Summer isn't really summer without the Tour de France on the radio. And Radio Tour de France isn't really radio without Jaques Chapel. His commentary is legendary in the Netherlands. He IS the voice of Radio Tour de France. Or I should say 'was'. Jaques Chapel died today, one day before the Tour 2008 starts tomorrow. It'll be weird listening to the radio and not hearing him, I'll miss him so much. Her's to you Jaques. Thank you.
[click to enlarge, sorry about that, couldn't get it to go bigger than this in the post]
One my most beloved professors ever, prof Paul Hoftijzer, once told me 'Everything is interesting if you're interested'. And you know what? He's right (well, of course he would be, he is one of the smartest guys I've ever met and one of the best bookhistorians). Totally right. Everything IS interesting if you take an interest.
Yesterday I went to the second edition of Interesting, the 2008 installment. (If you want a full run down of who was one and who talked about what, check out the Technorati listings of blogposts here and here or Wordpress tags here, and see photos here). And it's my duty, as someone who attended last year's installment too, to say that it wasn't as good as last year's. Actually, now that I've availed myself of my duty, I can secretly admit that this year was every bit as interesting as last year's and I yet again had a blast. Where and when else will you learn all you wanted to know and much more about toilets, why horses get scared by crisp packets, what the links between graphic design and music are, find out what zoetropes are and fall in love with them (see Jim Le Fevre's stuff here), see an impromptu 35-person recorder orchestra perform, why lego is brilliant, and why Winston Churchill was loveable. And tons more that I can't remember now but that was equally stunning and touching and brilliant and unexpected. And I loved Steve's presentation on what specifically it is that generalists do, a topic close to my heart (see here). The world can't be all bad if days like this happen!
Special hello goes out to Amelia, who made sure I didn't hide in the corner the whole day. It was weird having my online world collide with my real world (having lots of that lately, colliding worlds), weird and wonderful. Must make that happen more.
You know how they say you should never meet your childhood heros when
you're all grown up because they will disappoint? They have a point.
Except, that is, if you're hero is Bruce Springsteen. In which case
that theory is utter bollocks.
I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen in 1985, lying on my tummy on my aunt and uncle's bed, watching MTV on their telly in the bedroom (what a luxury, a telly in the bedroom!). We didn't have cable then, so watching MTV on a TV in a bedroom was the height of sophistication for me. And there he was. Bruce. In all his glory. I'm pretty sure my knowledge of English was pretty non-existent then, so I can't have known what 'Dancing in the Dark' was all about but that didn't matter at all. The first ever CD I bought was the Live 1975-1985 box set (80 guilders, which was a lot of money then for me), and I would listen to it on our family stereo (I didn't have my own CD player then) with these huge headphones on. Later on, I traced him back to his first albums and loved him even more. But always from a distance. It never occurred to me I could actually go and see him, live, doing a concert. Until this past xmas then all of a sudden I realised this is one childhood dream I can make come true.
So this past Wednesday, I boarded a plane, went to Amsterdam and saw the Boss in action. And boy, was it good. I didn't want the night to end or Bruce & the E Street band to stop playing. He was awesome. You could tell he was having a great time and he worked his butt off to give us a good time too. The whole band did. Better than I could have imagined. Here's to childhood dreams and making 'em come true.
I love it when a plan comes together. A few weeks ago, at the Innovation Edge 08 conference, I ran into Gabriele, LBS MBA2009 (and a few other 009s), of I want to shadow Steve Jobs-blog fame. Before I knew it, the idea was born in my head to try and do a bit of rapid prototyping of our own and bring together bschool and dschool for a networking event. I roped in two of my studygroup mates from dschool, the wonderful Helena and Julea, and together we started making a plan, picked a date and set the ball rolling (well, that ball was kept rolling by Gabriele, Helena and Julea, I must admit I tried my hand at delegating on this one ;-) And this past Thursday, the two worlds collided and we had ourselves a blast! I think about 35 people showed up (including a special guest, Idris Mootee, who blogged about it here) and I think it went well.
When people ask me about the diffferences between bschool and dschool, it's so easy to fall into cliches. And some of them are true. There are bschool people wedded to their Excel spreadsheet. And there are designers with not a commercial bone in their body. But they are extremes, and I'm finding that there are a lot more similarities than differences. The problem as I see it tends to lie in language (it is like speaking two different languagees, bschool speak and dschool lingo) and perceptions, both in large part due to the way we are educated to see the world. Once you bridge those, beautiful things happen. And I think they happened last Thursday. I had a blast and thank Gabriele, Helena and Julea. Awesome job! Here's to having some more of these events this autumn.
PS The countdown is on, 3 more days and then I'm off to A'dam to see Bruce Springsteen, and I can't wait!
So how often do you pick up a call on your mobile and the first question the other person asks is 'where are you?'?
Why do messages sent from a Blackberry always have that line at the bottom 'This was sent from a Blackberry'?
Location, location, location. It's all about location. But it isn't anymore sometimes. After ranting at a friend of mine on the topic on how stupid AND brilliant it is that every Blackberry message has that ‘sent from a BB’ tacked at the end is, he said ‘well, it indicates that I’m on the move, but still replying to email’. That got me thinking. Does it matter to me, sender of said message, that he, receiver of message, is on the move, or firmly wedged at his desk at work? Nope. Not in the slightest. Either you’re available and pick up and reply to your messages, or you’re not. And really, it doesn’t matter where you are. Location is so 1995!*
*except for when you’re buying a house obviously. That set of houses on the photo are on Hampstead Heath.
I am
an MBA
a design student
but not a designer (or am I?)
a brand strategist
a project manager
a lady geek
a blogger
a writer
an ex tech-consultant
an ex management consultant
an alumna
And that's without even going into the personal labels I stick to myself (or get stuck on me). Labels make it easy to talk to people. "I'm an MBA from LBS" seems to open some doors or at least explain in a concise way what I am. "I'm a postgrad at Central St Martin's" usually opens other doors (weird how you say MBA from LBS but not MA from CSM). And sometimes even mentioning you're a blogger works magic! But at the same time, these labels make me feel uneasy sometimes, especially when others refer to them (or when I do) in a way that excludes another one. I feel like that a lot when it comes to business suits versus designers/creatives. Somehow there's this perception that that's an either/or situation. Either you're a suit, and bureacratic and a management-speak spouting, tailored suit wearing MBA, or you're a woolly creative, dressed in all black and sporting blackrimmed glasses, talking about negative space. I'm a bit lost I think. Where do I fit in? I haven't worn a suit in years, and gave up glasses about 8 years ago. Is being both a suit and a designer a compromise that is the lowest common denominator of both and thus a bad thing. Or does it mean I can do both, and both reasonably well I hope, and that's a good thing?
Interesting to see that this labelling happens on all sides of the fence. MBAs think designers are as weird as designers think MBAs are aliens. So maybe that's what I am. Weird AND and alien!
You know the drill. Been busy. Extra busy. Ultra busy. Insanely busy. With work, and school and life. And everything.
But that doesn't explain why I haven't written in a while here. I'm always busy. Somehow, this medium wasn't the right one for getting my thoughts out of my head. Don't know why. And don't know if it will be in future. Suspect it might be. Actually, I'm pretty sure it will be. But not quite sure when yet.
So, if you're still interested, hang in there. I say that out loud, as much to you as well as to me. Hang in there. I'll be back. With something more substantial than this. Because 'I'm sorry I haven't written in a while' posts are just lame. I know.
You know when you're working on something and all of a sudden you see it all around you? Well, that's happening to me now. For MADS we're working on a project about technology and the way it arranges the world / how people experience the world. Quite a broad topic. As you might have guessed, if you say 'tech', I say 'web', so that's where I've taken my research. How do people use the web to structure their life? And to experience it?
And what do you know, all of a sudden I am reading about the internet and what people use it for (see here, for a Universal McCann Social Media Tracker study (pdf) on the internet worldwide, found at Marketingfacts), and having conversations with people at work about it (I find it decidedly odd that there are people that have iPhones but are too scared of setting up a delicious account!).
I admit, I'm quite the geek-girl, and use quite a lot of online tools* and am always amazed when other people don't use them. Or don't know about them. This is how I order my online existence, and hence, my online world. I read my email, scan 5 or 6 newspapers, have about 530 RSS feeds (although I only manage to keep active track of about 100 or so). What I'm curious about is what you guys do/use online? How many applications do you use and why do you use these? Which ones can't you live without? Yep, that is a call for a little audience participation.
* my most frequently used web2.0 tools: yahoo mail (x3), delicious, facebook, bloglines, tumblr (x2), flickr, typepad, linkedin, backpackit, last.fm and am starting to use friendfeed. Have killed all other social / business networking sites. And have set up my own homepage. *end geek alert*
Every Friday, round about 4 pm, work at our offices stops for about 20 minutes, and we have our Friday Afternoon Tea and Cake Break. It's an institution. Well, it's on its way to becoming an institution. See, our offices are a 5 minute walk from Borough Market so cakes are in easy supply. Couple that with a strong belief on my side that work isn't all about work, et voila, Friday Cake Break was born. We make a nice cuppa, have a piece of cake (every week a different one) and chat. About everything under the sun, except for work. A colleague recently asked why I was so obsessed by cakes. I'm not. Don't get me wrong, I love a nice piece of cake as much as the next girl, but it's Friday Cake Break is not about the cake. Yet it couldn't work without the cake. But it soooo not about the cake. It's about making work more human and dare I say it, more fun.
So what am I trying to say? Work should be more fun. It should be about interacting with human beings, who have their own pet peeves and hobby horses. It should on occasion be silly, sad, fun and dramatic. When did we start separating work and life? I shudder when people ask if I am any different at work than I am outside it. Ehm. No. Decidedly not. I tried that for a while in my twenties, it made me frightfully unhappy and I think also crappier at my work. I can't and won't turn myself off between 9am and 6pm. And I don't think anyone should. There is a difference between colleagues and friends, between clients and buddies, and my behaviour takes that into account, but I am the same person. I have good days and bad, and love to laugh. And stop every now and then, have a nice cuppa and piece of cake and talk about what movies are good, or what books, or who's good on Idols (although I must admit, I don't have a TV, so when the conversation rolls that way, I listen more than I speak... actually I should do more of that in general, listen more than speak).
It's all about the cake. But it's never about the cake.
about jargon. It gets a bad rap from a lot of people (who hasn't in their life played a little bullshit bingo? I know I have. Sometimes still do. If you don't, check this out), saying that it obscures the meaning of what you're trying to say, or makes you sound like a pompous ass. And sometimes, yes, it does that. But there's also something really nice about jargon. It makes you feel like you know what you're talking about and in some cases even means you know what you're talking about.
I've been working in branding and design for a good 8 months now, and I'm slowly getting the hang of the design lingo. I know what Pantone and CMYK is, what the difference is between perfect binding and a half Canadian, and I even used 'negative space' in a sentence the other day. I'm by no means an expert yet, but I'm loving getting a hang of this, and learning the jargon is making me feel like I am really earning the salary that I'm getting at the end of each month. I hate feeling stupid, which I did a lot at the beginning of starting work here. I had no idea about anything design related. But slowly and surely I'm catching up. I'm starting to know what questions to ask. And boy, does that feel good.
So excuse me whilst I throw around a few more designer-lingo-words, honest, I'm not trying to show off, but I'm enjoying finally getting the hang of them.
The title of this post, and the inspiration for it, was shamelessly ripped by me from this article in today's Observer. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. The article asks several artists about life-changing encounters with books, music or art. The ephiphany-kind-of-life-changing. We've all been there I think (have we? Are there people out there that have never had one?). Something hits you. A book, a quote, a song, a piece of art. And somehow, life just isn't the same after it.
Epiphany, besides just being a beautiful word, is such a beautiful concept too. A moment of clarity. Of divine (and I use that in the loosest sense of the word, any religion will do here) inspiration. I've been thinking a lot about it recently. When I wrote about careers a while back, it shot through my head that many of the choices I made were either random, or the result of an epiphany. And epiphany came back to tickle me this weekend, as I was thinking about an assignment for MADS which has us dissect why we want to do the course.
The best example of epiphany in my life so far was the decision I made for my undergraduate degree. I had gone to different university open days at uni's up and down the country, looking at History, American Studies, Chinese, English. I decided to follow my fascination with the US, enroll in English at Nijmegen uni for my basic first two years (way back when we still had a propadeuse, now long replaced with a BA/MA system) and then move on to American Studies. Done and dusted, decision taken by the official government deadline of December 1st of 1994, the year before I started my degree and I started to prep to go to Nijmegen. Until one day in April I received a promotional booklet from another uni. Opened it (hey, I am an info junkie, I can't help myself), saw an article on Book & Publishing Studies, turned red in the face and showed it to my mum. 'Mum, that's it, that's what I want to do.' Bless her heart, my mum took it in her stride and said 'OK, dear, go ahead and do it then.' I changed universities, scrambled to find a place to live and set off to this uni to do a course (again preceded by a propedeuse and second year in English) that I had no real clue about beyond that I HAD to do it. There's just no way I couldn't. There's also no way I could explain why I knew and why I wanted to do it beyond it being the coolest thing ever. I had no idea what practical use it would have and wasn't worried or phased in the least by that.
Come to think about it, the choice for LBS was pretty much similar. I had no real understanding why I wanted it, or what exactly it was I was going to be doing (sssshhht, don't tell the admissions people that). I just knew I had to do it. And knew it pretty much instantly. And same for MADS, how could I NOT do it? I must admit though, that at the time when I am hit by these bolts of lightening, I have a hard time articulating how I know or what I know or why it matters so much. I have given up asking 'why?', or no, that's not true. I still ask 'why?', but now know that I might not get an answer. But heck, at least life is full of fun surprises this way! Here's to epiphany. May you and I have lots of it in the years to come.
Think about this:
'Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it. But where is “away”? Of course, “away” doesn't really exist. “Away” has gone away.' (Cradle to Cradle)
Don't throw it away. There is no away. [seen on a painting at London Art Fair, can't remember what the artist name was]
I think this was one of the quotes that most impressed me from a book I recently read called Cradle to Cradle
The book really got me thinking about sustainability and the environment and that kinda jazz. And that automatically leads to feeling guilty and bad. We know we're doing the wrong thing, but I don't want to be told what I'm doing wrong constantly. That's what I think from a marketing perspective is the biggest problem with all things green: they make me feel bad. Guilty. And that ain't making me wanting to grab my purse. Not really.
In the book, the authors phrase it like this:
'Instead of providing an inspiring and exciting vision for change, conventional environmental approaches focus on what NOT to do... Like our ancestors, we may react automatically, with terror and guilt, and we may look for ways to purge ourselves -- which the eco-efficiency movement provides in abundance, with its exhortations to produce and consume less by minimizing, avoiding, reducing and sacrificing... The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero 'ecological footprint'. As long as human beings are regarded as bad 'zero' is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the BEST humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the 'be less bad' approach: a failure of the imagination.' (Cradle to Cradle)
Hurrah. Less bad is a failure of the imagination. Less bad is dead. Let's go for good. I love good. Good makes me feel good. It makes me want to buy it, sell it, flog it, advertise it, engage with it, and share it.
One of the ideas I liked best in the book was the idea of products as a service:
'Instead of assuming that all products are to be bought, owned, and disposed of by “consumers”, products containing valuable technical nutrients - cars, televisions, carpeting, computers, and refrigerators for example - would be reconceived as services for people to enjoy. In this scenario customers (a more apt term for the users of these products) would effectively purchase the service of such a product for a defined user period.' (Cradle to Cradle)
Wow, so how cool is this? You don't buy a washing machine as a product, but as a service. In 5 years time I will return it to the manufacturer who will take it apart and make new products from it. Now THAT is an idea you can sell. Marketers, innovators, CEO's of the world: here's a disruptive business model. Right there. Think of car sharing services such as Zipcar or Streetcar. Or the Velib scheme in Paris. Products are dead. Long live the product as a service.
And finally, to close, here's what the Cradle to Cradle guys say (and they are so much more eloquent than I am):
'Should manufactures or existing products feel guilty about their complicity in this heretofore destructive agenda? Yes. No. It doesn't matter. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Negligence is described as doing the same thing over and over even though you know it's dangerous, stupid or wrong. Now that we know, it's time for a change. Negligence starts tomorrow.'
[edit 15/03: just found a TED talk by one of the authors of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough, check it out here.]
So, am I turning into a morose old lady? That thought has been wandering through the vast expanses of my brain over the past week. Ehm. I'd like to think not. Yes, I on occasion write angry impassioned blogposts when I think organisations are saying or doing stupid stuff. But there's also a lot in this world that makes me very very happy. And maybe it's time I remind myself of that. And since the best way to do that is to write and force myself to click 'save', you'll be a witness. So this is about what makes me insanely happy right now:
Yep, it is what it looks like. An old TV. But not just any old TV. It's a 1950s (I think) Philips. Look at how beautiful this is! It's a work of art. Those lines, that shape, the four buttons at the bottom, the little legs. And for the first time in almost 3 years, I'll have a TV again. Never mind that it's analogue, has no power cord and is currently stored in my parents' attic. I don't actually want to watch TV on it anyway. What am I going to do with it and why did I buy it? I have no clue. Yet. I have no clue yet. I had a gut feeling about this. I want it. And now I'll rationalize my way into why. I might make a nice fishbowl. A colleague at work suggested making it into a mini-bar. And it'll go nicely with the two lovely Gispen armchairs I picked up at an auction last year. My new TV/fishbowl/object d'art/minibar.
[edit to add: just saw that this is my 400th blogpost. That calls for a little celebration!]
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