Almost Perfect

As I embark on a new laser cutting project, I’m diving deep into patterns, tessellations, and polyhedrons. These are patterns of perfection, one unit exactly like the next. But the deeper I go into this research, the more I’m drawn to the theme of “almost perfect.” It’s popping up everywhere. In nature there is pattern and variation like in kernels on an ear of corn or in leaves on a branch. They’re all the same, but they are slightly different from one another. And in music there is the concept of “theme and variation.” The theme is the perfect and variation the imperfect. Alone they are flat little pieces but, paired, theme and variation create something rich, complex, and whole.

Christopher Alexander’s 1977 book, A Pattern Language, is filled with imperfect patterns that help us to design better buildings, towns, and cities. “Something Roughly in the Middle” is a pattern from that book. The pattern doesn’t discard symmetry but asks us to play with it a bit. When designing a courtyard, he says, place a sculpture or a fountain roughly in the middle. Resist the urge to place it dead center.

Like I said, this theme is everywhere. I even heard super-model Tyra Banks tell one of her contestants on America’s Next Top Model, ‘You want your photos to be perfect, but not quite perfect. Because that’s what makes a great photo, when something is slightly off.’

So thank you, universe, for pointing out the almost perfect. And let me ask you dear readers, what are your favorite examples of “almost perfect”?

RIT Locavore Potluck

In September, the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) issued a call for "Locavore Potlucks" across New York State. Since my students and I are working with organic farmers this quarter, we rose to that challenge and hosted a local-food potluck in RIT Innovation Center on 9/29. We had a great turn out, about 30 people, and enjoyed some incredible dishes made from locally grown ingredients. We also had some great conversation with folks from the RIT community and the Rochester food economy about how best to support the people at the heart of the local food movement, our small-to-mid size organic farmers. Support them not only with consumer dollars, but with innovations like developing affordable tools for tillage and food processing and better channels for sales and distribution of their products.

The potluck turned out to be a great venue for knowledge sharing and it was also a lot of fun. We're planning to do it again on January 17 from 12-2 so save the date and keep your eye on the RIT events calendar for details. (Worried that you won't be able to find local food in January? Never fear, just sign up for a winter share from the Good Food Collective).

The photos above were taken by one of my very talented students, Blayke Morrow. To see more of her work, go to this link: http://www.blaykemorrow.com/galleries/

First Garlic of the Year

from Monroe Ave Farmers' Market. And mint and peas and berries and flowers. Joy!

He rode off in many different directions

The other night we went to hear poet John Ashbery speak at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) and were delighted by his easy sense of humor. Ashbery was born in Rochester and even took painting lessons in the basement at MAG when his high school in Sodus, NY cut their art program. He seemed very relaxed and at home in the gallery (though he's probably always like that).

The talk coincided with a beautiful piece of experimental book-making that's currently on view in the museum - a setting of Ashbery's poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. When asked about how he felt about the popularity of that poem he gave a great response that I'll try to capture here:

'It's funny how popular this poem is because it's not necessarily the direction I went in. In fact, I've tried to go in many directions, like, He saddled his horse and rode off in many directions.'

Two things I love about this statement: 1. The manner in which he delivered it, with the craft of a poet and the lightness of an improv comedian and 2. The confidence with which he is able to speak about such a non-traditional approach to life.

Everywhere we go we are told to choose one thing to do and to learn to do it well. We're discouraged from working on many things at once lest we confuse our audience with too much noise. Yet, if we are a curious about life's mysteries, then we are bound to pursue many different directions simultaneously. So thank you, John Ashbery, for spontaneously crafting this silly and meaningful line. I'm glad we were there to hear it.

Working on a book this summer

so my blog may be a little quiet. I'll try to share a picture every now and then because this is the season of beauty in upstate New York.

The book is about the value of constraints in the creative process. At least that's my jumping off point. If you would like to be interviewed on this topic, then give me a holler at xanthe [dot] matychak [at] gmail [dot] com. The more voices I can gather the better.

Enjoy yourself this summer. Be happy and healthy and let your people know how much you love them.

Xanthe

UPDATE: The subject of the book changed a lot as I began to write. I'll be giving a talk on it in November at TEDx Rochester. I hope you can come!

Project for 2011-12: Open Source Farm Tools

I made this video for a design competition and, even though I'm not using it for the competition (I've decided to highlight another project instead), I'd like to share it with you.

As you may already know, this past year my design-thinking class has worked with visionaries in the local food system - folks from Foodlink, FreshWise Farms, and the Good Food Collective. Recently, Chris Hartman from GFC brought a project to my attention. It's called the Global Village Construction Set. It's a project put forth by Marcin Jakubowski that offers open source plans for 50 tools that are essential to farming. The idea is that anyone who wants to farm anywhere in the world can if they are able to build these tools. Most of tools are comprised of off the shelf parts and come at a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining similar tools from large manufacturers.

I'm just thrilled about this project. It brings together two things that I am very passionate about - the local food economy and DIY culture. So have a look at the video - make sure the captions are on and try to ignore the rough spots and anonymity at the end. Just let me know what you think. And if you are a student at RIT and want to get involved, please do sign up for my class!

Design-thinking course # 0102.421.01

Cheers!

The Roots of Design-thinking

For our first field trip for the ROC 2020 map project, my students and I met with folks from the Good Food Collective to help them sort the very last of their winter veggies. You may be wondering what the heck carrots and potatoes have to do with design-thinking. My students were probably wondering that too as they sifted through the dirty and sometimes stinky roots.

Here's what these root vegetables have to do with design-thinking: they are the product of Good Food’s vision of transforming the regional food system, acquired through a process at the heart of design-thinking called “Build to Learn.” Last fall when the Good Food Collective was struggling with the question of how to deliver regionally produced food year-round in a region, Western New York, that has a mere three-month growing season, they didn’t rely solely on other people’s data. They also didn’t rely on a business plan, and they certainly didn’t let the possibility of failure get in their way (“Fail Forward Fast“ is another process inherent to design-thinking). Instead, they made a prototype: they found a dark and cool space, played with a couple of different types of storage bins, and voila: beautiful, crisp carrots and potatoes in March. By thinking and working as designers, by building and testing their own prototypes, they learned how to get closer to their vision of transforming the food system in Western New York.

This Answer Is Not Helpful

I had the goofiest interaction on Quora this past weekend. For those of you not in the know, Quora is a new site for Q&A. Unlike sites like Ask.com, questions and answers posted on Quora are highly curated. And as we’ve become increasingly attentive to the crediblity of online information sources, curation has become a vital part of our virtual interactions.

Quora has strict rules about how to craft questions and answers and I bumped up against them over the weekend. I posted an answer to a question and the answer was almost immediately voted down and collapsed by another user and labelled "This answer is not helpful." Call me oversensitive, but being told that I wasn't being helpful made me feel really bad. My censurer pointed me to the rules on how to write a helpful answer, but I did not know which of these rules I had broken. And beyond that, I didn't agree with all of the rules.  

In contrast, something that I kind of liked about Facebook was its "like" icon. Even though several groups formed claiming to want an "unlike" icon, it never materialized. And even though you can have a pretty contentious discussion on Facebook, the architecture of the icons is pretty positive. As are the defaults they afford us.

This experience with Quora got me thinking in a broader sense about online rating systems which are also playing a major role in the quest for creating credible information sources online. 

Why do we vote instead of encourage people to articulate their responses in writing?  Because it's faster and easier. Yet sites like Quora have the potential for a real exchange of knowledge and beliefs that a rating system can never achieve.

If we really want to increase human knowledge, then why don't we create systems that enable us to help each other find the right words? IDEO has a brainstorming principle "Build on the Ideas of Others." That is, when someone says something that you may not agree with, pause for a minute, find a part of the statement that you like, and build on it until you like it. As with any consensus-building exercise, the addition of new ideas to a conversation can almost always be helpful - regardless of the idea’s direct relationship to the project’s goal. Educators don’t shut people down for writing unhelpful answers; rather, we take on the responsibility of integrating those answers into the discussion.

My Quora experience would have been great if only my censurer had provided a thoughtful and constructive response. Now how can I help him do that?

special thanks to E. K. Learnard for feedback and editing

Does poetry matter?

Poet Nikki Giovanni was interviewed on the local radio station earlier this afternoon. She is in town for a Martin Luther King celebration. It was a fantastic interview. In it she said something about art, and poetry in particular, that I want to capture here. 

The host of the radio show asked her something like, 'Does poetry matter to the average person? Is poetry important?' 

Now, before I taught in a b.school, I didn't ever have to think about questions like these. When you are in art school as a professor or a student you just assume that what you are doing matters. 

But now that I travel in business and tech arenas, I'm constantly finding myself explaining the value of creativity to skeptics. Which is challenging, but ultimately good for me and, I hope, good for the skeptics.

But back to the interview. When asked if poetry mattered, Giovanni responded with this convincing anecdotal evidence, 'We have words poured over us when we are born. We have words poured on us when we marry. We have words poured on to us when we die. Surely, poetry must be important to us.'

I love this answer. It's straightforward and clear. It's the kind of answer that I can picture one of my colleagues in business or technology responding to. But I can also imagine these colleagues pushing back with something like, "Well, of course art matters to us during those milestones, but those moments are few and far between. I still don't understand how art, or creativity, is meaningful in our everyday lives."

‪Poems are important to us at births and weddings and funerals because we want them to shape those important moments of our lives. But we should be seeking to shape our lives every day. ‬Business and technology are every day ventures. Every day these forces shape us whether we want them to or not. So as long as they are shaping our lives, I'll make mine, and take mine, with poetry. 

bonus: Here's a much longer post on design & poetry that I wrote a few years back. Enjoy. 

Sign up for Design-thinking at RIT

Hey RIT folks. It's registration time once again. If you're looking for a great gen. ed. course for the spring, then check out  "Design-thinking and Concept Development," a general education course hosted by the Saunders College of Business at RIT. course #0102.421.01

This spring we'll be creating a 3D map of Rochester's future. Throughout the process of making the map, we will learn about and practice problem-solving strategies commonly held by designers: 

•               Generating & visualizing ideas

•               Engaging in creative exercises

•               Designing for sustainability & society

•               Observing & understanding human-behavior

•               Discussing readings & videos about design

•               Exploring new business models

•               Researching emerging technologies

•               Building & testing prototypes

Join us. The project is going to be fantastic. The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 11.50am in the Center for Student Innovation at RIT. 

QUESTIONS? contact Prof. Xanthe Matychak at xanthe [dot] matychak [at] rit [dot] edu or shoot me a DM on twitter @xanthm

Kimchi and Soft Hearts

I've been making some fun things at home these days. For one, I'm trying to find a nice little something to give for Valentines Day which is one of my favorite holidays. I enjoy sending out valentines to my friends to remind them that I love them. I'm not crazy about these hearts yet, but new designs tend to get better after I make about a dozen or so. I'll get there.

I've been making kimchi too though I don't think I can put it in the mail. This is unfortunate because, I mean, what says "I love you" more than a stinky jar of fermenting cabbage?

This batch here is made of nappa cabbage, daikon, carrot, bonito, a splash of rice vinegar, pressed garlic, grated ginger (I love my ginger grater, btw. I think it needs its own post soon), and a heaping tablespoon of that Korean red pepper sauce they make dukboki with.

Let's just say that I'm having fun.

Xmas: nostalgia, reflection, and making gifts

Even though I'm a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, I really love the Christmas holiday. I love it for several reasons. Each reason, I hope, offers an alternative to the consumer-frenzy a lot of us find ourselves in this time of year.

NOSTALGIA. My paternal grandparents (not Jewish) were of the "greatest generation" and when I was a kid we celebrated Christmas in style: electric candles in every window, super boozy egg nog in every cup, and Bing Crosby on the crooner radio station that you can only tune in on a stereo cabinet like my grandparents had -- a large, waist-high piece of furniture with a record player under the hood and built-in speakers covered with shimmery golden fabric. A few years back I made a four-song holiday record inspired by those recordings. And this year I learned a few more carols on guitar and played them at gatherings. Fun!

REFLECTION. They say that Christmas is the season of giving and you'll see in the next section that I enjoy that part too. But for me, Christmas is 90% reflection. It's when I take inventory of all that I've done or seen over the year and every year I feel more and more grateful. Sure there have been some real tough times -- my mother's early death, my cancer -- but all in all I live a charmed life. I enjoy this time at the end of the year to really think on that.

MAKING GIFTS. Since I am averse to made-in-China crap, and since I can't afford to buy high-end craft for all of my friends at once (unlike birthdays when you can buy one item at a time), I roll up my sleeves and get to making. In the summer we pick fruit at eco-village and  make a ton of jam, so we give that. And then I make truffles, this year two flavors: kahlua and rum (we even made the kahlua). And this year, for the first time, I made felt brooches. About 30 of them. I used a process called needle felting in which you take semi processed wool, called roving, and bind it together with a barbed needle. It's kind of like drawing in slow motion with limited control. I really enjoy it and hope to get better at it over the year, maybe even figure out something to do with it for Maker Faire.

May you have a wonderful holiday season. Don't forget to look at the past. There's a lot to learn there. And try making something with your hands. Even if what you make seems small and not as jazzy as something made in China, it is a large and generous gesture filled with meaning.

World Maker Faire 2010

Last weekend, Andrea, Michelle, and I took our interactive exhibit, RIVER MEMOIR, down to World Maker Faire in NYC. As you can see from the picture above, folks were really engaged with the exhibit and we had fun sharing it with the wide range of people that passed through the fair.

Unfortunately, as exhibitors we didn't have much time to check out the rest of the fair. There were some great speakers, performances, and exhibits all over the site.

The most exciting part about being there for me was being in Flushing Meadows Park, the site of the 1964 Worlds Fair. The 1964 fair was all about the future of big industry. Growing up on Long Island, I saw the site as a beautiful yet tragic monument to a faded vision of that future. So, being a participant in this enormous celebration of DIY culture, in that location, is especially meaningful for me.

Thank you to the organizers of the fair. I think you did a fantastic job considering this was the first time working at this venue.

Above is a detail of the "river" we made at the fair. We collected little stories from people at the fair and then cast them on to a river (a piece of knit wear) using a knitting machine and a computer. The process was amazing and the final product, as you can see, is pretty.

Writing in rivers and on the wall

I have some pretty pictures to share. Above is the latest development on our Maker Faire project. It's called Rivière Memoir. We're knitting a river into which you cast on your memoirs either with "stones" or "river grasses." The river is further enhanced by LED-sparkle and a virtual river of swimming memoirs. I can't wait to take this thing out on the road. Maybe we'll do a little of that later in the summer just to find out what people do with it. I hope for some surprises.

And here are some pictures from a hand-lettering workshop we attended last week at The Future of Reading symposium.

The woman in above is Professor Lorrie Frear. She teaches graphic design at RIT and her hand-lettering skills are off the chart. Below is famed type designer, Kris Holmes. Both instructors took a "just do it, you can't fail" attitude with the workshop participants which, as you know, I adore. We had fun. I definitely need to pick up one of those giant markers.

Summer Rules.

A few local foodie pictures to share. This morning we went to market in Dewitt Park and were o so happy to see garlic. And carrots. Lookit how pretty!

Additionally, we picked up duck eggs from the Daring Drake Farm folks. Mmmmm. Duck eggs.

After the market we went out to Eco-Village because we have a berry share there. They have all kinds of small businesses running out of Eco-Village. It's impressive. The one we support most is Kestral Perch U-pick Berries. How it works from our end is that we pay them a lump sum at the beginning of the season and the owner/operator, Katie Kreeger, emails us every week telling us what and how much we can pick. We're very impressed with how Katie runs her business. It's an honor to support her.

Today we got to pick two quarts of strawberries (actually Cory picked them - I roamed around). The strawberries taste even "sweeter" this year as last year it rained too much and there was no season.  Strawberries grow very close to the ground so when they get too wet they mold and mush up : (

What to do with my silly little dog is always an issue when we go out to Eco-Village. Often I tie her up to the posts that frame the blackberry patch. Here she is glaring at me. On the left of the glaring image are the beginnings of raspberry season which is almost always super plentiful. The darn things make fruit in summer and then again in fall. 

So that's my local food report for early-mid June. We pick up our first CSA delivery later this week. As for the Rochester falcons, Archer and Beauty ended up having two girls. They grow bigger by the minute and are due to fledge by the end of this month. You can check in on them here. Maker Faire project is moving along and hope to report on that soon. 

Summer rules.