Suicide Notes

This email came today to promote a programme on BBC Radio4 which is usually well worth listening to, as it covers research in the field of sociology, one of the areas most directly connected to design. It answered some questions I asked myself a while ago while pondering a project related to suicide that I never got off the ground due to various factors (issues of taste being one of them)

You can listen to the programme here for seven days after broadcast, but here's Laurie Taylor's intro:

Whenever the subject of suicide or attempted suicide comes up in conversation I can be relied upon to describe a piece of research on suicide notes that was published some years ago (even though I’ve tried, I can’t find the exact reference any more).

What the researcher had done was collect a large selection of suicide notes written by two classes of people: those who had successfully ended their own life and those who had failed for one reason or another to kill themselves (attempted suicides).

He then submitted these two sets of notes to a computer analysis in the hope that this might throw up some interesting differences in style or subject matter.

As I remember he found clear evidence that the notes written by the ‘attempted suicides’, by people who had not taken quite enough pills, or not sealed the door sufficiently well to prevent noxious gases or fumes escaping, were heavily philosophical in tone. The writers spoke at length of life no longer being worth living, of the meaningless of existence, of the impossibility of optimism.

These were in shark contrast to the suicide notes written by those who had succeeded in killing themselves. These notes tended to be much shorter and much more practical than those provided by attempted suicides. One for example simply said “You’ll find the car keys on top of the sideboard and the will in the top desk drawer.”

There are thousands of other research papers on the subject of suicide. Indeed, it could be argued that sociology first asserted itself as a distinctive subject back in 1897 when Emile Durkheim first tried to formulate a structural and cultural account of its incidence which did not rely upon any psychological understanding of individual desires and motives.

Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place

Jean Baudriallard has died.
It's very sad news - he was one of the most imaginative, controversial and broad thinkers who lived.
However, in responding to the news I joked to a colleague 'Did he actually take place?' which, if you know your Baudrillard is rip-roaringly funny. Except that The Guardian have obviously been waiting to crack this one for years:

Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place. "Dying is pointless," he once wrote. "You have to know how to disappear." The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries and asked Baudrillard: "What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?" Baudrillard replied: "What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself."

Baudrillard, whose simulacrum departed at the age of 77, attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced, imperturbably, that it had not taken place. This prompted some to characterise him as yet another continental philosopher who revelled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.
Yet Baudrillard was pointing out that the war was conducted as a media spectacle. Rehearsed as a wargame or simulation, it was then enacted for the viewing public as a simulation: as a news event, with its paraphernalia of embedded journalists and missile's-eye-view video cameras, it was a videogame. The real violence was thoroughly overwritten by electronic narrative: by simulation.

Such had been Baudrillard's name for the defining problem of the age since the 1970s, when he wrote that the Marxian problem of class struggle had been replaced, in the "post-industrial" era, with the problem of simulation. He thus anticipated, by a decade or two, later arguments about the nature of "virtual reality". Pop culture paid tribute to Baudrillard's prescience in Andy and Larry Wachowski's 1999 film The Matrix, about a near-future Earth where human society is a simulation designed by malign machines to keep us enslaved. Hacker hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides his contraband software in a hollowed-out copy of one of the philosopher's books, and rebel chief Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) quotes Baudrillard's most famous formula: "Welcome to the desert of the real."

Baudrillard was invited to collaborate on the sequels, but declined. He later protested wryly that The Matrix had got him wrong: "The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment ... The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce."

Baudrillard was born in the cathedral town of Reims in north-eastern France. His grandparents were peasants and his parents became civil servants. He was the first of his family to go to university, studying German at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he later said that this led to a break with his family and cultural milieu. In 1956 he began teaching German at a French lycée, and in the early 1960s published essays on literature for the journal Les Temps Modernes, as well as translating works of Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss.

In 1966, Baudrillard joined the University of Nanterre, a small, fiercely radical institution that was to become notable as the incubator of the Mouvement du 22 Mars and its subsequent role in the évènements of May 1968. (Baudrillard later said he "participated" in the student revolts.) That same year, his first book, The System of Objects, was published. With the sociologist Henri Lefebvre and the cultural critic Roland Barthes as his intellectual mentors, he gave sharp, ironic readings of interior-design materials, gadgets, washing powder and other everyday phenomena.

In subsequent works, including The Consumer Society (1970), The Mirror of Production (1973), and Forget Foucault (1977), Baudrillard developed arguments about the increasing power of the "object" over the "subject" in modern society, and the way in which protest and resistance were increasingly absorbed and turned into fuel by the symbolic "system" of capitalism. During this period, he also wrote on art and architecture for the journal Utopie.

The 1981 volume Simulacra and Simulation (the book that later appeared in The Matrix) gained a wide audience, and Baudrillard soon found himself a globetrotting academic superstar, discoursing on his themes of "seduction" (the term that escapes the binary opposition of "production" and "destruction") and "hyper-reality" (the simulated realm that is "more real than the real"). In 1986 he moved from Nanterre, which had, he lamented, become "normalised", to the university of Paris-IX Dauphine.

Baudrillard characterised the 1990s, with its wishful illusions about the "end of history", as a "stagnant" period in which events were on strike. Eventually the strike was broken by the attacks on the US of September 11 2001. Baudrillard called it "the ultimate event, the mother of all events".

"It is the terrorist model," he wrote, "to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess."

Subsequently, for Baudrillard, there was no longer any need for the media to virtualise events, as in the first Gulf war, since the war's participants had thoroughly internalised the rules of simulation. His 2004 essay, War Porn, observed how the photographs from Abu Ghraib enacted scenes of fetishistic pornography, concluding: "It is really America that has electrocuted itself."

Baudrillard took to calling his works "theory fictions": because the present is always more fantastical than the most lurid science fiction, "theory" must compete with it on an imaginative level. So Baudrillard offered himself as an extrapolator, a canary in the cultural coalmine. "My work is paradoxical," he explained. "It's surrealist like fiction." He found a sympathetic soul in the novelist JG Ballard, who called him "the most important French thinker of the last 20 years". (In 1974, Baudrillard had hailed Ballard's Crash as "the first great novel of the universe of simulation".)

Baudrillard once wore a gold lamé suit with mirrored lapels while reading his poetry in a Las Vegas bar. If he didn't take himself particularly seriously, his critics complained that he didn't take anything else seriously either. A recurring charge was that it was politically and morally irresponsible, at the very least, to speak of the "unreality" of modern war, because to do so was to ignore the realities of killing and suffering. Baudrillard's response, in his 2004 book The Lucidity Pact, or The Intelligence of Evil, was laconic: "The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it and have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead ... it is not we, the messengers of the simulacrum, who have plunged things into this discredit, it is the system itself that has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today."

One sceptical British interviewer called Baudrillard a "philosopher clown", a description to which he probably would not have objected, instead taking it as an invitation to think about the social function of clowns. As he once argued: "It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous." He was an aphorist. "Contemporary art is contemporary only with itself," he growled; or: "Our sentimentality towards animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them."

Baudrillard, who is survived by his wife Marine, had once written a playful account of his personal evolution, from "pataphysician" (a scientist of imaginary solutions) at 20, to "viral" at 60. When I saw him in 2000, he was 70 years old. What was he now? He chuckled. "Well, let's see, at 70, I would say that I am ... transfini. Beyond the end. It was my fateful strategy to go beyond the concept, so as to see what happens beyond." Now, perhaps, he knows.

· Jean Baudrillard, philosopher and sociologist, born July 29 1929; died March 6 2007

Rich actress's dad apparently offers peanuts for official site

The actress who play's Veronic Mars, Kristen Bell, appears to be in the market for a new official web site, if this ad from Craigslist is to believed:

OK, this job will not only be fun, but you can make a bit of a name for yourself.
I am looking for a web designer to put together the OFFICIAL website for actress Kristen Bell (TV's Veronica Mars).
I realize this will not be a huge moneymaker for the designer---I do need to stay close to the compensation figure offered here. But what a great thing to have on your resume. We can also discuss having a credit to you on the bottom of the home page. (And you know it will get traffic!)
There will probably be a need for some monthly maintenance, and we can discuss that.
She prefers simple, clean, and contemporary. Flash and html.
I am not a fan (well, not entirely true). I am her Dad.
Serious offers (with examples of your work) only please.
Thanks
Tom Bell

(The fee quoted is $1000 - that's between 20-30 hours' work by my reckoning. Gonna be a great site!)

Ah, it's that old 'this will look good in your portfolio so who cares that you won't be paid very much' argument! I feel like writing to Ms Bell and asking her to appear in my local primary school's nativity play. I'll pay her £50 - I know it's not a lot, but wow, it'll be a lot of fun and won't it look good on her credits!

I wonder if this ad is genuine. If it is, maybe someone can explain to her that prestige and, er, 'fun', don't pay the rent. If that's how she's doing business she needs to get a new agent.

(And, in my experience, no web site is ever actually 'fun' to work on. Indeed, the fun factor is usually inversely proportional to the amount of fun the client thinks it's going to be...)

Are all typographers pretentious?

Spotted over in the comments on Design Observer:

"If you use a typeface without knowing who designed it, it is like sleeping with someone and not knowing their name." (Robert Bringhurst)

Blimey - that could well be the most pretentious piece of crap I've ever heard. Who gives a flying fuck who designed a typeface? Get over yourself...

Someone's got to say it: typography is not the be all and end all. It is not the secret to the mystery of life. It will not save the starving and poor.

No one ever died from a bit of bad kerning or over-zealous leading.

It's. Just. Type.

Socks and slugs: proof that creationism is false

For me the whole creationism v evolution debate comes to a shuddering halt when I consider two things: socks and slugs. For me they are proof that evolution is the end of the story.

Let's take slugs. The only way that slugs could be said to be the result of a creator is if you suppose for a minute that the creator also had a child bugging him or her at the time. Let's face it, slugs are useless ugly little buggers that scare the bejeezus out of me (I don't know why, I'm just a wimp when it comes to slimy things that sit there and do nothing).

If creationism were a kitchen, then slugs are the equivalent of the things that kids make when their parents finally give in to their nagging and give them a bit of pastry to mess about with. If you're a parent you may have experienced this (I'm not so I haven't) but surely everyone who's ever been a kid knows what I'm saying. You're watching someone making jam tarts or a steak pie or something and you nag and nag until you get given a bit of pastry and some jam and what do you make? That's right: a big lump of pastry with some jam in the middle. And you insist it gets baked along with the rest of the stuff and, after it comes out of the oven and is cool enough (or not, as my scalded tongue reminds me) you insist on eating it or - worse - making your mum or dad eat it.

This is what I think slugs are. The creator was busy in the creative kitchen making all the lovely birds and the flowers and making the odd mistake (sharks, spiders, Republicans etc) because Junior was nagging to be allowed to play and make something too. And when given some material, what did Junior do? Rolled it in to a sausage, filled it with goo, and created the Slug, then insisted it was baked and let loose on the world.

Now I don't buy that. So clearly, the slug must be a product of evolution because only a stupid and slow process could come up with something so stupid and slow.

So where do socks come in to it?
Well I've just spent 20 minutes searching my drawers for a pair of socks that match and, despite my little flashes of genius ('I know, I'll buy only socks that have different coloured stripes on the top so I can identify them!', 'I know, I'll only buy black socks so it doesn't matter!') I couldn't. So here I am wearing odd socks, both black but slightly different shades of black, and both slightly different thicknesses so even if no one else notices they're odd, I certainly do.
You see, if we were the result of an all knowing creator, he or she would not have created us with body parts that needed covering and protecting by two different things. He or she would not have set us up for an existence where, over the course of a week, the best part of two hours would be wasted fumbling about in a drawer for nothing more substantial than a couple of tubes of wool or cotton.
Either he or she would have given us hooves or caterpillar tracks. Or, indeed, not bothered with legs of any sort and made us like... er, slugs.

And so there's an end to it. Creationism or evolution? Socks and slugs prove it: evolution is the answer.

iPhone gets a wag of the finger

A culture change is needed - but in industry or academia?

One of the issues that keeps coming up in my current research project is the complaint from certain sectors of the design industry that they are not seeing the same quality of graduates that existed before (in the mythical 'olden days' presumably). I posted last week about how I thought that was so much rubbish, and could even be argued against using basic maths.
The complaints are based on anecdotal evidence from employers but there are two real problems with this: firstly, it's anecdotal evidence. If things were really so bad then the British design industry would be in the pits, so there's no actual evidence of such a decline. Secondly, it's been said for years - in fact I can't remember a year when exam results in the UK weren't met with a press release from the Confederation of British Industry moaning about falling standards.
What we really mean by falling standards is that I can't believe kids these days don't know when the Battle of Hastings was, or who Edward Heath and Richard Nixon were. Whereas I remind myself that when I was sixteen I couldn't do half the things today's kids can, the 'suits' confuse trivia for knowledge. I suppose if you were recruiting on the basis of putting a winning pub quiz team together you could rightfully complain about 'falling standards', but otherwise, I'm not sure you can.

Anecdotal evidence has its value, mind you. I'm a big fan of it (especially when it supports my point of view!) and I think it's wrongly frowned upon in academia. My own anecdotal evidence, based on many conversations with students and graduates, suggests that contrary to what employers are saying, we are producing 'quality' graduates. And I agree that employers aren't seeing them. How can both sides of the story be true?

Simple: the qualities, not the actual quality, are changing, and the things that mark out a high quality graduate these days, certainly in graphic design, are cynicism and scepticism, a healthy distrust and dislike of the way a lot of businesses work, and a growing preference for a job and lifestyle that contents them, rather than propels them on a glittering career and wealth. (I suspect those things may change as they get older, of course...)
In other words, the reason a lot of design firms in the UK are complaining that they are not seeing the same number of top quality graduates applying for jobs is not because the quality of teaching has dropped, but because those graduates are more choosy about who they go and work for. The tradition in the design industry of undertaking unpaid work placements, and then accepting poorly-paid 'trial periods' is something that today's cash-strapped and culturally-aware graduates are no longer willing to take part in, and a good design graduate would rather take a post in an independent coffee shop than work in a soulless office all the hours God sends for little or no pay (this is what the 'suits' call 'passion' incidentally).

And that's not a crazy comparison, as though working in a coffee shop is a really menial thing just one step above being a designer. As Richard Florida points out in The Rise Of The Creative Class, in today's cafe culture jobs like this are seen as fulfilling ones for the people you meet, the conversations you have and so on (we're talking about arty, independent cafes here, not your greasy spoons and chains). While 'suits' think having a workforce of waitresses and hairdressers with degrees in English Literature is a sign of educational oversupply, I think it's a sign of a society that values knowledge and creativity.
It seems odd that the body that represents the creative industries in the UK seems hell-bent on stamping out the very things it depends on, not just because designers use them, but because so do clients and consumers.

These thoughts were reinforced for me today by an entry over on Florida's blog. It's worth noting that Creative and Cultural Skills, the body I'm talking about, uses Florida to make their case about closing courses, building artificial communities of creative people servicing communities of bio-scientists, businessmen and so on. It's clear they've never actually read his book beyond the introduction, if that. In calling for things such as a more business-oriented approach to design education, less frivolous (i.e. no fun, I assume) and less interdisciplinary in social terms, they actually contradict a lot of what Rise suggests is needed to nurture creativity. He makes the points again today in response to an article in the New York Times:

Three things crossed my mindas I read the story and scanned its pictures, which interestingly enough appeared in the fashion and style section and not the business section.

• (1) You can't pump creative work out of people, assembly-line style.' Motivating this kind of mental work requires a new kind of' workplace, one that appears to be nurturing,' attuned to individuality, and 'fun'-' a trend I dubbed 'soft-control' in Rise.



• (2) It's a mistake to see this stuff as all frills and perks. Companies are doing it because it is increasingly required to attract top talent.' Offering a stimulating environment, flexible work hours, and the ability to be 'yourself' is an effective and relatively 'cheap' way of competing against, say, investment banks and hedge-funds.



• (3)' Scanning the photos, I was struck by the similarity between these new work-spaces and college dorm rooms, where so many of these high-tech companies come from, or even the play-spaces of middle age teenagers. Could it be that the demographic trends toward postponed marriage, extended single years and what Ethan Watters dubbed the 'urban tribe' are being projected into the work-place?

(Via The Creativity Exchange.)

Those graduates the industry say they are not seeing will not magically show up because you put a pool table in the studio or let people play music (something, incidentally, that drives me mad - I would never work anywhere I was subjected to other people's music!) but only when the entire culture of the employer changes. And yet there's a long way to go before unpaid placements, long hours, 'flexible contracts' and other strange practices are consigned to history. Will these things ever happen? Well it's telling that the industry bodies think it would be easier to force university courses to turn out exactly the type of graduates they want (i.e. willing to work for nothing, over long hours, and with little job security) than to change industry practice.

Another reason why the 'business' approach to design teaching is wrong

I think [design schools] have a good shot at helping the university turn out capable innovators. They are better positioned, for instance, than [business schools].

For one thing the design schools believe in consulting carefully with the consumer [...] the design field believes in ethnography, and this method flourished there well before its present popularity in business research circles.

For another thing, the design school believes in culture.

As it stands, the business school tends to think about the product or brand in terms of utilities, functions or benefits. Brands and products create value by doing work in the world.

From Grant McCracken via Richard Florida