Tag: growth
S P A C E | ‘Maslow’s this and that’
From Wikipedia on ‘Self-Actualization’
‘Research shows that when people live lives that are different from their true nature and capabilities, they are less likely to be happy than those whose goals and lives match.’ Abraham Maslow developed a hierarchical theory of human motivation in Motivation and Personality (1954).
Maslow’s self-actualizing characteristics
- Efficient perceptions of reality. Self-actualizers are able to judge situations correctly and honestly. They are very sensitive to the fake and dishonest, and are free to see reality ‘as it is’.
- Comfortable acceptance of self, others and nature. Self-actualizers accept their own human nature with all its flaws. The shortcomings of others and the contradictions of the human condition are accepted with humor and tolerance.
- Reliant on own experiences and judgement. Independent, not reliant on culture and environment to form opinions and views.
- Spontaneous and natural. True to oneself, rather than being how others want.
- Task centering. Most of Maslow’s subjects had a mission to fulfill in life or some task or problem ‘beyond’ themselves (instead of outside of themselves) to pursue.
- Autonomy. Self-actualizers are free from reliance on external authorities or other people. They tend to be resourceful and independent.
- Continued freshness of appreciation. The self-actualizer seems to constantly renew appreciation of life’s basic goods. A sunset or a flower will be experienced as intensely time after time as it was at first. There is an “innocence of vision”, like that of an artist or child.
- Profound interpersonal relationships. The interpersonal relationships of self-actualizers are marked by deep loving bonds.
- Comfort with solitude. Despite their satisfying relationships with others, self-actualizing people value solitude and are comfortable being alone.
- Non-hostile sense of humor. This refers to the ability to laugh at oneself.
- Peak experiences. All of Maslow’s subjects reported the frequent occurrence of peak experiences (temporary moments of self-actualization). These occasions were marked by feelings of ecstasy, harmony, and deep meaning. Self-actualizers reported feeling at one with the universe, stronger and calmer than ever before, filled with light, beauty, goodness, and so forth.
- Socially compassionate. Possessing humanity.
- Few friends. Few close intimate friends rather than many surface relationships.
‘BUT CAN I DO THAT?’ Further paraphrasing from Wikipedia, there may be a common feeling that the possibility of ‘self-actualization’ is reserved for those people who have been lucky in life and don’t have to struggle for their day-to-day survival in a dead-end job. Notwithstanding, Maslow (2011) suggested that it was very much about the attitude the individual brought to his/her life that might be the crucial catalyst for where one’s life and self-growth goes. There are many examples of when people have been in basically the same circumstances, but have turned out very differently, which might indicate that attitude can have an enormous bearing upon one’s fate…
…”the aesthetic needs” which include a need for “symmetry, order, and beauty”…
Feature Photo: Dipika Kohli, Atelier S P A C E | DK in Copenhagen and Aarhus, 2015
Winter 2018-19: ‘The Work of Art’
In search of meaning
E X P L O R I N G _ T H E _ A R T
of
Human Relationship
Times, shifts, curiosity about new people and new ways of thinking, and the general crisscross of emails and vague fragments of thoughts are what we write and share about in S P A C E. Works are creative nonfiction short stories, co-created with members of Design Kompany’s team both in Phnom Penh and in the places where we are going to discover new and different voices ‘out there,’ in the field..
Where are the new and unusual perspectives, hiterto underreported or cast aside as ‘ethnic?’ Let’s go find them. Let’s write them, share them, co-create them. In S P A C E Meet us there? Introductory offer: subscribe for just $4/week.
S P A C E posts every Tuesday at 7AM USEST. When. you subscribe, you’ll get it every week by email, plus these exclusive PDF zines, too. Themes change but the idea is that we get closer to the study of what it means to look, listen, discover, hear what we are able to piece together when we make a space for quieting, and noticing, both one another, and ourselves.
Publication schedule
Into the Quiet
4 December
S P A C E | Kärsämäki, ‘ The Book of Slow Moment’
11 December
S P A C E | Oulu, ‘Kesärakkausjuttu’
Finding the stillness.
Encounters
18 December, 2018
S P A C E | Phnom Penh, ‘Angle of Incidence’
Living in Cambodia: then and now.
Companionship
1 January, 2019
S P A C E | Tampere, ‘Miia’
8 January, 2019
S P A C E | Kyoto, ‘One Moment Cafe’
Alexis Jokela’s follow-up story, set in Tampere, to Jokela’s July piece, ‘A Summer Love Story’
Mirth
15 January, 2019
S P A C E | Helsinki, ‘Coat Check’
22 January, 2019
S P A C E | Brussels, ‘The Work of Art’
A. Spaice goes to Helsinki to discover 16 random strangers and talk to them, at a once-off conversation salon on the theme, NEUROSIS. Here’s what happened.
Enchantment
5 February, 2019
S P A C E | Rovaniemi, ‘Arctic Circle”
12 February, 2019
S P A C E | Berlin, ‘Strange Geometries’
A jaunt to Lapland, unplanned and spontaneous, lands a pair of wanderers at the gateway of an unmistakably enchanted forest. Inspired by H. C. Andersen’s description in The Snow Queen of ‘Finnmark’.
Subtlety
19 February, 2019
S P A C E | Singapore, ‘The Prospect of Beauty’
26 February, 2019
S P A C E | Malmö, ‘Vakt’
What makes something beautiful? Looking with a microscope for ‘the remarkable’ in a money-obsessed island.
Calls for submission will be made through S P A C E. Subscribe to get the details.
Welcome to the party
SATURDAY AFTERNOON we hosted Arts & Letters Society at the cafe of the National Museum here in Kuala Lumpur.
Have moved over to Southeast Asia for the autumn tour to make more zines, meet more people, find new stories, and co-create works of creative nonfiction. (If that sounds like a tall order, well, maybe it is. But we’re on for the challenge.)
Why host popup salons?
I HAD GROWN tired of the usual meet ups around the places where I was living in the past. Seattle for tech events. Durham NC for the feelgood community spaces where, you know if I’m really honest, I never felt like I could be part of because me being me, I had one foot always ready to jump out the door and exit the country. See things. Go places. Meet people. Discover. Why? Because… the new. Searching and drifting, looking and listening. Managing to do this, somehow, in a wobbly way at first (2013 was difficult), but then, with growing confidence, and practice, and, hey, people who were interested in the same, and co-creating, and then, amplifying our work together because we’re moving in the same vein. Let’s do this, I’d say. Let’s play.
An art of the moment
HAVING BEEN AT IT making Atelier S P A C E for a year now (pics on instagram, zines in our store), we’re getting more practice at the ‘how’ of designing the spaces in which new and different others can find remarkable moments of connection. It’s very airy, I guess, to say it that way, but what it really looks and feels like is a cozy, fun, light and casual conversation party, and, when it’s good, you’ll see ridiculously deep moments of insightful breakthrough that occurs when we are talking together. This happens between, and this bit is important, because this is what makes it S P A C E and not a general meet up, it’s between people who haven’t ever met.
Shifting and growing.. Moving and changing. The art of noticing. The art of paying attention. Less talking. More ambient being-together. Not over-intellectualizing. Calming down. These are the shifts, of late. This fall there will be more of them, I’m convinced. But what, exactly, and how, are still open to discover. If there’s anything I learned from Finland, it’s this: we are where we are, right now, at the moment.
Everything ahead ‘depends.’ Katsotaan, ‘let’s see.’ You don’t have to know everything up front and have it all pre-defined, agendas outlined, bullet-point lists typed up to distribute.
The old style of DK (‘let’s get to the point, and make it snappy’) is morphing a little into a mellower, kinder new one (‘let’s play’). Why? We were always more about the play side of things, I think. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of that because DK turned into ‘a business,’ or ‘work,’ or ‘a consulting boutique,’ or, um.
What would you call it… ‘A job.’ A job? A job? WTF. DK is never a job. DK is DK because it’s a space for play, exploring, experimentation, discovery, co-creation, shifts, drifts, meanders, and the rest. I don’t want DK to look or feel like a job. So I’m writing this blog again, first-person, directly.
I hope you can enjoy with me the new stuff. Which, honestly, has been about stripping all the facades and getting back to exactly where I started, in 2005, right here. Blogging every day, from DK World HQ in Capitol Hill, Seattle. Telling whomever might find it interesting what my personal opinions were, back then. Embarrassing, really, when I think about it. But if it wasn’t for the blog I never would have found people like Seattle-based CE, or Durham NC’s JM, whose mentorship and patronage gave DK the boost it needed in those days to continue to evolve, to develop new programmes, and to test out some of the things that we had no idea about. I’m writing this as if it’s a big moment of reflection or some kind of wild milestone, or something, and it’s just… not that, but it… feels really good to go back to the original DK. Where we just played. A lot. Almost every day.
In real life with people we liked, going to the parlors and bars and cafes and parks and museums and theaters and otherwise ‘third places’ and designing S P A C E. Who remembers the party ‘Dazzle?’ Or ‘Sugar?’ Or ‘Pop?’ I still remember when one of our guests said she’d driven past the house, then circle back when she saw a giant plastic floor lamp, a kind of round thing that looked like a big fat flower, blaring light from the doorway. ‘I knew when I saw it that had to be the place.’ It was. It still is. Now our lamp is blaring in a different kind of way: conceptually. I know, I’m getting esoteric here again. Sorry about that. It’s really not that hard, or intellectual, or anything. We’re kind of um, just. Um. Always. I guess this makes it really not-work. But I’ll say it. We’re just having a really good time. Like a party.
Remember Primal Scream?
Remember ‘Loaded?’
Yeah.
Now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
The writing process
‘SHOW, don’t tell.’
That’s the advice writers get when we are starting to write.
I think that’s pretty marvelous advice, except, um. We’re writing. So how do you ‘show?’
Well, it’s a good thing I brought the new camera. I’m borrowing it. From BOSS. It has a bunch of cool lenses and I’m enjoying the depth of field play, for the first time in many years. I don’t have an iPhone, so I don’t take camera pics. I don’t carry the old digital camera (the one you can put in your pocket) around because that means having to bring the battery charger and remember all the parts and figure out how to load up things to the computer. Of course I don’t bring around my old Minolta X-375, because… film. And where is it, anyway? I hope it’s in some box safely tucked away in one of the many, many attics and behind-the-staircase closets of friends and relatives on another continent, where I remember seeing it last. But this new camera. Is reminding me of the old one. Except, you don’t have to advance the film. And, it doesn’t make that oh-so-satisfying shutter click sound. But there are pros. I never have to worry about running out of film. I’m not the kind of person who constantly checks the picture to see how it looks, either, so I do really stay with the subjects when I’m with them. That’s just how I am. I feel pretty strongly about paying attention to the things you photograph, which might be why I’m always complaining about people talking selfies indiscriminately here and there and everywhere, or meeting someone for two seconds and wanting to grab a picture with them. Howcome? What is the emotion there? There isn’t any. It’s not going to make an artful picture. So what is the point of making it?
STRONG OPINIONS. If you meet me in real life, you will know that I talk about this a lot. About the lack of attentiveness to relationship-building. It has to start slow. Slow and steady. I feel. For it to last. Maybe not everyone wants a thing to last. But I don’t like this insta-pic culture, and I don’t like throwaway relationships, either. I like quality. I think I’ve been blogging those three words quite a lot in public and password-protected pages, here. I do. I want that. And for quality to happen, you have to build the space so that it is welcoming, inviting, comfortable. THEN you can get intimate. You know, I feel this way about the subjects I photograph, too. It’s not always portraits of people: sometimes it’s my zines. Or art books. Sometimes it’s butterflies, and lately, it’s birch trees. Koivu.
Some news…
- There’s a two-page spread coming together for the zine, about Koivu. I’ll be sure to write about that in today’s issue of S P A C E. But that’s for the inner circles, people who are members of this community, and whose monthly subscriptions make doing this work even possible. (Thank you.)
- This week I’m writing S P A C E | Karsamaki. In July, I’ll interweave the real-time writing process with the online salon, ‘Slow Moment.’ See if you want to write with 8 of us, when you check out that link, and apply.
- I took some photos to mock things up, rapid prototyping being my favorite thing in the word. How is it going to look and feel? I need to sketch it out, quickly, to see if it’s actually worth doing. I think this one is. There were a lot of mini-tests in my first two weeks her win Finland, and I have a bunch of time before the International Zine Day event that will be the date I launch this new photozine. So I’m going to lay low, write some more, see if I can get a poem or two translated into Finnish.
This is my process. Thinking and jamming with people who are resonant with the things that are beginning to emerge. Letting go when the rapid testing shows, ‘Hey. This is a dead end.’ Getting over it. Being okay with it when your expectations fall short of the reality of a thing. Learning to enjoy the unexpected highs, like five-star cooking that appears every so often when you couldn’t possibly have imagined it, and it’s good, and what’s better, it’s warm. Friends, company. Learning, sharing. Making new kinds of books. Exploring needle and thread and improvising on bookbinding. Gathering more materials. Looking around. Walking outside. Talking to trees. Winston Churchill did that, I read once. It’s not crazy. Philosophy isn’t irrelevant, either. In fact, it’s the only thing that will get us out of this weird loop we’re in, of navel-gazing and anxiety-making, and othering, and line-drawing, boundary-making, political ensnarements, and the all around slap of ‘Really? This is the best we could do, as humanity, after all this time?’ But then I remember MB’s advice and conversations with him about this topic. Yes, this is the best it’s gotten. And it’s not all rotten. Remembering the slow moments. That’s the work, for now.
UPDATE. This is what the zine is looking like, so far. Not bad, huh? Now. Let’s get to writing. –DK
Protected: 2 July | DK’s online photography x writing workshop-salon
Atelier S P A C E || Bangkok
Atelier S P A C E is DK’s popup, zinemaking on-the-spot workshop. The idea is to gather a handful of people to meet and cocreate a short publication. A zine.
So far, DK has hosted Atelier S P A C E in: Battambang, Singapore, Penang, KL, and a few smaller cities in Malaysia. Zines from Atelier S P A C E have appeared at writers festivals in Singapore and Georgetown Penang, so far, and more appearances are set for a Finland tour in the summer.
Be a part of the international conversation.
- For the full five-day programme in Bangkok, it is THB 8000.
- Register by 5 March to confirm your spot. Get tickets here. ✨
Lifehack
LEARN DESIGN KOMPANY’s top 4 tools to uncover the answer to a very important question:
What will be your legacy?
SUMMARY. Here’s what it is. Get four top tools from our toolkit, which DK’s creative directors developed in-house over more than 10 years while working with different kinds of people and engaging with their unique learning styles. Here is what you will get. A workbook from DK with our best-of collection of 4 modules, which each give you the spreadsheets, tools, and instructions we will work through together. You’ll be able to apply what you learn right away to manage and direct your career, make better-informed decisions, and look forward to the next steps with confidence. This is our agenda:
Module 1.Self (as seen in Bangkok)
Module 2. Choices (as seen in Siem Reap)
Module 3. Flow (as seen in Malmoe)
This will be in English. It is aimed at mid-career professionals. It’s for people who are interested in doing work they really care about, work that matters, work that will leave a true legacy. ‘We’ve been working with people in Europe, N. America and Asia for 12 years, and we are ready to share the highlights of what we know works,’ says DK’s creative director, Dipika Kohli (TEDx ‘There’s Not That Much Time Left’). ‘This is a unique workshop where you can explore with others also interested in taking time to look at what work is personally important to each of us, and why.’ You’ll walk away with a 5-word ‘self-concept,’ and a professionally-worded summary statement. Useful for resumes, especially when looking to work abroad.
Register here.
Protected: Moving forwards, looking backwards
The Village II
THE VILLAGE is an online conversation salon. It’s by invitation. It’s for people whose paths we are crossing, and with whom we’d like to develop a continued correspondence. This time, themed around the idea of The Village. Together we will ask, in this 12-week sequence, ‘To which tribe do I belong?’
Mixing our experiences and backgrounds is the goal. Co-discovery and co-learning, through writing together in protected-page posts at this blog. You’ll meet people from other timezones, writing asynchronously in response to the weekly prompts. Prompts are sent Mondays at 7AM USEST. There is no need to be anywhere at any particular time, it’s all done by email. No video, no tests, no homework. Just… weekly prompts. Each one is designed to take less than 20 minutes.
Lifehack
LEARN DESIGN KOMPANY’s top 4 tools to uncover the answer to a very important question:
What will be your legacy?
Get four top tools from our toolkit, which DK’s creative directors developed in-house over more than 10 years while working with different kinds of people and engaging with their unique learning styles.
Here is what you will get. A workbook from DK with our best-of collection of 4 modules, which each give you the spreadsheets, tools, and instructions we will work through together. You’ll be able to apply what you learn right away to manage and direct your career, make better-informed decisions, and look forward to the next steps with confidence. This is our agenda:
Module 1. Starting & Self (as seen in Bangkok)
Module 2. Finding Flow (as seen in Malmoe)
Module 3. The Chart & Choices (as seen in Siem Reap)
Module 4. The Plan
This will be in English. It is aimed at mid-career professionals. It’s for people who are interested in doing work they really care about, work that matters, work that will leave a true legacy. We’ve been working with people in Europe, N. America and Asia for 12 years, and we are ready to share the highlights of what we know works. This is a unique workshop where you can explore with others also interested in taking time to look at what work is personally important to each of us, and why. You’ll walk away with a 5-word ‘self-concept,’ and a professionally-worded summary statement. Useful for resumes, especially when looking to work abroad. This is designed and hosted by Design Kompany’s Dipika Kohli (TEDx, ‘There’s Not That Much Time Left’).
Your ticket includes lunch, tea, and snacks. Lunch will be a Khmer meal, served family-style.
ABOUT DESIGN KOMPANY. DK started in 2006 in Seattle, USA, working with discerning architects, software developers, artists, and other process-oriented people to design or redesign their brand identities (Capitol Hill Chamber, Baltic Room, NW Asian Weekly). Since arriving in Phnom Penh in 2014, DK branded NUK Cafe, and took on several ad hoc projects to get people thinking more clearly about how to clarify goals so as to optimize for the right metrics. ‘Lifehack’ is part of a fall series of workshops and programmes in S P A C E, an online community that meets regularly in destinations around Asia. Find out more about that here.
FAQs
Are there ID or minimum age requirements to enter the event?
Ages 25+. Best for mid-career professionals.
What can I bring into the event?
No need to bring anything. Everything will be provided on the day.
How can I contact the organizer with any questions?
Use the form at our website to contact us.
How can I order tickets?
Register here.
Up II
‘MADE IT.’
‘What?’
‘The accountability thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘You know. Getting you to write down what you want to do this week. And then asking you if you did it.’
‘…’
‘You said you wanted that, right?’
‘That was like, half a year ago!’
‘Yeah, sorry. But. I’ve gotten some other things going that reminded me of how it’s important to check in and stuff. And so I got back into it, not because, you know, it was highly urgent or anything, it’s just that, I know how to do it, at least. I have a hunch. A minimum viable thingy. But yeah. I think this will work. Mechanically. You know. Automating, but not getting all carried away with figuring out code. I’m not a code guy, you know that.’
‘…’
‘I think sometimes people like to overdesign the tools. The tools aren’t important, though.’
‘What is?’
‘The doing.’
Protected: Lifehacking: How I figured out what I’m supposed to do
Protected: Above the cloud, below the finish
Breakfast in Cambodia
MEMBERS OF S P A C E who are in Phnom Penh will be invited to this exclusive event, a reading and conversation about life in a rapidly changing Cambodia. Meet the author of Breakfast in Cambodia, DK’s own Dipika Kohli. You’ll be able to talk about publishing, editing, and writing as well as the process of putting together a finished piece. Or just enjoy the short reading, on the day. To book your spot, just order the eBook. When you do, we’ll share the location details directly with you by email.
Order here: http://gum.co/villagereport
3.14159
THIS MORNING, it started to become clearer.
‘What?’
‘The new thing. There has to be a new thing, always.’
‘After..?’
‘N.’
‘But you’re not finished with N.’
‘No. But I don’t want to get bored… well, not bored, but do you know how hard it is to try to get 16 people to commit and showup and pay and actually really, like, you know, do it, when they don’t know who I am, whew, wow, but so cool… and it’s… stressful and taxing and takes a lot out of me, even though it is magical and rewarding and beautiful, but you know, you can’t have that kind of intensity all the time, so in the meantime, less intense but more often kinds of conversations would be cool, and so rather than trying to expend every ounce of my energy trying to make 5N happen, which, it must and it will and it has to have enough space to enjoy itself when it is ready… and yeah. Not try at least to invent other things to try in the meantime… that would be stifling, wouldn’t it? It would be… silly. To get overly attached to N. Even though yeah, I turned this whole blog into the N journey thing there, for a while. Strange.’
‘So what is the next thing?’
‘π.’
The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159. Wikipedia
This Tuesday, everything resets
FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS, we’ve been publishing a weekly eZine, S P A C E. There is a fee for this magazine. There are a very small group of subscribers. But that’s good.
I’m telling you this because we are at the verge of a new chapter, this junction of DK. It’s 2017. We started in 2006 in Seattle, as a humble LLC thinking that ‘making it’ was landing enough gigs to pay your bills. But that’s so… boring, just paying your bills. What about interestingness? Intrigue, learning, growth? Beauty. Over the years there’ve been many shifts, and this Tuesday, I press a big red reset button. Killing the mailing lists, outside of the new one. Many things. For sure. Are informing the downsizing of the ‘who I know’ database and an inward press to focus, instead, on just a handful of people with real attention, real is the important word here, real because there’s caring, and understanding, and mutual respect. No more ambient stuff. No more keeping in touch. I’m moving everything into the new box, the new S P A C E.
Happy, so far, with the way it’s been a slow cook build. Because small is beautiful. We are consistently creating conversation-sparking instances, I think, really, it’s working. We aren’t overly in touch, but we are quality in touch. We are developing conversation space that is progressing, with richness and complexity. Delving deeper than the superficial, going beyond the happy facebook post and going into places that, for better or worse, are opening us up to one another, and ourselves. The online course SELF started it, then there was THE MIRROR, THE FORUM, THE VILLAGE, and some other things that were invitation only for just a handful of people because… I felt… they might like them.
***
DK ARE STILL MAKING AND DOING. Thanks to our subscriber base, we can explore more interesting dimensions, and get to better and better ideas, which takes a lot of room and improvising and testing and… belief in the point of it all. Some of us are more interested than others in the pursuit of beauty, the search for meaning. And those are the people who DK now works for. It’s been quite a trip, discovering this. It’s been a long slow process of carefully and sometimes less than artfully letting go. Of the deadwood, that doesn’t contribute, but only takes. So Tuesday, I kill the mailing lists. I get started instead on who is newly arriving in the orientation rooms for S P A C E.
***
Who DK works for…
HERE’S WHAT’S COOL about the online programmes, to me.
‘So like how do you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Whatever you’re doing.’
‘What?’
‘Whatever it is. Does it pay the bills?’
Total stranger asks me this. Like it matters. Like anyone cares about the things I care about, and what matters to me, except me (and maybe 1-2 others whom I randomly find out of every 100 people I meet). Interesting, I thought. But I kind of just went all into it. I said, ‘You know what? You have to create your own value, now. You have to show up, and do great work. You have to deliver. This is the digital economy, now.’
***
WHAT I DIDN’T SAY: Asking me about how to make money in this field (which is what, exactly, anyway?) is not just overly personal and out of bounds, but it’s okay, I’m over these things, being a self-employed person you get this a lot, but you know, boring. It’s just… such a 1990s question. DK are not making widgets (anymore. No more brand identity designs, those process books that we would deliver, they were about the conversations… the arrivals at terribly insightful moments of ‘yes! That’s IT!’… which was the fury and the love of doing these collaborations… but when we got googled about design and identity and Seattle, people saw the images and portfolio things, I think, at first blush as products to buy off the shelf... Only our clients at DK know how much time and energy went into the early part of the process… getting to know you, designing something uniquely authentic and… well, anyway, we’re not doing them, now. Around the time we finished up NUK Cafe we said, that’s enough).
The people who subscribe to S P A C E are the people who are making it possible for us to continue to conceptualize, design, develop, test, prototype, test some more, research, understand a glimmer of something about, but not fully, and that’s okay, because we can keep at it, we can fail flat, or flatter, and then, try again… they are the people who are supporting us, in the most important way (for viability, that is): capital. I used to think that the people I wanted to keep in my inner circle were those whom I had known the longest. Those who had, in some way, been part of my most intimate conversation spaces. But I was wrong…
WHY? Well. It takes years of life to learn that you were wrong, in a big way, about something you held as basic. People I imagined would be part of my S P A C E community, the one that matters to me the very most, were… those from my past. But I was wrong. Of course they weren’t. They were… the people I was finding now… in life, the world of this place and time, where I am. Bricolaging and finding us together, expressions of moments of exchange, collected instances, is my new work, now. And I can’t cling to the past connections, I can’t hold on to every single… old tie. Were we teenagers, hanging out getting tacos or ice creams or something bad for you, as teens do? Maybe we were in the same dorm, or maybe we shared some kind of experience, like a concert or a theatre performance, or something lifechanging like… well, you have yours and I have mine, right?
Too personal to share out loud, here. As so very much other stuff is, too. Work, life, family, relationships, conversations that happen in the private rooms of dialogue that go into weird and fascinating directions. Letters. Poetry slams. These kinds of things are not high-profit, but they matter. I think. I really, really do. Which is why I’m not going to break down and get some gig in digital things I don’t understand the point of. Why would I want to market someone else’s things, when I have S P A C E to send out into the world. Why???
I still want to make conversations happen, which is why we are hosting online programmes to continue the dialogues that spark an interest. If you are on for sharing with us more, then do consider applying for something, or show up for something when it comes around in your town (next stops: Berlin, Copenhagen, Budapest, maybe). Thinking. Planning. Devising. Dreaming. Here we go. Next!
READY TO CONTINUE THIS conversation? Good.
I invite you to S P A C E!… the orientation is free… just click any of the boxes to go to the page to add your name and contact. More from there.
From new angles
THIS WEEK IN S P A C E, some sharing.
Of how we got to ‘N’…
- 1997. ‘Let’s start a design studio. I’ll set up a hotmail.’
- 1999. ‘You what? You want to hire us? Oh… Sure, yeah. I’ll do that. I have Freehand.’
- 2000. ‘Let’s move. You can work at __.’
- 2004. ‘Let’s move. I’ll work at __.’
- 2006. ‘Let’s do that design studio thing we talked about. Should we get an office? Official! Shall we get an $800 color laser printer? Yes!’
- 2007. ‘What the? People think design is Photoshop. Like, it’s the tools that matter, or something. Why? It’s not! Design isn’t about the pixels. It’s about the conversation. How good the conversation is will be a direct influencer in how strong the concept will be. Because it has to come from the person who wants to… It’s about… getting there… together, learning about the story of them, and listening… Isn’t that… obvious? No? Well, hm.’
- 2008. ‘Let’s host some conversation parties.’
- 2009. ‘This is. Interesting. But why is it so intense? Why is real life conversation so hard? Should we do this more? Should we make them into workshoppy things?’
- 2013. ‘Argh. I prefer just mini-conversations to workshoppy things. People have too many… expectations. Half the fun is exploring! Let’s forget workshops. Let’s forget design in general. Let’s focus on conversations. Of quality. Yes! Conversations of quality are getting really tough to make happen. Outside of my couple of standing dates with __ and __, I just don’t feel like things are progressing. So, hm. What should we do? Maybe go on the road. That’ll shake things up.’
- 2014. ‘I like this place. Phnom Penh. Can we stop here for a bit? I love this architecture.’
- 2015. ‘This is fun. I’m going to do this thing. ’16N’. On NORMALITY. You know, I think I’ll give it a whirl…’
- 2016. ‘Wow. That was fun. How about taking it on the road?’
- 2017. ‘How about making ‘N’ in Hanoi?…’
HELLO, there, Hanoi…
Shall we play 16N?
Protected: The stories to write, the stories to share
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