that have damaged keep being sold, hence becoming an enormous risk to an unknown consumer. China Economic Net reported that a consumer spent 400RMB on a second hand cell phone that was quite cheap. Eventually he got injured because the cell phone suddenly exploded.

It is interesting to find that some people declare for protecting the environment but meanwhile, they just throw old electronic products away. Improper disposal old electronic products can’t vanish from face of the earth. They will pollute environment and damage food chains, because they include diverse chemical components such as heavy metal, which is not self-degradation. Then all the harmful elements will gradually infiltrate the soil, and eventually find their way into plants, water, animals and human beings. Therefore, if no protective measures are taken, we will not be shocked to learn that our health will be influenced by pollution.

Inspired by Think® chair, which is made of disassembled and recyclable materials, I suggest that the components of electronic products can be partly recycled. It indicates a design opportunity that chooses renewable materials instant of one-time or non-recycled. For consumers, they have resistibility to implement this recycling system, which is far-reaching and makes contribution to society. Additionally, in case second hand markets sell electronic products to consumers regardless of safety the recycling initiations have to get license

The improper disposal of old electronic products must be concern because it exerts unfavorable influence on environment, natural resource, and human health. In the long run, we need to take some down-to-earth actions.

“The imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice,) a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice,) and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined field of possibility.” (Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy)

A few summers ago, I took a one-week art history course on the Pueblo Anasazi Indians. Around fifty students and I signed up to take the class and camp out in Mesa Verde, Colorado, a place where the Anasazi Indians once called their home. The Anasazi first settled in Mesa Verde in around A.D. 550, inhabiting the area for over 700 years. The tribe built a small foundation in Mesa Verde, which eventually blossomed into a full-fledged city. Then suddenly, they disappeared. Although we may never know for sure why the Anasazi migrated from their long-established home, what they left behind gives a glimpse into the possible role collective imagination may have played.

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As Appadurai mentions in the Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, ”one man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison.” When I was camping out on the beautifully green, lush terrain, Mesa Verde seemed like a voguish utopia.  However, this place must have been an inexorable political prison of sorts for the Anasazi to leave behind everything the culture had established over the past seven-hundred years. More importantly, they would have also must have each imagined a different, though better life; an imagination which drove them to move on and abandon their environment. “The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.”

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There is much speculation on why the Anasazi Indians left Mesa Verde. The once small community that had inhabited a few small, self-constucted dwellings had developed into manipulating the entire landscape to establish a prosperous neighborhood. Cave dwellings resembled modern tiny apartment complexes, and provided a sophisticated shelter from the Colorado elements. This seemingly flourishing environment would have cultivated a probable enduring civilization dwelling. So why then, did the Anasazi suddenly migrate?

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Appadurai speaks of five dimensions of “global cultural flows,” ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. Although the efficacy of these dimensions is aimed to represent the complexity of the current global economy, one of them in particular illustrates a conceptual proposition for why the Anasazi may have abandoned Mesa Verde in A.D. 1300. Appadurai defines mediascapes as follows:

“whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them in a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which text can be formed of imagined lived, their own as well as those living in other places. These scripts can also be sets of metaphors by which people live (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) as they help to constitute narratives of the Other and protonarractives of possible lives, fantasies that could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement.”

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The Anasazi did leave behind many pieces of history from their lost civilization, including hundreds of depictions on rocks surrounding where they once lived. These are the only scripts left that express the trials and tribulations of the Anasazi civilization. Over eight-hundred years after they abandoned Mesa Verde, the stylized markings remain. These markings constitute the clearest, currently-accessible narrative of the Anasazi culture. The markings also illustrate the collective imagination of Anasazi culture, and social practices that illuminate their values, experiences, and desperations.

Images from the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”

“Hey isn’t this great, sushi in drug stores? Look at that selection. Gosh, Walgreens have really refined their taste, haven’t they?”

Every day in Ginza, Tokyo, Japan, a man gets up at 5 in the morning to refine his skills at his restaurant. To him, national holidays are a bore. Not because he doesn’t respect his country and love his family, but because it means he will be away from his work for too long. Despite making sushi for decades, he insists he has a long way to go. He knows every day holds a new opportunity to reach perfection, but is perfectly aware how impossible that achievement is.

Jiro Ono is the 85 year old hero of the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” directed by David Gelb. The chef of a 3 Michelin star restaurant (the highest number a restaurant can earn) is followed along his pursuit of art, as Jiro’s work is a true art form–a thoroughly conceptualized experience for his customers beginning well before they sit at his counter and after they leave. He speaks of making sure ingredients and their temperatures are in perfect harmony, creating a balance of flavors that elicit a unique, refreshing experience. His servings are based on what is available daily at the world-renowned Tsukiji fish market, ensuring the highest quality ingredients. The sushi version of those selections being served have been likened to listening to a concerto. The consideration of flavor, density, or delicacy of each piece compliment and build on each other and alternately slow the pace of the meal, with a bit of improvisation mixed in for fun. His restaurant is so renowned, lunch and dinner reservations must be booked a month in advance, drawing customers from all over the world just to eat at his restaurant, which sits in the basement of a Tokyo office building. Prices start at 30,000 Yen ($358.74). Despite these figures, Jiro’s aim is not money. He is a legend in his industry and a success in traditional terms because of his love and dedication to his craft.

Imitation tuna?

Equations in his line of work aren’t all as simple as dedication + creativity = sucessful results. One pivotal element that Jiro is confronted with on a daily basis is dwindling supplies. Many varieties of seafood he has offered in the past are becoming scarcer or worse, non-existent by the year. It’s a serious issue since sushi popularity has grown throughout the US and Europe since the mid 1980′s, compounded heavily by the proliferation of convenience-store sushi. Beyond being an insult to Jiro’s craft, it’s an irresponsible move on the part of the middle men who supply fish to these producers. This is a two-fold issue. On one hand the fish supply is low for those who depend on it for income, like Jiro. The second and more systemic issue is that this depletion deprives the ability to carry out their intended life-cycles, failing to contribute to the natural recycling system the oceans require, to stabilize that larger living system.

The practice of overfishing views fish of all types and ages suitable to be caught and sold, increasing their fishing as supply’s dwindle, following the adage that where there is enough money, resources will be obtained. Further, In Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins describe that once in the well-oiled machine of industry, if a product becomes scarce or too expensive to produce, a cheaper substitute will be made. This is very possible for synthetic or chemically produced items. But for products or species such as tuna, there will never be a replacement. When exactly will industries realize this impending fact?

Jiro and the authors of Natural Capitalism would argue that businesses need to be much more conscious of this situation, treating living systems not as an endless supply of resources to meet their economic needs, but to conduct business “as if living systems mattered” (pg.9, Natural Capitalism), and therefore had a conscious value placed on them before being over-fished out of existence, even back-tracking on the choice to offer sushi in convenience-store format, knowing that people as well as tuna are and will be affected by these thoughtless practices. “The climate debate is a public issue in which the assets at risk are not specific resources, like oil, fish or timber, but a life-supporting system” (pg.4). I would argue that no matter how small the specific resource, they greatly impact the larger life-supporting systems. We should be just as conscious of preserving them as their larger counterparts, as as this story outlines. No resource is too small to overlook.

Without sounding like the person who stands in front of the bulldozer with her sign, on her soapbox nonetheless, I am calling for those reading this blog to be conscious of what resources they interact with, where they purchase their products and to track the cycle of the consequences as far as possible, so as to be critical in your everyday and long-term actions. Oh, and Jiro would be much appreciative as well.

Arigatou gozaimasu. (Thank you very much).

I have six nieces and nephews.  Yes, I said six.  The oldest is five and the youngest is just four months.  Around Christmas time I start to panic.  I struggle with what gifts to buy them. I become anxious about giving the right gift and buy nothing until, well this year like last year, it’s already the 14^th of December, and I still haven’t purchased one present or even thought about what to buy them.  It’s hard to find a gift that will make me look cool, not bankrupt me, and not be the same gift as anyone else gives them. Heaven help me it is so boring they toss it aside immediately making it a complete waste of time and money spent.

“Even private giving of presents has degenerated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, skeptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort.” – Theodor Adorno

Ok, I get it.  This Adorno passage is speaking to me; the gift-giver with a “prescribed budget” who wants to expend the “least possible effort” and still be cool auntie Siri.  I’m not sure it’s possible.  The four month old will probably get nothing.  Don’t judge me. Do you remember gifts you got when you were four months old?  He’s cool he won’t care.  The two 2 year olds are on the cusp of really loving a gift, so it’s gotten a little tricky.  In the end, I will probably buy them gifts that are more for their parents.  I’m thinking bubble bath.

Then there are the five, four, and three year olds. Last year I bought them clothes.  Very considered clothes from the Union Square Christmas Market made by a local artisan.  After purchasing all these super cute t-shirts, I showed them to a friend, proud of what I had accomplished who in response added, “that is so lame, you’re going to be that aunt.”  And he was right.  My sister-in-law sent me a picture on Christmas Day of my niece in her t-shirt with this look on her face, unimpressed to say the least.

Adorno goes on to say, “Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver.  It means choosing, expending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction.”

So, I’ve been thinking of a way to apply what I’ve learned on the Transdiciplinary Design course in the past few months to my anxious gift giving process.  What if my three eldest nieces and nephews, the ones I need to buy real gifts for, became part of the process of their own gifts?  I wouldn’t just give them a gift we could create something together.  I thought about giving them a challenge, writing them a fictitious letter saying all the artwork in the Modern Museum of Manhattan had been stolen and we were desperate for new art work.  If they could send their best artwork as soon as possible we would be so grateful and send with the letter a toolkit of art supplies and self-address stamped envelopes.  I also thought about how this would continue throughout the year; slightly scaling to bigger projects that would have incentives.  I could send them other challenges or games, sending them back and forth though the post.  We could co-design a story together, they could pick the parameters, a person, place and thing, send it to me and I would design a story that they could than illustrate send it back to me and I could get it published.

Gift giving in more of a Transdiciplinary way brings me richer ideas.  The gift receiver and I will become part of the gift together throughout the year.   And our co-designed Christmas gift for me as well.

A network is simply a set of interconnecting nodes; exchanges are made through connections between the nodes and these two elements form a larger system. There are computer networks like the internet, supply networks like the food supply chain into New York, social networks like your groups of friends, and so on. Networks are often over simplified by only discussing their structure; for example, if you have a decentralised and interconnected network it is naturally resilient. The structure is; of course, an important factor; however, there are at least two other factors to be considered; resources and bandwidth.

Resources are the reason a network exists whether the resource is digital traffic, vegetables or friendship; networks are required to transport them. Bandwidth is the networks ability to move these resources around. If the connections have a poor bandwidth, like a too narrow highway, traffic starts backing up and resources move slowly.

A strong network necessitates good resource flow so every node gets the resources it requires. Networks also need to be efficient so resources are not wasted and resilient so that in times of crisis they can be rebuilt. Structure affects all these factors, but so too do bandwidth and resources and when taken into account, a perverse relationship develops between network resilience and network efficiency: A network can never be both efficient and resilient.

Resilience is the extent to which a network can survive a moment of crisis. Survival requires all nodes in a network to have adequate access to essential resources, even in times of crisis. To ensure the system has enough resources for a range of eventualities, stockpiles of resources need to be amassed; resilience requires excess. These stocks can be relatively small for the day-to-day fluctuations in resource flow; but, more rare emergency situations require contingency plans. Emergency plans usually involve drawing on external resources, these resources depend on building connections just in time and a suppliers ability to supply them exactly when they are required. This is risky, if the supplier is low on resources they may refuse access to them or if connections cannot be made quickly or are low bandwidth then resources might not be received fast enough. The alternative is to build up stocks of spare resources within your own network; this is expensive. Idle resources are wasted resources, especially as most resources degrade with time and cannot be stored indefinitely.

The recent gas crisis here in New York, after hurricane Sandy, is a good example of a network breaking down. The oil refinery in New Jersey was damaged by salt water; this is the equivalent of a resource-creating node being removed from the network. The gas stations are the other nodes in this network and between them they had some gas in storage, this is the excess resource; unfortunately New York has lots of cars. This is not a resilient network; there was one centralised node, which provided all the resources to the other nodes. When it was removed, the network had to rely on its reserves, which quickly ran out. The emergency connections in place had too small a bandwidth to be of any use. Trucks filled up with gas in Philadelphia and drove to New York, allowing for emergency vehicles and essential traffic to keep moving but the rest of New York’s traffic came to a stop.

The network diagram below shows more than just connections and structure, it also defines bandwidth, emergency connections and resource load. Clearly New York’s gas network is not resilient, it is a centralised network with all its resources stored and created in one location, and it was this node that was removed. Reliable contingencies had been put into place but their bandwidth was too narrow. Some spare resources were stockpiled but not enough to cover the network for the required amount of time to repair the lost node. As a result New York’s gas network failed.

What could be done to build a more resilient network? It, of course, would be better to build three individual refineries in three different locations, operated independently. This way if one is removed a third less damage is done to the network. So why wasn’t this done? The answer; efficiency.

By centralising and scaling up efficiency is increased; only one control room is needed per refinery, no matter how big it is. Three plants separate plants require three separate control rooms. These control rooms would need to be staffed and individually fitted out with a range of equipment. All of these are costly resources that would have to be purchased and maintained. As can be seen, when looked at from a resource perspective it makes much more sense to centralise the refinery.

To get resilience you have to sacrifice efficiency. To build efficiency you have to sacrifice resilience. Restaurants and supermarkets over order food stocks to ensure resilience and waste vast amounts of produce, New York builds an efficient gas distribution system, to save money, and runs out of gas when the system is stressed. When building new systems, a designer must, through correct distribution of resources, emergency connections and allocation of bandwidth, attempt to balance the universal and intractable tension between resilience and efficiency.

There are many skills and talents that are required to become a good designer, especially paying detailed attention. For many years, my habitual process of assuring quality has kept my clients happy with projects I was assigned to. However, an issue came about when I began my study at Parsons, as I started cutting back on work to concentrate on my studies full time. A manager of one of my former clients informed my supervisor that they weren’t happy with the work being received. They have specifically asked for my involvement in their project again. Knowing that people currently assigned to the project are as capable if not more than I am, I began wondering about the causality of this problem.

Where do I even begin? Can my company keep this client if I get involved on this project again? I looked through the old notes from work and found a few I jotted down when I was involved in what I will now refer to as the troubled project. These documents were drafts of proposed internal quality assurance processes, and quick checklists that I was going to pass to junior designers that joined my team back then. But on second thought, quality assurance processes and training alone could not have prevented this problem. The biggest problem was that no one in the company knew that the client was frustrated with the service they were paying for until the management got involved. I had to step back to look at the whole picture of the situation, and try to look at this issue from a different angle. I was enlightened with the possibility that maybe the underlying issue was poor communication. Giving it some more thought, and discussing this issue with my peers I was confident that this was, in fact, a result of poor communication with the client. We have been putting bandages to temporarily fix the symptoms, but failed to look at the underlying cause of those symptoms. I decided to expand my research to come up with a solution that will put an end to this systematic communication problem.

In the book Art of Managing Social Networks, Kinam Kim puts emphasis on the importance of attentive listening. He also points out that what moves human hearts are not big things but a series of small things that you can only find out when strong communication channels are established between two parties.  We have to recognize that on the other side of the e-mail, there’s a person sitting there. In a service business, it is surprising to see how much can be accomplished through a “Give & Give” mentality instead of a traditional “Give & Take” paradigm. To retain and continue a relationship with clients, it is vital to recognize that we need a system in place to ensure all our previous efforts are not lost, no matter who fills the position in the future. Documenting all client communication is a must, and we need to look into Customer Relationship Management practices to transform communication documents into tangible organizational assets.

By drawing out a system diagram on our customer communication feedback scenario, we will be able to find out what we are doing well, and what we are doing wrong, and how we can improve to better serve our clients and their goals. Using this information we can praise our designers for a job well done and managers can get involved early on with potential problems while issues are still small and manageable. To transform our design communication better with the client, we can create a system to collect quick feedback on the areas we want to measure performances in, such as customer service, work quality, timelines, etc. Also, we can document the conversations not only through email but separate notes that can be used by future staff to better serve the client.

Throughout the semester, conducting research, thinking in different ways than before, having difficult discussions, and doing nerve-wrecking presentations at times made me feel overwhelmed. I can see a strand of light now. Without realizing, my paradigms have shifted. I started to see things differently, look at things in patterns, try to think in systems and not overlook even small problems.