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Edward Burtynsky at Flowers East

Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale colour photographs document the many facets of nature as it is transformed through human industry. Exquisitely detailed and exactly rendered, Burtynsky’s images strike an intricate balance between a sombre reportage and a powerfully seductive aesthetic. His various series, including shipbreaking yards, urban mines, quarries and industrial refineries, reflect the dilemma between man’s desire for prosperity, and the suffering we exact on the environment.

Born in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1955, Burtynsky graduated from Ryerson Polytechnical University in Toronto with a B.A. in Photographic Arts. He was awarded the inaugural TED Prize in 2004, honouring individuals who raise awareness of life in a global context to inspire positive change. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in August 2006, a centrepiece of Canada’s Honours System, which recognises a lifetime of outstanding achievement. Burtynsky’s photographs are included in the collections of fifteen major museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the V&A in London.

Text from Flowers East
Images from Edward Burtynsky

Purpose webmag

“The subjects explored are broad and relevant: “chronicles of the ordinary”, “Africa seen by its photographers”, “environment”, “social body”, “memory”, “margins and frontiers”, “childhood"…

purpose is a meeting-place for known and unknown artists who wish to compare and contrast their visions of the world.

Accompanied by an original soundtrack created by composers with varied perspectives, each issue is also a multimedia experience.

The concept and editing of purpose are realized by Paul Demare (art director), Gilles Raynaldy (photographer), founders of the webmag, and Francesca Alberti (art historian).”

http://www.purpose.fr/

Helvetica Hegemony

What emerges is a fascinating account of the process of standardisation in complex public systems.

These attempts began with unsolicited attempts by graphic designers in the 50’s to propose the standardisation of information. It was only later that Helvetica came to represent the face of that standardisation.

“It’s a big job. But for the sake of the subway itself and for the sake of the city it serves and for the people of that city it must be done soon.”
George Salomon, Appleton, Parsons & Co, “Out of the Labyrinth: A plea and a plan for improved passenger information in the New York subways.”

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/the-mostly-true-story-of-helvetica-and-the-new-york-city-subway?pff=2

Insightful IDEO interview

The (2006?) IDEO team is Alan South, Head of Service Innovation; Mat Hunter, Head of Consumer Experience Design; Ingelise Nielsen, Head of Marketing Communications and Brand consultant Alice Huang. The 2006 interview highlights a number of useful insights about their approach to working with clients and the role of the agency within client organisations.

One thing that stuck out for me is the idea of “open-source innovation” which seemed to apply to the philosophy in IDEO of teaching clients to work the way they do and trusting that the agency will be needed for truly sticky problems and greater strategic value.

Another was their strong case for ‘generative research’. They argue forcefully for qualitative research as inspirational. They highlight the need for analysis and design interpretation to bring insights to life as ideas. And they argue for partnership, not combat, with quantitative data. Mat Hunter summarises these positions as possibility and risk. He says, “The point is that our intuitive thinking, our qualitative approach is very good for imagining new possibilities, but managing risks you must bring in analysis, statistics and data.”

Ekaterina and her company have a number of other interesting publications available at their website, their organisation operates in Russia and Asia.

A Short (Economist) History of Modern Finance

Tour Bus Ethnography

Image: A snapshot of today in Western European (liberal media!) culture.

In this post he deals primarily with some of his techniques for managing life on the road, through a kind of “mental scaffolding” for comprehending where you are (taking photos of local papers) and managing data through a very specific process and dedicated person.

The post seems to implicitly raise other issues though. He notes that in a 100 interview tour of the States, the first 4/5 days produce the most valuable insights. This is the pragmatic side of the argument. Get in, get out, keep moving. You never know the truth anyway so what counts is having a clear idea of where “truths” came from. The scaffolding is what counts, not the detail.

The other side is that the tour bus is like a moving armchair, carrying our 19th century study with all it’s preconceptions with us. Admittedly it’s a different set of preconceptions that I’m talking about here.

Somewhere in the middle lies a compromise. In the end, it hinges on the framing of ‘the field’. Concerned exclusively with the field inhabited by users of general practitioners in a particular town, your terms of reference hinge on that town and more depth is desirable. The issues are local and therefore specific, and time may be required to uncover them. If your frame of reference swings to the wider issues of medical services infrastructure, then looking at ‘instances’ of GP use can be enlightening, alongside ‘instances’ from other aspects of that eco-system. Within this eco-system perspective, it can feel like an unrealistic luxury to spend too much time in a single instance.

There’s something of Sennett’s critique of potential man in this debate. And something of a nostalgia for when the world was seen simply enough to spend a year mythologising remote cultures.

Here in the thick of it, Chipchase’s scaffolding techniques and images of traffic flows, feel like the reality of the never more global world that we inhabit and it’s perhaps a different, rather than inauthentic anthropology.

Henry Paulson’s Shell Game

He says that the US (and by extension global) financial system is suffering from 4 problems:

• The banks have toxic product no-one wants, and the lack of trust in their value is paralysing lending.
• The banks have holes in their balance sheets from bad debt.
• The economy has been running on housing bubble debt, which must now normalise.
• And finally, there are credibility problems in terms of the governments and banks that created the problems proposing the solutions.

He argues that the plan as it has now passed the US Congress addresses only the first issue ( and at cost to the State, not the banks). This is a simple argument about designing things the right way first time round. It’s also an implicit argument that that’s not even being attempted because this is a bail-out of Wall Street, with little regard for the impact to taxpayers and the incoming administration.

Image by Duncan Hull

Gnva.com Autumn/Winter 2008

I’ve just completed a redesign for the Autumn/Winter 2008 season.

It’s largely inspired by newspaper design. Lot’s of columns and blocky boxes for all the odd content that I collect and heavily dependent on imagery for visual impact.

Whilst I never claim to be a designer, I hope this refresh will pass and keep Gnva.com looking fresh through the winter.

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback!

-- edit—just added the photo, it took a while to find some changing trees.

Newsmap

It attempts to identify patterns in world news by recognizing bands of information and displaying them together, as Weskamp puts it, to “demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media”.

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm