The New Normal on LA Freeways

For the past few months (or more) I've been thinking about what many are calling "The New Normal". Just google those three words, and you'll be thrown into a surprising number of views on strategies for managing the magnitude of change that we are all (as individuals, employees, corporations and governments) experiencing.

I was imagining what this future could look like and I had an idea of what transportation could look like in Los Angeles:

Local roads will serve pedestrians, bicyclists, mopeds and, maybe, electric carts, allowing individuals to move around their neighborhood. For longer trips, cars (or whatever these vehicles are normally called in the future) could navigate on to the freeways. Once on the freeway, they would connect up magnetically to other vehicles going in the same direction (plotted through GPS) so that the travelling individual and/or group of friends could enjoy the ride and socialize, using less energy overall. Seems doable since the existing infrastructure could be used.

For me, this type of idea is exactly why I work in design and believe that design thinking can solve problems like mass transportation. More significantly, design can actually create the "New Normal". Tim Brown's blog provides useful reading, as well as his article on Strategy by Design.

Different | Same

There is nothing in any one of us that isn’t, to some degree, in all of us
- Old adage from Amartya Sen’s book Identity and Violence

I've been having a long running (rather humorous) argument with two of my best friends, who happen to be second generation Italian-Americans. The argument always begins the same way when, for whatever the occasion, one of them says, “You’re just like US!” in a genuinely sincere, inclusive, jubilant manner. “No, I’m not, I’m different!”, I reply. They obviously see the bonds that connect us as one and the same, human beings. And, I protest the lack of distinction in acknowledging our different characters (resisting any attempt to homogenize my personality).

It’s amazing how the choice of a pronoun can produce such a powerful reaction. YOU are just like US… I’M different. Where are WE the same? How are WE different?

I was reminded about this argument when I read about Jane Elliot the other day and about the experiment she conducted many years ago. The subtle rankings in the social order are probably at the heart of where I see differences between the experiences of what have composed my friends' thinking and how I have viewed the world. I enjoy the differences and have now convinced my friends that we should write a book of parallel histories so we can see how our generations have grown in similar and very different ways.

Art as Moral Action

Each year, Peter Sellars teaches a class by this title at UCLA. The lecture hall is almost always full, beginning with a circus-like energy: music resounds, people circulate around a long line of books that Peter has brought in - often students dance and at the start of the class, anyone can come in to make an announcement about a project they are working on.

For some students, the class as seen as an "easy" class because Peter leaves it up to the students to account for their actions. For others, the class has been life changing and has become the reason for their future direction in life. There are many visitors. Some, like myself, audit the class. Others, like Josh Viertel, Albie Sachs and Alice Waters, speak about their work.

Here are the notes I took during one evening:
Use image and culture to pull everyone into a new direction
Hold onto the truth - buy Gandhi's autobiography now so you'll have it when you need it.
Beauty, strength and courage...everything has meaning...look critically
Effort deepens and creates the spiritual life.
CREATE VALUE
Practice daily acts of creativity.
Remove stress and replace with productivity

And I was struck by one anecdote Josh Viertel related. Josh told the story of a Slow Food colleague who was able to meet with President Obama in which she pressed for changes in U.S. agribusiness. At the end of the 15 minute meeting, Obama asked her, "Give me a social movement, then I can make change happen." This week, we saw the result of the petitions that had been circulating inspired by Alice Waters and others for the Obama family to plant a vegetable garden at the White House when Michelle Obama broke ground for the food garden.

One thing I know how to do well

I like to fish.

Stopping in Bishop to check out the tackle
Buy Sierra Gold bait, salmon eggs, and a rapala or two
Driving up to Rock Creek Lake
Seeing the light bounce off the water and knowing that there are fish underneath
Holding the tension on the 2 pound test line, as it winds on the reel
Relearning how to tie a decent knot each year
Tying on a swivel, picking out a lure
Casting my line out
Letting it sink for just a beat and then slowly, methodically, like a small fish, or a bug, or a small frog, reeling in the line.
Feeling the quick jerk of a fish biting
Pause
And then a reaction to set the hook
Feel the pull of the fish on the hook and sensing the tension to reel it in, letting the fish play out the fight, slowly, reeling in a bit more line, until the fish has landed

time

A friend of mine (who truly functions in a completely unique frame of time) recommended this book to me years ago. Every once in awhile I open up the pages and remember my own relationship with time.

Robert Grudin writes in his book, "Time and the Art of Living"

Preface
Time is everywhere, yet eludes us. Time is so bound up in our universe and ourselves that it resists our efforts to isolate and define it. Time haunts our experience like some invisible spirit of things, some irretrievable truth. And when we try to manage our own time, setting new goals, cleaning and rearranging the little houses of our days, time gently mocks us - not so much because we lack wit as because time operates on a deeper psychological level than conscious effort can normally reach.

page 135
x.3 Anthony Trollope wrote every morning before going off to work for the postal service. His attitude toward his art was placid and workmanlike: he set himself weekly quotas in pages, and if he happened to complete a book during the course of a morning's work, he would simply begin another. His contemporary Gustave Flaubert would sit each day for hours, fuming, fretting and scribbling words and phrases, until the proper rhythms and tonalities broke surface in his mind. Then , for a relatively short period, he would write fluently and intensely. Trollope and Flaubert had little in common except that, like all successful artists, they viewed time heroically and made themselves lavish gifts of it....To sit down at your desk in the morning and know that you are taking up the work of a thousand mornings, to write knowing that tomorrow's work can redeem any imperfection in today's - these realizations produce cheer and confidence in and of themselves. Similarly, when we allow ourselves not just one or two hours, but several for productive activity, we show patience and mercy to our own minds, and they bring forth good things even on bad days.

x.4 Laughable error and profoudn discovery are born of the same freedom.

Human doing or Human being?

I just posted a youtube video of a lecture by Jon Kabat Zinn. Although it isn't the most entertaining (he sometimes talks about specific research studies and shows visual perception videos) - this lecture has some very useful thoughts about being mindful about where we are at any given moment.

I can't remember who said this to me, but I like to start my day this way: Live each day as if it was a whole lifetime. So much happens in one day.

Terry Irwin ~ posture

I was fortunate to hear Terry Irwin speak at Art Center a few weeks ago. There were many amazing parts to her talk about how she changed her life as a designer by becoming a researcher with an ecological world view of design. I interpreted three thoughts that have stayed with me:

1. As designers, all too often we are looking down. To become really effective and conscious of our place in the world, we must change our posture, and look up.

2. Think about Context over Dogma

3. Look toward the natural world as examples for human interaction and growth (the industrial revolution is history.)

Her bibliography on her website is well worth studying.

Plan B

Last year I started this blog as a complement to the class I teach called "Creative Livelihoods" aka "The Green Sheet", posting all the ideas and information that land on my desk.

I realize now that it has no static point, but follows a kind of serendipity of what I am thinking about while I work.

These days, all my senses seem moved by the amount of information I am receiving, often tossing me in multiple directions all at once. Chaos. A desire to change. A compulsion to organize - and then more chaos in the excitement of all possibilities.

I keep asking myself - will my plan be able to keep up with my sudden inspirations and concerns?

It occurred to me that that there are plenty of people who are asking other kinds of interesting questions. So I've started a new class called "Plan B: A dialogue on change and how it impacts our plans (or what to do when everything feels like it's falling apart!)"

This blog will post all that we discover while we experiment with Plan B, etc.

Enjoy the ride.

Why?

Whenever I begin to have more questions than ideas, I start to look outward. I begin to wonder what other people are doing and thinking. Lately, my questions have become a rather large and messy pile. They started to push through my mind after the Presidential election, then into the financial crisis and now, every day, I wonder why?

As I ponder, I start to research as a practical way to organize where I need to pay attention to these questions. The definition of "discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems ..." suits my process for wandering around so I can.... "harness (my) curiosity."

I sense I am breaking some habits and it's kind of fun.

"...how often I saw where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else." - Buckminster Fuller.