This, by the way…

is what happens when you let paid, professional journalism die a slow and painful death:

You get wonderful insights like this from the University of Iowa’s creative writing program.

Health Humanities: Design’s Next Frontier

My alma mater, the University of Alberta, just hosted a fascinating exhibit that melds art, science and medicine together.  Entitled “Insight: Visualizing Health Humanities” the exhibition showed multiple manifestations of design & health coming together in vastly different—and highly personal—interpretations.

The 32 submissions in gallery of the Fine Arts Building ranged in format, focus and message: from the poetry of a cancer survivor to a 3D diorama of a seniors-enabled home to a video on Mongolian spiritual rituals to something called the “Phantasmagoric Amphygorium of Dr. Wybury.” Each represented how human needs relate to healthcare and the practice of medicine.  In other words: health humanities.

As noted by Dr. Alan Bleakley, a professor of medical education in the UK, “the culture of medicine has little tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.” This is a culture is built on precision, analysis and reliability.  In other words, the opposite of “medical arts,” which are intuitive, immeasurable and subjective (in my mind, this harks back to Rotman Dean Roger Martin’s “reliability vs. validity” paradigm).  Whereas the steady march of medical science in the 20^th Century removed doubt to determine answers (Bleakley cites the use and overuse of medical screenings as a day-to-day example) medical arts are making a comeback in the 21^st, reveling in their inherently ambiguous nature.

As Insight demonstrates, if we reframe the medical arts as health humanities, then we are left with a truly staggering number of influences to comprehend: “literature, narrative medicine, history of medicine, philosophy and ethics, medical anthropology, medical sociology, environment and health, art, visual culture, health design & communications, drama, music” to list just a few.  And as every graduate student learns early on, any particular field breaks down into further levels of exploration.  Co-curator and assistant design professor Bonnie Sadler-Takach cites the visual arts, which alone “encompasses health information design, health communications, knowledge translation, information and data visualization informatics, visual research and discourse analysis, visual rhetoric, semiotics, visual representation, visual grammar, visual literacy, visual communication, visual culture, visual identity design, public graphics and more.”

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The idea of using art for therapeutic, restorative or palliative purposes is a relatively recent one, going back to the 1930’s & 40’s.   Over the last 5 years the U of A has made concentrated efforts to explore, blend and crossbreed these disciplines.  This, according to Pamela Brett-Maclean, the director of the university’s Art & Humanities in Health & Medicine Program, makes this exhibit unique: “This is the very first time design has been used to examine the potential of an emerging field (such as health humanities).”

Underscoring this point, Sadler-Takach  said the idea was to have not only artists but anyone connected with the U of A (one of three prominent health humanity programs in Canada) submit works that “weren’t just living in the design space, or weren’t just living in the health space.” That’s not to say designers didn’t play a part–more than 60 visual communications design students helped visualize and brand the project.  “As a designer, this seemed to be an optimal project to see what health humanities could be and what healthy societies can be.”

With pieces ranging from the plight of homelessness to therapeutic journeys on bicycles to feminist critiques of body imagery, critics might say the exhibit lacks focus but that is precisely the point.  The goal was to challenge conventional models around health and wellness so the curators pointedly refused to limit what expressions could be submitted. “We wanted very much not to fit everything into little spaces but rather have the viewer make their own connections,” says Sadler-Takach.  “We had a feeling there were people working in different areas who maybe felt isolated or didn’t quite fit in a specific space but they knew it was important and compelling so we thought we could bring some folks together to see how it could add up.  Its called an exploratory exhibition to translate  knowledge in ways that are innovative, accessible and engaging.  The third member of the curatorial team, Aidan Rowe says “This breadth of form of submission and the wide range of exhibitors speak to how far this nascent field has progressed under individual pursuit.”

16 different faculties and units across the university were represented at Insight.  Sadly, dentistry was not represented.  As the son & brother of dentists, I can kind of see why that is.  However if they’re ever going to make a visit to the dentist less scary than the fear of death itself (and make a dent in this morbid urban legend), then participating in this conversation would be a start.

Next year, the organizers plan to stage a similar exhibit but open it up to submissions beyond the U of A.  Ultimately, they hope Insight can open the door to a possible undergraduate certificate or even a Master of Arts degree in medical health humanities.

Canada’s missing ingredient: creativity

The Edmonton Journal‘s Ray Turchansky interviewed a local economist out with a new book about what’s missing from the Canadian economy: creativity.

Speaking with Alberta Treasury Branch‘s chief economist Todd Hirsch, Turchansky notes that for far too long, we have relied on our status as “hewers of wood, drawers of water” to fuel our prosperity (no pun intended, Alberta). Even without the current resource & commodities boom that’s driving Western Canada and keeping the country as a whole afloat during these difficult economic times, its been evident for quite some time that Canada suffers from a “productivity gap” compared to our southern neighbors.

This gap is literally visible in the US’s consistently higher GDP per capita and I think it’s also intuitively felt when companies and talented workers migrate south to get a bigger bang for their buck, though admittedly, this gap now seems to be closing for the first time ever.

(It ain’t because we’re suddenly innovating– a contemporaneous piece in the Globe and Mail cites the usual frustrations SMEs have in Canada: small venture capital market, taxation structures, a lack of coordination between public & private agencies, few mentors and weak commercialization processes.)

Much of this is a result of our own complacency.  Hirsch, who looks a bit like Rick Moranis with windswept hair, says “we need to stop asking the government to make us productive and creative.” He & Robert Roach have authored a book that tackles this issue: The Boiling Frog Dilemma: Saving Canada From Economic Decline. The title’s a bit alarmist but he does make a few salient points.

Hirsch offers some interesting anecdotes around creativity and the subsequent lack thereof, such as our increasingly rigid educational system (when “our crayons are taken away”) and the Overseas Experience (i.e. “Gap Year” ) that Australians and New Zealanders regularly take in between finishing school and starting work to refresh and rejuvenate themselves.

This is not to say that Canadians aren’t creative–witness everything from the invention of insulin to the construction of the Canadarm to Research In Motion–but for the most part Hirsch says we are too comfortable in our abundance.  And it’s not like the opportunities aren’t there: as one of the world’s energy hotspots, Hirsch says Alberta should be leaders in areas of relevance such as carbon capture & storage technology.

(my favourite example)

Interestingly, the article finishes by looking at what he considers the three components of applied creativity: invention, innovation & design.  Innovation is a tired, overused term while design is the easiest and most economical to build upon, according to Hirsch. (I would posit that design itself is in danger of being beaten into a cliché. Time for a new word but more on that later).

He cites the world’s number one firm as an example of how to “do” it right: “Apple doesn’t really invent anything, it just takes existing technology and adds tremendous design that people connect with.”

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.

Hello world!

Welcome to my WordPress blog site! Its my second time on here and I plan to build up the site with some content from my previous blogs and Internet incarnations, including going all the way back to the infamous Email That Almost Got Me Fired from 2005.  For now, its going to be all about the interesting things I find about design thinking, here in Canada and elsewhere.