Design as a “Native” Tradition

If design exists in every culture then every culture has its design sense.  Its how terms like Gothic, Baroque, Victorian and Brutalist enter our vocabulary.  Design seems to be a universal concept–see Feng Shui in China and Vastu Shastra in India–as well as an immemorial one: the ancient Romans called it Genius Loci or “the Spirit of the Place.”  But what about aboriginal design?

To anyone who has ever spent any time with it, aboriginal design is vibrant, intuitive and sophisticated, often marked by a prevalence of natural and spiritual motifs.  Yet, like so much of aboriginal culture, either historicized or neglected.  Yet by looking at a few examples of new aboriginal design it makes sense that aboriginal perspectives would gel with architecture, sustainability & urban planning.  That’s the hope of  the “First Nations Conference on Sustainable Buildings and Communities” on February 29^th and March 1^st at the River Cree Resort & Casino, on the Enoch First Nation just west of Edmonton.

Architect Wanda Dalla Costa knows this firsthand, particularly around sustainability.  She says aboriginal-driven design  “aligns with traditional philosophies of environmental responsibilities, being caretakers of the land and caretakers for the next 7 generations.  It comes from within.”  As Chief Clarence Louie, the CEO of the Osoyoos Indian Band Development Corporation will attest to,  resource-based aboriginal economies are poised to boom in Canada, so Dalla Costa says there’s also pragmatic reasons for this conference.  “(First Nations communities) are aware that there is a large push towards green buildings right now and therefore funding for those innovative, pilot projects.” 

The event is entitled “Starting the Conversation”—perhaps a tacit acknowledgement of the sorry state of housing in aboriginal life (one word: Attawapiskat, of which Grand Chief Stan Louttit will update the conference).  Even when done with the best of intentions, the government-mandated urbanization of aboriginal communities hewed to a boxy, institutional approach that  privileged function over form, according to Dalla Costa. “A lot of First Nations communities were built and designed on an urban layout i.e. with town centres on a grid system and prototyped housing but without regards to the society, climate, culture and activities people in rural cultures may undertake.”

So what does aboriginal design in architecture look like?  Some groundbreaking examples include Arthur Erickson’s Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and Blackfoot member Douglas Cardinal’s sinuous Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec as well as the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

Dalla Costa, a Cree member of the Saddle Lake First Nation, says aboriginal design often borrows from geomantic principles.  For example, after spending many hours listening to elders envision a learning centre for the Blood tribe of Southern Alberta, she incorporated the four cardinal directions, sun patterns, wind dynamics and other earthly elements into the building.

“Concepts with FN architecture are almost everything.  They are so important because the communities are trying to  hang on to their identity…They want to  resurrect the culture and buildings are one of those forms. “

Amazingly, Dalla Costa counts herself as only the 8^th licensed aboriginal architect in Canada, a tiny fellowship that includes Cardinal and Alfred Waugh.  Waugh calls the Left Coast home which is where the most progressive examples of aboriginal design tend to be.  He and Dalla Costa will be having a panel discussion on the best of Canadian sustainable architecture at the Conference (www.sustainablefnc.ca).

Waugh has characterized aboriginal architecture thusly:

“It embraces what happens whenever we take action to give order or meaning to the space around us.  Naming space, designating sacred parts of the wilderness, clearing village areas, garden plots, claiming food-gathering areas, planning and constructing buildings and arranging the spaces that surround and connect them are all components of Native architecture.  Encoded into these buildings and social domains are the social and religious meanings particular to each Nation.”

Seabird Island School by Patkau Architects

UBC Museum of Anthropology by Arthur Erickson

Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre by Alfred Waugh

Canadian Museum of Civilization by Douglas Cardinal

You knew this was coming…

Its Sh*t Edmontonians Say

Credit to the enterprising folks who saw the meme and jumped on it. In one day its already gotten 100,000 hits…and once it digested the requisite Oiler fanfare (thanks to appearances by phenoms Jordan Eberle and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins), stirred up some civic dialogue.

(for the record, I have never actually seen Lucy the Elephant, I grew up in Millwoods and they’re bang on about the air conditioning…)

In the meantime, hello, everywhere else in the world: consider the floodgates of self-caricature open, if they aren’t already.  I guess it makes sense, given that the ” Sh*t (insert ethnicity here) say” vids lit-up the broadband, one after another.  Alas, even enterprising, funny webisodes based on ethnic comedy eventually meet the law of diminishing returns.

What I think is utterly fascinating is how fast these memes are circulating.  For what its worth I’ve been really enjoying this one lately, and it doesn’t even have a title. The fact that these online memes are less than two months old is starting to give 2012 an interesting–if not worn out–theme.

But I am looking forward to seeing vignettes about what other cities in the world–starting, of course, with Calgary–say when they say Sh*t.

Q: What happily binds Quebec and Alberta together?

A: Aside from below? Nothing.

Passion for hockey glows | Hockey | Sports | Edmonton Sun.

A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click – The Atlantic

Of all that’s been said about this topic since the Internet was invented, back in the mid-90’s, nothing I’ve seen quite captures the natural conclusion that The Atlantic’s Joseph Turow does here…nor how chilling it is.

A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click – The Atlantic.

Great Stadia Batman!

Now who doesn’t like a stadium? At least a stadium done well, impressive to both fans in the seats and passers-by on the street?

Well in honor of Superbowl Sunday, let me repost a list of impressive edifices by Rana Florida, Richard Florida’s wife.  Richard, who instructed a class at Rotman, once famously said cities shouldn’t invest in sport stadiums as a way of economic revitalization and attracting the Creative Class. I think his idea was actually a bit more nuanced than that (a sports team won’t revitalize a local economy but a vibrant entertainment district–with an attractive  stadium/arena at its heart–might) but nobody can argue that some of these are just impressive to look at.

Edmonton’s Gaga for Pecha Kucha!

Thursday night was historic in Edmonton for a couple of reasons.  First, Sam Gagner scored an incredible 8 points against the Chicago Blackhawks, tying Wayne Gretzky & Paul Coffee’s record in a feat not seen since 1989.

Second, the 12th and likely biggest Pecha Kucha night happened in E-town.  A sell out crowd of more than 500 at the   historic Garneau Theatre on increasingly stylish 109th Street saw a truly eclectic set of presentations ranging from the  history of credit unions to the viability of winter cities to a live yoga demonstration to a perennial favourite, local farming.  My personal highlights were the two self-professed foodies talking about the greatness of bread and Steve Sandor’s push to have the groundbreaking sketch comedy show SCTV memorialized for the time it was filmed here, back when Edmonton stood in for the every-town of Melonville.

Like an abbreviated TED Talk, a Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit-chat”) involves a speaker talking in front of a series of slides according to a concise little formula–20 slides, 20 seconds of conversation per slide with the idea of “matching each thought with a perfect image” in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.  So an evening flies by with 10 or 12 talks interspersed by an intermission, live music and flowing booze.  The format is simple and highly portable–469 cities around the world have held a PK to date including places as small as Dawson City, Yukon and as far flung as Ekaterinburg, Russia. Its also highly subjective–nobody need be an expert to present, unlike TED.

Outside the Garneau

That invites a common criticism: when a presentation is nothing more than shameless self promotion.  Now in the case of the photographer traveling the globe getting people to pose with his little toy car, the credit union guy hoping for a promotion or the seriously diehard fan who’s followed U2 to 55 shows (yes, fifty-five!) that is absolutely true.

But so what?  To my mind the most important thing in a presentation is that it be interesting, engaging or edifying. So long as that’s true then play on I say.

Breadmaking on display

The theme of each PK is up to the organizing committee and in Edmonton’s case they tend to revolve around ideas of civic engagement, design, downtown revitalization and community building.  Thus they attract that evanescent (yes, its an actual word) “creative class” of the flannel shirted & designer spectacled students, artists, designers, activists and urbanists, a demographic this particular city administration has made a concerted effort to engage.

Ben Henderson on winter cities

Ben Henderson, one Edmonton’s more progressive city councillors presented on what Edmonton can learn from other winter city destinations like Helsinki & Oslo.  He enthusiasm for his presentation and the night as a whole was evident: “Clearly its an interesting place to share some exciting thoughts and its gained a kind of cultural energy which might be really peculiar to here. It takes a lot of movers and shakers that maybe weren’t aware of each other and brings them together in a way that a force can be created out of that. That collective mind, collective curiousity and collective energy pours out of them.”

Yoga demonstration

Virtually half the crowd at each PK is new to the event, according to Christine Causing, the NextGen coordinator. “I think we have a variety of presenters from the community and they have a network of friends, colleagues and even fans that come out.” I was involved in setting up the 3rd PK the city hosted back in 2009 and have been surprised to see the format is more popular than ever here, which I think says something not just about the expression of ideas in a novel format–since other events like “World Cafes” have come and gone–but the communal, peculiar spirit that animates Edmontonians.

One aside from the Oilers that is.

3D Printing

3-D printing has the potential to be…

courtesy Brendan Dawes http://everythingimakewithmymakerbot.com/

way cool. Like a glimpse of the future made near…and maybe something that should have been featured in this film.

I saw a demonstration of 3D printing by a couple of University of Toronto students in Alex Manu’s “Innovation, Foresight & Business Design” class at Rotman.  Like some of the items Brendan Dawes produced here, it was mostly small knick-knacks (which as the 2nd photo shows, can be extremely useful).  Once this spreads to regular users the possibilities naturally seem almost limitless.

courtesy Brendan Dawes http://everythingimakewithmymakerbot.com/

Here’s a review and a suggestion of which company should take advantage of this in my favourite magazine, the Atlantic Monthly.

 

How Fidelity Used Design Thinking to Perfect Its Website – Frederick S. Leichter – Harvard Business Review

And who says design thinking couldn’t apply to the buttoned-down financial industry? Even if improving the customer service experience is only at the retail client-facing level (i.e. not amongst the big investment bank/hedge-fund managers) this shows there’s still enormous room for improvement and engagement in banking using the basic principles of empathy, storytelling, synthesis and prototyping…

How Fidelity Used Design Thinking to Perfect Its Website – Frederick S. Leichter – Harvard Business Review.

The Humble Art Of The Indo-Canadian 99%

Picture a museum of all things Indian and you might envision something like Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, which featured prominently at the Art Gallery of Ontario for much of the past year. It was a display of historic Indian regalia at its finest: jewelry, clothing, artwork, chandeliers and even an exquisitely preserved Rolls-Royce were present, much of it on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibit was a reminder that even during the height (or depth, depending on your perspective) of the British Raj, a relative handful of rajas, nawabs, and princes — the country’s original one per cent — enjoyed a lifestyle far removed from the disease, starvation and penury that characterized most of the period.

However inside the Young Gallery, a pocket-sized corner of the AGO, you’d have a starkly different vision of the contemporary Indian experience: plastic toilet brushes, “smelly” cotton sweatpants, a box of “Fair and Handsome” skin whitening cream and what seems like a metric ton of tin (mostly in dinner plate and foil form). At first the items appear to be nothing more than the cultural detritus of suburban life. But upon closer inspection the collection is perhaps one of the more honest — and humorous — depictions of South Asian culture in Canada, a rare look at the everyday life of Indo-Canada’s 99 per cent.

Described as the place “where culture, tradition and objects intersect” and part of the Toronto Now series, The Museum of Found Objects is the latest collaboration by Toronto-based artists Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten. The Museum started as an art exhibit running concurrently to the Maharaja show and through the support of SAVAC, the South Asian Visual Arts Centre, it is now available as a collectors book of the same name.

If there was ever a catalogue of the generic South Asian experience in Canada, this would be it. Collated in a manner faithful to the exhibit and culled from Gerard Street East, Toronto’s so-called “Little India” neighbourhood as well as the strip mall bazaars and suburban boutiques of neighbouring Brampton, Mississauga, Markham and Malton, the Museum is a delightfully self-aware display of banal utility; the rituals we encounter living inside a typical South Asian home. Photographed on a white carpet background, a plastic ruler handily gives these items a sense of scale and reinforces just how humble, cheap and disposable they all are.

SM set up a separate dining room in the garage to help with the overflow

Anonymous observational captions accompanying many of the items provide a sly sense of context. For example, “RM still has performance anxiety from his parents demanding that he play music in front of visiting guests at every occasion” lies underneath a plastic grade school recorder. These snippets serve as gentle hints that the South Asian story goes beyond frugal immigrant domesticity. It is, like so many others, built around family and the foibles that characterize them. An elaborate 16 piece set of plastic containers states that, “It has been ten years and JM’s mother is still asking for her ‘good Tupperware’ back.” A tin of Royal Dansk cookies has toured a subdivision: “RC re-gifted the tin to NF who re-gifted the tin to MP who re-gifted the tin to AP who re-gifted the tin back to RC. Full circle!” A pair of innocuous-seeming trousers indicts, declaring “NF said that the first thing she did when she got married was to throw away her husband’s old smelly pants.”

The Museum is actually a “museological critique” according to Haema Sivanesan, the former executive director of SAVAC. She commissioned Farooq and Linschooten to do the exhibit after seeing a similar project in Istanbul, Turkey during that city’s year as a “European Cultural Capital” (Farooq splits his time between Toronto, Amsterdam and Istanbul). In stark contrast to the pomp and ceremony of the Maharaja show, the Museum of Found Objects “brought fresh air into the discussion” says Farooq. “When we try to represent specific cultures we can’t only focus on the precious and the great — we also have to focus on the everyday and the mundane in order to really give dignity to these cultures.”

In his laconic, thinking-out-loud manner, Farooq says there’s a danger in solely showing India in a particular light. “If we only represent Indian culture as opulent, then it pulls people out of everyday life and puts them into a place of study or a place of otherness.” “But,” he laughs “if we all use this sort of toilet brush it democratizes it and acknowledges that nobody is any more or any less special than anyone else.”

Inspired by Cartier

While some items have an expendable quality to them, others are quietly ornate examples of design meeting tradition meeting mass production, such as an encased replica of Amritsar’s Golden Temple that lights up when plugged in. These humble charms underscore Virginia Postrel’s point in The Substance of Style that “not only monuments but the humblest of objects increasingly embody fine design.” Postrel argues that since “the line between art and artifacts is not always so rigid,” not everything has to have the imprint of Steve Jobs to be both graceful and functional at the same time.

On positioning the Museum adjacent to the Maharaja exhibit, Sivanesan acknowledges a “gold and lice” image that typically dogs depictions of India in the expositionist context; of narratives oscillating between highly localized majesty versus misery on a vast, almost stupefying, scale (almost perfectly epitomized by the first half of the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). “There is a tendency to historicize a culture like India’s and there is a tendency to essentialize what South Asia is” according to Sivanesan. SAVAC itself emerged as an artist-run centre in 1997 in response to the traditional mandates of places like the AGO and the ROM, with a mission to “critically explore issues and ideas shaping South Asian identities and experiences.” The latter two may have been slow to recognize and support artistic talent amongst Toronto’s multicultural communities, but have since made strides “opening up to diverse communities” she says. Thus, to its credit, the exhibit wasn’t in outright opposition to the showcased-nature of the AGO exhibit, but fully endorsed by the institution.

In contrast to the increasingly stylized, affluent and consumer-centric images of India as evinced by Toronto’s hosting of the Indian International Film Academy Awards in June, Sivanesan suggests its now up to local artists like Farooq to carry this momentum forward in an increasingly sophisticated South Asian arts scene and truly reflect the lived experiences of the Indo-Canadian 99 per cent.
The Museum of Found Objects is available for sale at Art Metropole (788 King St. W) and SAVAC (401 Richmond St. W). SAVAC is encouraging individual South Asian artists in Toronto, Hamilton, Burlington, Oshawa and Whitby seeking to present works in an exhibition to apply for the Exhibition Assistance Programme through the Ontario Arts Council here.