Maxim Transfiguration 

As guiding design principles go, it’s hard to beat Vitruvius. In his treatise on architecture, Vitruvius stated three qualities of good architecture:
Firmatis
Utilitas
Venustatis

Usually translated as:
Durability
Utility
Beauty

Often conveyed as:
Commodity
Utility
Delight

I’m not sure when “Beauty” became “Delight” but there is something more personal or emotional about the word “delight” isn’t there? Maybe because it doesn’t sound as serious or portentous as “beauty”. As a designer whose work is compelled by usability (what’s the point of a functionality or a feature if no one can figure out how to use it), I like to think of it as:
Useful
Usable
Delightful
But that's because I like the cadence of it.

But maybe it should be:
Durable
Usable
Delightful

After all, if something has utility, it should have inherent commodity and value but that doesn’t make it durable. Additionally I prefer the adjective form rather than the noun (eg. "Delightful" versus "Delight"). In software we say a finicky program that fails often “is brittle” or that it “breaks easily". If a solution is too customized and can’t be reproduced on a larger scale it isn’t "scalable" because we're in the business of manufacturing and reproducibility which architecture and Vitruvius wouldn't consider. Perhaps good software, like good industrial design should really be:
Durable
Scalable
Usable
Delightful

I like that. It may seem crass and wordy compared to:
Commodity
Utility
Delight

Which itself is a distillation of the original:
Firmatis
Utilitas
Venustatis

But hey,
Que sera sera
Whatever shall be, shall be, right?

It’s the spirit of it that counts, because that’s where the truth lies. Like they say:
In vino verdi, in aqua sante
In wine, truth, in water, health
Put another way, a drunken man’s words, are a sober man’s thoughts.

Or as Caesar put it:
Veni, vidi, vici
I came, I saw, I conquered.

Then again as Dizzy Gillespie said of Louis Armstrong:
No he. No me.

You get it. I don’t have to explain it to you et cetera et cetera, and so on and so on, blah, blah, blah, yadda yadda yadda.

Seen in January… 

Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Zizek on one of the many sets and locations for The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Image via The Movie DB.

This is becoming a bad habit of mine - posting the previous month’s list when the following month is almost done. It hardly matters as the first half of January was lost to me. I had a cold that was relentless. During that time I sought out mostly movies I had seen and knew would comfort me (also it wouldn't matter if I fell asleep while watching). This is what I did see peering from behind a dune of used tissues.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes have created another in their series of collaborations which are more like cinematic essays or lectures that apply a Freudian lens to many classic films. Zizek is professor of philosophy and a cinephile and Fiennes the director. In this documentary, there's a slight reversal in that Zizek uses film to explain ideology. Not just the ideology of Capitalists versus Marxists or Reagan or Stalin but also how we form our own ideology, especially in the context of the society within which we live. This approach makes the content much more engaging and memorable. One of the surprising insights is how someone like Stalin's personality and personal ideology helped formed the ideology of the Soviet Union and how the survival of Capitalism makes sense because it is inherently self destroying and constantly reforming and aligning itself however it needs to (more like a viral infection than any organizational principles). In that light, Capitalism doesn't need an individual to guide it, but it is much closer to nature's own survival. There are some mind expanding revelations if you're open to it.



A photo by Mark Hogancamp from Marwencol Image via Artsy

Marwencol

The documentary of a man who created his own therapy through his art and is the basis for the latest Robert Zemeckis film Welcome to Marwen (presumably they didn't get the permission of the "Colleen" who makes up the "col" part of the name). I will not see that film because I do not like Robert Zemeckis films and I'm pretty sure you won't really find out much about the real Mark Hogancamp who the story is based on. Mark Hogancamp was at a bar in his upstate New York town when he was jumped by a group of men who very nearly beat him to death. Why? He may have mentioned it wasn't so weird to wear women's clothing. The men were arrested, charged and jailed but that didn't heal Hogancamp. He spent months in physical therapy relearning how to walk and when the insurance money ran out, teaching himself to read and write again. Damaged and reeling from a brain injury Hogancamp withdrew into a world of storytelling where he was the rescuer and rescued hero of his own devising. In some respects the brain injury was a reset. Hogancamp's previous life included a successful marriage until alcoholism tore that apart. After the injury he had no interest in drinking at all. To keep himself occupied he began to build a model town set in World War II era Belgium. He populated this town with his G.I. Joe scaled dolls depicting friends, many female, who were based on those people around him thus the name he gave the town, "Marwencol", an amalgam of Mark-Wendy-Colleen. He didn't just build the town, but created a storyline for it as an evolving place that he recorded through simple but striking photography. When a photographer met Mark on one of his many walks he saw the potential of the work, contacted a small art magazine publisher and gallery owner. That's how his work and story came to national attention. By the end of the documentary we see Hogancamp realizing this next stage of his life in a new version of Marwencol. In this new version, the action figure of himself is not a WWII hero but an artist photographing a scaled down version of his original creation. Retelling his reality in an alternate nested reality is a sort of physical manifestation of how we relate our memories when we repeat our own stories to ourselves and others. Picture yourself telling a table full of friends how one time you found a cat in a tree. Now imagine you created a scaled version of yourself sitting at a table of doll sized depictions of those same friends and on the table you have created a scaled diorama of yourself rescuing a cat from a tree. That's what this would be like. Come to think of it, it would be interesting to view this with Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York which is about creating something as a stand-in for another thing (sort of).
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