An ode to ‘09

December 27th, 2009

Two thousand and nine, I wrote you a rhyme,
To reminisce of a year passing by:

Oceans crossed, hemispheres swapped,
Adventures and mishaps started and stopped,
Soul searching to discover in fact nothing was lost,
‘Twas a rolling stone that began to gather some moss.

To consider that little cash was compiled,
Even tho’ many a project clogged my hard drive,
Is a testament certainly the economy’s lividity,
Equally as much as this designer’s naivety.

Still, that being said, new ground was broken
On ideas and ventures newly awoken
Some writing, some editing and a touch of graphics,
Made up for the fact that I failed mathematics.

Hugh’s Wolverine should’ve gone unseen,
That actor is pushing his luck,
If you thought in Australia he was such a big failure,
You missed another X-men film that sucked.

Politics played an unfinished symphony,
As we witnessed the height of systematized apathy,
All the world’s leaders in Copenhagen converged,
And Earth is now further from being preserved.

In retrospect, I must reflect,
That a year of transformation is done,
Two thousand and ten must now begin,
Battles to be fought and walls to be won.

As I climb out of limbo, I look through the window
Of optimistic momentum approaching crescendo,
This much is sure; change comes without warning,
So the second star to the right please, and onwards til’ morning.

-Leon Fitzpatrick

——————-

NewGarde Home

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Are you watching closely?

September 30th, 2009

“The audience knows the truth; the world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. If you can fool them, even for a second, you can make them wonder.” - The Prestige

Film has a pretty significant impact on my life and creativity, as does music. There are some movies that I’ve watched and re-watched more times than I can remember. This is often for different reasons; a movie like The Matrix for example was the right film at the right time and combined all the right elements to make it something perfect for multiple viewings. The other films in my top 5 list that keep The Matrix company are The Insider, A Bittersweet Life, Le Samouraï, and last but not least The Prestige. One of my favorite Chris Nolan films, The Prestige embodied everything that makes a great film great. It’s also deceptively complex. There is a slowly unveiled twist that is fully revealed at the end, but there are so many more elements at play that are only noticeable when watching the film a second or third time…as the first line of dialogue “are you watching closely?” suggests, you do have to be paying attention. It’s nice when you look back at something you experienced and enjoyed at a surface level and discover another detail or layer of meaning; in truth many poignant life experiences are at first easily disregarded and it’s only in retrospect that you discover their real value.

Beyond this, I’ve recently been looking a little more closely at the objects, music and movies that I resonate with. The significance of The Prestige is multi-layered. Nikola Tesla’s involvement in the story (portrayed with a kick-ass cameo by David Bowie) made me look a little more closely into the nature of how technology is viewed today. If we looked at our technologically advanced (but often socially regressive) society with a true sense of wonder then we may find a better connection with that very technology and question where it comes from; in terms of energy, raw materials and so on.

There is a definite element of illusion when it comes to products and services we surround ourselves with. Many of these things make a big hurrah while simply disguising their slight-of-hand, and the bigger the corporation the more skilled the act. Take an iPhone for example, not an uncommon product by any stretch of the imagination, and something that has made leaps and strides in terms of redefining what a cell phone is. The product in this instance is not the important part, at least to most people. Proof of this is provided simply by the fact that the first version was advertised by what it did on screen, not what it looked like, and that Apple managed to segue from a heavy, machined aluminum casing to a glossy plastic one without the average customer really caring. The illusion here is that everything the phone does tells us we’re in the future; a seamless world where there’s an app for everything imaginable, e-mails that can be sent as easily as text messages, and immediate access to every song we’ve ever listened to. Obviously the hardware involved to power this is complex, being that it is essentially a pocket computer, but that’s probably everyone’s last concern. It shouldn’t be. There are many horror stories about off-shore manufacturing, Nike had huge issues with this in the past and was perhaps disproportionately crucified, they were guilty of turning a blind eye but in fact a huge number of companies were guilty of far worse and still are. The tricky part is that Nike doesn’t make anything, and neither does Apple. They are not manufacturers. They like so many others go through suppliers in China and this is where the whole thing becomes blurry, because a supplier can say something or show a pretty picture about their social and environmental standards but do something entirely different. Recently a worker at Foxconn, a massive supplier who produces products for Apple and numerous other electronics companies, committed suicide over the loss of an iPhone prototype. Serious business. It is ultimately up to the company who puts the brand on the final product to be at peace with how the product was made and where the materials came from. But as in the case of conflict diamonds, a consumer’s bedazzlement over something shiny will oft outweigh concern about its origins and therein the fault is mutual. If you think comparing blood diamonds to cell phone manufacturing is a stretch, consider that much of the precious ore that is refined and included into circuit boards in most cell phones comes from places like the Congo at the cost of human rights abuses and exploitation of resources.

This isn’t a shot at Apple in particular, and it’s hard to criticize something that allows me to sit here and write this. The point is that if you are easily dazzled by the ethereal abilities of your phone, computer or even car, take a minute to find out what it’s made of and where it came from. When you power one of these things up the lights come on and the show begins, but what’s really happening under there? Was that product glued together on a production line somewhere, was the plastic chrome plated to look like metal and were the imperfections painted over?

BMW’s recent “Vision Efficient Dynamics Plug-In Hybrid” (needs more words) was supposed to be a look to the future of automotive design but it was simply smoke and mirrors masking up a relatively straightforward idea. Neon lighting and surfaces near impossible to be practically manufactured, it’s hard to call it a concept car. Shouldn’t a concept be about how you build something better instead of fooling people into thinking we’re a couple of years from flying cars? Blue sky and out-of-the-box thinking is detrimental to moving forward and in order to do this we must be very open minded, but this open-mindedness I think should be applied holistically. Start to finish. From the sketch to the shelf.

Corporations will continue to pull rabbits out of their hats, it’s what keeps them in business. You may wonder where the rabbit came from but you also may not care, and the rabbit probably has no opinion either way. But the future requires us to watch a little more closely, to question the illusion, but also to find that sense of wonder that is curious and critical at the same time.

“Now you’re looking for the secret – but you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be…….fooled.” - The Prestige

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The New City

August 29th, 2009

newcity

Brisbane seems to occupy a rift in time and space for me. It’s hard to describe a place where I was born in but didn’t really grow up, and a place that I call home yet it’s without any friends…(as for family members we’re increasingly peppered between Australia, the UK and the unknown). This distant sense of familiarity is due to the fact that Brisbane has been a back-to-zero point for some 20-odd years now, sort of like going to get the oil changed every few thousand miles or pushing that little ‘reset’ button that you sometimes forget is even there.

It’s hard to describe a home that isn’t a home. There’s no bedroom with relics of a childhood past, since when I wasn’t moving countries or cities, it was suburbs or houses. The most comfort I’ve retained is a collection of comics that have survived in the garage, the prized of which are a stack Calvin and Hobbes that get even better each time I read them. It’s probably why I love those scenes in movies where the protagonist returns after many years away, and pulls a dusty cover off some super-cool car and spends time getting it running again. That re-visitation of the familiar in order to make new always seems appealing.

Brisbane is a place that suits re-visitation. Coming back once a year during U.S. vacations made all the changes that the city has gone through over the last 10 years immediately apparent. What was once a large town started to feel more like a city. During the last 5 years it’s simply exploded, with construction cranes creating their own industrial skyline while commercial and residential buildings shoot up left and right. Billions of dollars have and are being spent on simply making things better…cut to Detroit (where I went to college) where millions are spent on simply trying to stop the city falling to pieces. The contrast couldn’t be clearer. In fact, I don’t know many other places in the world so dedicated to beautification and improvement. In truth Brisbane does have the largest singular city council in the world and that’s why it’s so well looked after. Cafes, restaurants, parklands, bikeways, galleries and even ferris wheels appear so quickly you easily forget what they replaced. All this progress isn’t without it’s architectural atrocities, much of this new development seems to have been designed with a crayola set the day before building started, but I’ll leave that argument for another time.

So my relationship with Brisbane is ever-changing. I come back and it slowly becomes familiar, I leave and return again to something quite different. Repeat. I change in between and it does too. This constant state of flux means there’s always something unexpected to find even if the hospital I was born in is only a few miles away… I suppose there’s a kind of co-dependence as I search for the meaning of home within a place that’s home by default. Yet I don’t expect to find an answer here anytime soon. Incidentally the last place that felt like any kind of home was none other than Detroit. Irrespective of all it’s decay and desolation it was where I was fully immersed in design school and dug down to the bone to find out what I was capable of; a city where the new was akin to a flower managing to grow out of a fissure in the sidewalk.

Brisbane is indeed the New City, one who’s future is still being written and whose occupants share the same optimism that abounds wildly in the lucky country of Australia. It and I will probably continue our long-distance relationship a while longer as we try and figure out we can offer each other. Yet with a special someone, friends and a business trying to get off its feet in Los Angeles, stuff in a storage locker in Chicago, friends in Detroit, Cincinnati and New York and family in Brisbane, Canberra, and the UK it would be hard to end this on a “home is where the heart is” type addage. If only it were that simple.

—-

“Now the future seems a fine thing – so bright that it is blinding/ It can seem your destiny’s so tight that it is binding/ But put these new eyes in, kid, and see the world unwinding/ Take the time to see the sights in – there’s nothing to be frightened of…” – The Herd, Pearl.

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The New Rōnin

August 19th, 2009

waveman

The rōnin of feudal Japan were a class of warriors, once samurai, who through some circumstance had lost their master. In those times this would usually require immediate ritual suicide and those who decided not to end their lives immediately were scoffed at by other samurai and became outcasts. The simple fact was that many rōnin became guns for hire, doing what it took to survive, which was seen as a dishonorable existence. It’s an interesting point that many of the romanticisms of the lone gunmen of the wild west actually lend themselves more to stories about the rōnin than anything else. Even in film many a western can be traced back to Kurosawa’s samurai films, particularly The Seven Samurai which was of course later remade by John Sturges as the The Magnificent Seven.

The appeal was this: Imagine a highly disciplined, highly trained, intelligent and resourceful warrior who answered to no one; a lone swordsman who as a hired bodyguard or mercenary could very well be unstoppable. There are stories of rōnin having ‘disagreements’ and thusly taking on 3-4 other fighters at a time, for whom things didn’t end well and limbs were lost. Miyamoto Musashi was also once a disgraced rōnin but lived to become the greatest swordsman of all time and author of the highly influential The Book of Five Rings. Had he committed hara-kiri as expected this of course would never have happened.

It came as a surprise then, when reading certain samurai texts years ago that I came upon the definition of rōnin. It means “wave man”…as in “one who is tossed around on the waves of life.” The samurai class had always held an appeal but reading this brought it home. It meant being able to embrace chaos when nothing but yourself was your balancing center, accepting the unexpected and having the resolution to act when necessary. For me it meant being ok with not having a sure footing, or home, as long as I was continuing to cultivate myself.

Now that my career has changed gears I have a new perspective on what rōnin means for the new age. With a shift in paradigms, the phenomenon of ‘involuntary entrepreneurship’ and a developing trend of lighter, decentralized businesses and independent ventures, the new rōnin has navigated through the old system, sharpened their skills and developed themselves, and have relinquished their former master…be it a corporation, manager or supervisor. Instead of outcasts they are The Newgarde; the people to aspire to, and in a sense fear because they are multi-talented, tapped in, and outnumbered but surely not outgunned.

Be it by choice or circumstance, don’t be afraid to step off what appears to be solid footing and onto the waves, you may find them more stable than you think.

—-

“No matter what it is, there is nothing that cannot be done. If one manifests the determination, they can move heaven and earth as they please. Moving heaven and earth without putting forth effort is simply a matter of concentration.” – Hagakure


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COP15.

August 16th, 2009

COP15

In December 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen to discuss the future of our role in climate change. I only learned of this 6 months ago and was eager to know more, and at the same time I’d just finished reading Sir Richard Branson’s Business Stripped Bare (fantastic) and took note of his focus on environmental issues. Upon his advice (from the book, not from him personally unfortunately) I picked up and read Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers and have now started on James Lovelock’s Gaia. If you’re even slightly interested in climate change and whether you believe it or not (if not consider this an invitation to f**k off) then I couldn’t recommend The Weather Makers more, it’s truly an amazing book. It puts the technicality of the issue into perspective, in a clear and concise manner without having to dumb it down. Even with some truly heartbreaking statistics Flannery still manages to end the book on a positive note which I actually found surprising. More surprising however, was that he only touched upon the summit in Copenhagen (known as COP15) a few times. Being that this is (perhaps unwisely) being hailed as the ‘new Kyoto’ I would have thought more emphasis would have been placed on its importance. A few months on, I’m beginning to get a clearer picture as to why.

This realization came to a crescendo as I left my position at Motorola, much of which had been focused on eco design and what I felt was a necessary paradigm shift on the way products were designed and manufactured. In the end it was a drop in a pond and involved much tire spinning, but in retrospect you can’t expect people to do something because it’s the right thing to do. Ok sure you can, but not in business. There has to be an angle. While I think eco design is a pretty valid angle, and far deeper than it’s superficial coating, it has to be communicated in the appropriate terms.

As the road to Copenhagen shortens I learn more and more that there’s some serious sh** going down between governments, investors, politicians, UN dignitaries, entrepreneurs, and scientists to name a few. There’s serious amounts of money at stake, jobs both at risk and new ones waiting to be created, and reputations ready to be made or broken. As we get closer to a so-called resolution, many are starting to back away from the possibility that a decision will actually be reached in December, and many still are starting to call for a postponement entirely. While some may throw their hands in the air and go into pessimism mode so they can start whining on how f–ed up it all is, a postponed resolution may actually be completely necessary. If this really is the last stand for mankind, then better to take the extra time to do it properly than to rush in half-assed.

Much of this insight is owed to my brother Conan who is currently smack in the middle of this whole process co-directing and filming a documentary on the subject to be released next year. I’ve certainly re-assessed how I look at climate change and much of the frivolity has started to fall away. As a product designer I’ve spent many years trying to find a way to redeem myself and what I do as more than a perpetuation of wasteful consumerism. Buying eco products, hybrids, low energy light bulbs and recycled shopping bags is great, but that’s literally the very least anyone can do. The situation we are faced with requires active, not passive behaviour and I believe an almost anarchical uprising is necessary shake people and bureaucracies out of apathy. This is where design can serve a good purpose. If design is a signal of intent, it should be used to simply, effectively and powerfully convey information and spark enthusiasm in people. We see this all the time but it’s often used to try and get us to buy something.

So I created the above poster and others like it in order to put Copenhagen into more understandable terms. It’s easy to be bored senseless by people in suits rattling off pages and pages of statistics which is quite often the case at environmental summits. What’s really happening is a throw down on a global scale, in the hallways and alleys, between people with serious agendas. The process is not at all what you think it is. Like them we either need to weigh in, to make a choice between whether or not we want to be involved or stand on the sidelines and watch it happen.

At the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Kevin Conrad, Special Envoy & Ambassador for Climate Change for Papa New Guinea became known as ‘the mouse that roared’ for delivering a single yet infinitely powerful sentence to the those at the conference, after the Bush administration had continually barred progress;  “I would ask the United States: we ask for your leadership, but if for some reason you’re not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us; please, get out of the way.”

Enough said.

—-

And didn’t you know it’s all combustible/ We got born-again Greens just because it’s tax-deductible/ I’m optimistic but the toxicity is bouyant/ And now you lift a finger in response but just to point. – The Herd, Emergency.

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The Cross or The Sword continued…

August 15th, 2009

vanhelsing

Unfortunately the whole Van Helsing thing was a little ruined by that movie a few years ago, and I thought it was Hugh Jackman’s worst movie, ever, until I saw Australia. And Wolverine.

To carry on from the previous post, and due to an overwhelming response (just one from Marc actually) I’m pursuing the cross to start off with as brand of sorts. But I’m not discounting the sword either. Actually all I really wanted to do was the little photoshop job above…there I said it. But, keep an eye out because I think this chain of thought has some legs.

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The Cross or The Sword.

August 11th, 2009

cross&sword2

If I track back much of the work I’ve done to date, it’s always revolved around a brand. If there was no brand for a particular project I’d then create one. If one already existed, I’d do my best to understand it and then take it somewhere different without disrupting its roots. Brands are a tricky thing, because a singular name or logo can trigger a sudden memory or experience with just one product that you came in contact with or owned. That might work for a company if everything they’ve ever made has been successful, well designed, reliable, responsible and so on, but I think it could just as easily be a double-edged sword.

Looking at ideas as a product and The NewGarde as a brand, it makes sense to develop something to make it recognizable. After 5 minutes of sketching around I stumbled upon two possibilities based on the same configuration. At first I thought I’d need to choose between the two but realized there’d be value in both. The Cross or The Sword…Faith or Fight. There’s no gray area, and the two are seemingly opposites but are at the same time complimentary. They both embody The NewGarde is about.

It would be easy to get into an idealistic discussion, or rant, about the correlation between religion and war, but in all honesty that’s too easy and I’ll keep those opinions to myself for now. Instead its about the removal of the grayness, fence sitting, the beige and bureaucratic ways…simplified into a choice. You can move forward in today’s world by having faith, riding the wave and accepting things are the way they are. Like water off a duck’s back you can remain pious and humble in the face of all the negativity and adversity. The way of the sword on the other hand requires outward effort, courage, leadership and immediate action. As different as these two ways are they are also inseparable. The person of faith, like the fighter, must get where they are through devotion and self-cultivation. They both exude the same qualities but express them differently.

Perhaps this is too cerebral a way to develop a reason behind design. I say do whatever works and put meaning into whatever you do, whether or not others will see it. Whatever the case, don’t be afraid to choose.

—-

“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” – Bruce Lee

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What Would Tesla Do?

August 9th, 2009

WWTD

Ok, so that’s David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla in Chris Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige (a movie worth watching more than once)…but you get the idea.

July 10th saw the birthday of one of the most influential inventors of the 20th Century, someone who’s contribution to science and technology is still reverberating to this very day. Most of what we hear about Nikola Tesla is in regards his revolutionary alternating current, which outdid Edison’s direct current technology in so many ways. The tragedy is that much of Tesla’s forward thinking was trounced, bough out, pirated and suppressed by people and companies with more money and influence than a moral compass…the same behavior which has kept the world dependent on fossil fuels for so long.

Tesla’s wizardry, and it was just that, pushed the boundaries of science into the realm of pure magic. What I mean by this is that something like electricity that is now so forgettable and mundane, was once a thing of wonder and possibility. Now we simply flick a switch and expect computers to boot up, rooms to be bathed in light and freezers to be kept cold. This detachment and lack of curiosity is most certainly linked to the series of environmental calamities we are now faced with. If when we plugged an iPod in to charge we could see the dirty, grossly inefficient coal factory spewing black dust into the air that was supplying the power, we would start to think a little differently about our ‘modern’ society.

Tesla himself saw much of this coming. He knew that energy was the driving factor behind progress, but he also knew the issues that this progress would create. Some profound insights can be drawn from his essay The Problem of Increasing Human Energy…not least of which are his calculations on the potential of solar energy.

“Besides fuel, there is abundant material from which we might eventually derive power, but whatever our resources of primary energy may be in the future, we must, to be rational, obtain it without consumption of any material.  A far better way to obtain power would be to avail ourselves of the sun’s rays, which beat the earth incessantly and supply energy at a maximum rate of over four million horsepower per square mile.”

How might things have progressed differently in the past 109 years since this was written, if even a fraction this thinking had been applied in an industrial capacity? Creating energy without consuming resources seems to be a relatively recent realization, at least within the common consciousness, and we can again thank the corporations, conglomerates and governments that have helped to keep this sort of thing off the table for so long in the interest of profit margins and business-as-usual.

The reason for creating The NewGarde is certainly about massive change, and the ousting of the old ways. What I’ve learned from Tesla’s triumphs and tragedies is that to do or say something different can scare people enough to talk you out of it, or do whatever it takes to knock you down a few pegs even under the guise of friendly advice. As Tesla himself said:

“We are the result of ages of continuous adaptation, and we cannot radically change without unforeseen and, in all probability, disastrous consequences.”

Those disastrous consequences may not be what you think. They’ll be disastrous to the people carrying on with a business-as-usual attitude, and who are so far stuck in the old ways that they either cannot or will not change. Like the dinosaurs, they can’t see the meteor that’s about to hit. For people like you and me it means there’ll be an increasing number of chances to do good things, even if those things aren’t immediately apparent. So What Would Tesla Do?

—–

It’s not what Nikola Tesla woulda done/ And he’s not nearly as crazy as claimed by some/ Or Laszlo Biro and his ballpoint pen/ How he dreamt of being mentioned with the likes of them. - Urthboy, Lightbulbs.

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About The NewGarde

August 3rd, 2009

n3wgardpost1

This is an increasingly interesting time to be a creative person. It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities out there, as well as the knowledge that you no longer need to sit in a cubicle, in an office, in a building somewhere and drink the corporate kool-aid. While that’s a liberating thought for some it’s also a scary prospect for others; no safety net, predictability, comfort…all the things that come with a bi-weekly paycheck. Even freelance work still requires answering to someone else no matter how much heart and soul you may put into a project and how much it feels like your own.

In the publishing world there’s a few ways to get your work materialized. You can go through the archaic channel of finding a publisher, who will pay you barely anything, most likely severely edit your work while still barely paying you anything, and then release the book at their own leisure with as much or little publicity as they deem fit. The other option is to write your own work at your own pace the way you want it, then try and sell it for a large lump sum. The third option; self publish, where you become the judge, jury and exporter of your own work. It’s amazing what you can do yourself and it’s equally amazing how clunky, slow and outdated the normal ways of doing things are. Everything is now completely decentralized and any ‘legacy’ industry that relies more on historical clout than providing an effective service or product is now on the endangered species list, they just may not know it. Yet. I use publishing as an example because it’s in the family, but I believe it relates very well to the state of so many of the Creative Industries such as Design.

Back to the point. Now is the changing of the Old Guard. There’s certainly a common consciousness developing, a distaste with the way things are but not an immediate sense of what the solution is.

“Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life; that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

Watch this space.

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