New Discussion 4

Discussing films with my cousin

He: Media is a very passive form of consumption, there is no interaction - when you are sitting in a movie, there is no social interaction. People interact after the movie, right? During the movie, you don't interact with each other in a theatre. So movie going is a social experience, movie watching is a especially a very personal experience. In the home it is different, you can pause, you can discuss, you can do everything...in a theatre, people will be... "shhh..." and then you are just watching the movie. So that's why when we go for team activities, we never go to movies, We are like, it is almost an anti-social thing, because all you are doing is sitting for two hours watching a screen and not talking to each other. So that is why we have stopped going to movies with office going people.... and that's when I started realizing that movie watching is an extremely anti-social experience.

Me: No, but going back to the earlier point . The point I was trying to make was not for choice or angst or something, the point I was trying to make is how movie shapes the society. how they influence the society.

He: There is a huge influence of movies in society. All these Disney movies are. . .you want your life to be perfect, right? Now this Barbie doll, why barbie doll? Why don't you give somebody something else, a girl, why don't you give a girl a circuit board? why do you give her a barbie doll? Why that stereotype? May be the girl does not like the barbie doll, may be she likes something else. And where did barbie come from - it was a Disney character.

Me: Exactly, people start identifying themselves with the stereotypes. And sometimes people assert their identities through stereotypes. They get more and more legitimized.

He: I mean I hate Hollywood movies, the mainstream Hollywood movies are very stupid. I mean I can watch a bad Hindi movie, but I cannot watch a bad English movie. The movies that they make, the studio movies are so pathetic...so everybody is like "have you seen transformers..." I have no interest in transformers." Some Hollywood movies, as much as I can. And the trouble is that all these big Hollywood producers are coming in India and they are going to bring in the same kinds of movies in India.

Me: Yeah, but the verdict is that the Indian common man is so frustrated by his own life, that he wants to escape from reality.

He: Yeah, you know for example the movie Gaban, is it is about hardships in city life, the one of the 1970s that has the song "seene mein jalan...." Why will a common man want to go and see it? Why would I want to see the misery of my life on screen?

Me: I don't know why, but see, when you see such movies, the screen suddenly becomes a reflection...

He: Yeah so he is like "why do I want to see the misery of my life on screen? I am living it, I dont want to see it over and over again. I am living that misery right now."
That is what I think goes on in that person's mind: "I am living this miserable life, I know how bad it is, why do I want to see it?"

Me: Of course, certainly, but the thing is that it is meant to make the person question oneself.

He: When  the stomach is full, you will think about these things!

Me: No but that is not always true, because that is to say that the common man does not have any common intelligence.

He: No, he may have it, but I am saying that his time is limited.

Me: No, I don't mean to say that he does not have the time to invest in reflection. I don't mean to use reflection as a way of intellectualizing, but as a way to recourse your own life, or your own decisions.

He: y--ea--h. The thing is that people are so caught up in living their lives.

Me: The whole idea of a mirror is that it takes you out of yourself so that you can look at yourself objectively.

He: Holding a mirror to yourself is the most frightening that that you will ever do. And that is why people don't want to do it. They don't want to know what they are going to discover.

Me: Oh that is a very well put ... idea.

He: So you may want to, you may think holding a mirror to oneself is what you should do to your life, but it is very hard to do.


my cousin is a computer engineer.

anti-social: he meant socially passive

New Terms and Discussions 3

Out of box experience (OOBE): The OOBE experience is the design of the set of emotions that you go through when you unpack and reveal a new object to yourself. The narrative that gets created in the step by step opening of a box sliding and flipping layers of covering and plastic to decipher a newly purchased product offers a thrill, which is carefully thought of. In the industry, designers give it a lot of importance, and is known as the design of "Out Of Box Experience".

Lane boulder: A car on a lane on a freeway / highway driving slow resulting in all the remaining cars that follow to slow down, eventually causing traffic.

Small term pain for long term gain: The phrase is self explanatory, but quite well put.

Self help industry: Marketing and designing products in a human-starved developed economy as something that can be assembled and constructed by the "self", eventually turning every product or idea into self-help business model.

Blurring the disciplines

disciplinary -
concerning or enforcing discipline.

multidisciplinary - 

combining or involving several academic disciplines or professional specializations in an approach to a topic or problem.

interdisciplinary -

of or relating to more than one branch of knowledge.

transdisciplinary - 

connotes a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach

cross-disciplinary -
Team science initiatives are designed to promote collaborative, and often cross-disciplinary (which includes multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary) approaches to answering research questions about particular phenomena

On knowing

He who knows and knows that he knows,
He is wise, follow him.

He who knows and knows not that he knows,
He is asleep, awaken him.

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not,
He is a fool, shun him.

He who knows not and knows that he knows not,
He is a child, teach him.

Arabian proverb

New Terms, New Discussions 2

Water-cooler conversations: Random trailing conversations that take place over a cup of tea in India, resulting into spaces like the adda in old Kolkata, or the katta in Mumbai happen near the water-cooler in offices in the USA. While much limited, these conversations are thus called to be "water cooler" conversations.

Apple picking: The burglary of products like i-phones, i-pads and so on, manufactured by Apple. Apple picking is a famous phrase in college campuses like Yale (read city of New Haven) that are notorious for its crime rates and thefts. The phrase is a take on the activity of picking real edible apples that people engage in within the US countryside farms during the apple season.

Gamification: The process of turning different activities into a model of gaming in order to learn or de-learn aspects of a practice is called gamification. More can be found on wikipedia.

Paper Publications: My cousin informed me how 50% of peer reviewed papers published in journals are bogus and that there was as study where experts involved in this survey were not able to replicate the experiments under the same conditions, as published in the journals. The paradox of this system is that professors and doctoral students can prove their credibility only by research and publications. Under sure production pressure, tremendous amount is published, much of which is hardly re-traceable. Re-check your beliefs the next time you read, "A recent research from Yale / Harvard / MIT shows that..." It might just be a sample set that is carefully curated for a desired result, or else, a well worded paper hiding its biggest flaws!

On Positive thinking: Another recent book documented that it has been proven that the typical understanding of 'positive thinking' is actually foolish, since it is a fake mask one makes oneself wear to feel good. Being optimistic is different than positive thinking.
To constantly keep telling yourself that you are good is not necessarily the way to go about boosting.
On the other hand, for all we know, pessimists are more realistic people, because they take their decisions based on facts and real circumstances.
Read more here.

San Jose Museum of Art

Below are some images from the San Jose Museum of Art that I visited today. The museum has a modest collection, with a great variety of art from the artists primarily from the west coast. I do not have much to add about the museum because it is a really small museum, more like an art gallery that has some well displayed work! I struck on conversation with the docent tour guide there who has been offering tours within the museum since the last 20 years (1995). She told me that most people like to look at the art works on their own, so she ends up going up to people to find out what they like about the art works they are seeing within the museum space. 

I also visited the Contemporary Jewish Art museum in San Francisco yesterday, that I will probably include in a separate post with more about the city, sometime! Meanwhile, here are images from my visit today.

The Chaos of Representation

A few hours ago I discovered that the 'Indian Architect & Builder' - a popular architecture magazine from India allows you to access several of its past issues online - they have been chronicled on issuu.com. Since I have not had the opportunity to keep in touch with any contemporary architecture happenings in India for the past two years, I decided to browse through a couple of published issues of the magazine. I looked through some of these issues noting the cheesy captions, reeled through the catchy images and skimmed through the texts. The subjects were all familiar - catchphrases, compositions and vocabularies - all presenting the chaos of representation within the field of architecture in India.

When magazines invite architects to write, they play lenient on their submissions by asking the in-house staff to not judge them for their writing. I have been a part of this process, and was asked by my editor to keep in mind that "they are not writers." However, the question, I feel is not about writing, but about the methodical deployment of an idea. Most architects in India work in a hybrid fashion drawing visual ideas from multiple sources, which tie together into their building designs inconsequentially and many a times unconsciously. I will not be able to point out specific examples, but if you take a look at the building plans, elevations and sections, along with the strategic ways in which their photographs are shot after their completion, you will immediately realize the predominant ideas influencing them. A trained historian will be able to critique it more efficiently.

The written language in which architects express themselves is inherently problematic. They do not necessarily deploy their designs in what we conventionally understand as "methodical", and thus considered that the making of architecture in India is much organic, constrained by multiple forces during the process of construction, where design decisions are continually changed and developed (as against western practices where designs are frozen and lived by till the end), it becomes inherently difficult to not only map these influences, but also make sense and rationalize much of the decisions verbally. I am making claims that I am not substantiating, for I will need to sit with an archive. But if one compares the representation of a particular project in text, image and captions, it is hard to put them together, for I believe that each of these are imagined through different streams of thoughts and directed to appeal different kinds of masses! 

The interesting aspect is that over the past two years, I was trained to do all things methodically: the reading of a book, an image within the book as well as the text accompanying it. In addition, I was being taught to write methodically, step by step, considering and critiquing the images and its description in text. This has brought me to analyze the way images and text work with each other. There is an established discipline, a structure of appreciating or critiquing images, just like text. Thus I have gotten into the obsessive habit of analyzing image and text "methodically". Such jargon, ideally must be edited out of the magazine production house to maintain quality.

Probably I must specify that my observations are framed for and only IA&B, and I know the internal workings of the magazine for I worked with them for 4 months to understand their organization. But having said that, there are many good things that come out of the magazine once in a while. They, I am sure, try hard to bind architectural ideologies in India together into a coherent theme, but it fails them time and again. But what then should be an appropriate format for documenting architecture of a country that is so plural in its outlook that violates the linear form of the conventional book, a traditional serially organized magazine?

I think the format of the magazine is not fully able to capture the diversity of the architecture and architectural practice in India. It needs to be a scrap-book of sorts that has the feeling of the ephemeral, as well as the permanent - with pages of different sizes bound together, something having a childlike quality - within the framework of which naiive attitudes of building become innocent, and more playful to be engaged with? I am merely trying to think aloud a medium that will best capture the content of contemporary India in its structure. That will call for a structure that turns the chaos of representation into an intelligent artwork.

Crucial Conversations

Each of us enters conversations with our own opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences about the topic at hand. this unique combination of thoughts and feelings makes up our personal pool of meaning. This pool not only informs us but also propels our every action.

As people sit through an open discussion where ideas are shared, they take part in the free flow of meaning.

from Crucial Conversations

New Terms, New Discussions

Muscle Memory: On discussion between cricket and baseball, Siddharth was talking how inspite of the similarity of the two games, the way you are used to hold the bat is the key to play the game. Muscles thus, have a memory, bodies thus, behave in certain specific ways.

Dogfood: My cousin was explaining me the way many tech companies go about evaluating their own products. Many CEOs would go by the question - "Will you eat your own dogfood," essentially asking "Will you use your own product."

Frustration Free Packing: Going nuts over opening a recently ordered telephone shower, my cousin was frustrated after using all kinds of objects to undo its plastic case. He thus told me about the concept of packaging things in a way such that they are convenient to unpack, open (read without the use of external objects like sharps, knives, scissors, too much pulling, crushing, tearing, and so on). Amazon, my cousin informs, markets a lot of products for its frustration free packaging.

On Intuitive Design: Another question we stumbled upon is the idea behind intuitive design in mobile phones. We debated what would it mean for mobile phones to make its design and use intuitive. We discussed that it involves translating a host of cognitive object-action relationship and behaviour into the virtual world? It is about transferring the real physical space of the object into the virtual world, trying to keep the engagement of the user still similar. While some linkages are certainly broken (for example our tactile understanding of objects and things that are no longer physical), they are replaced by newer visual or other cognitive definitions. For example, the replacement of paper letters and envelopes by e-mails as communication devices is cognitively established in the virtual space by icons that will consist of "envelop", "pencil" and such other diagrams. What intuitively is at work here is the visual mental association, and not the tactility of the object, which is actually taken over by the computer screen and keyboard. The paper translates as a flat rectangular outline box on the screen, sometimes even virtually textured or ruled. However, the keyboard certainly fundamentally changes the way in which we write. Thus, an intermediate level of intuition is achieved where the material qualities of paper and pen are ascertained through their symbolic existence.

(more terms to follow)

Stanford University

I find fascinating to visit University campuses. Over the last two weeks, I had the opportunity to visit University of California, Berkeley as well as Stanford University. 

Here are some pictures from our visit to Stanford. Considered to be the ivy league of the West coast in USA, like the ones of the North East, Stanford's physical character is absolutely different. The first impression that all of us got on entering the campus is that of a hotel resort - with large lawns, topiary gardens and sloping roof in clay tiles - the university's image was nothing short of a holiday resort. The school is situated in Palo Alto, one of the most prosperous suburbs of the Bay Area. The suburb is known for its high end family homes neighbourhoods.

One is greeted with a large 'S' for Stanford grown in red leaves with sinuous serpentine curves - something which had a tendril-like curling quality. We all were unanimously put off by its execution, and in our own exposure and growing up in the environment of the ivy leagues of the north-east, this aesthetic expression was laughable. Apparently this landscaping of the 'S' keeps on changing every-time. 

The school buildings are nestled within the green, although flat landscape, where the campus tries hard to be stately and modern at the same time. One gets an uncanny feeling of tropical ashrams, with almost outscaled courtyards centered with large evergreen spreading trees. I don't have much to really talk about this place, since we didnot have an opportunity to wander much inside the buildings. Except that we did sneak into the D-school. 

Stanford is famously know for its interdisciplinary D-school, ie, the Design School. The nature of the school was like an open space, where different kinds of people can collaborate on problems through the platform of design. There was a looming blandness of the digitality of cyberspace in the actual physical environment of the D-school. Flat white surfaces to be written upon, movable furniture, post-its, cubicles and limpy blackboards - everything as etheral and unstable as the flash of pages on a website composed the atmosphere. The wateriness or the fluidity of all objects in space took me some time to appreciate, although I wasn't sure if I got it right! 

Somehow, the post-it aesthetic (people writing mini lists and thoughts on small square colourful stick-ons pasted onto the walls) is highly overrated. Look at every design thinking wesbite today and you will find a representational picture of "thinking" in the form of a constellation of post-it pink-fluorescent green-yellow notes! To sum it up, they have literally "reduced" design thinking to keywords that can be contained into strips of paper. I have a whole theory of the post-it aesthetic, which I am being bombarded with every now and then as I visit these design places. I wonder if they have tie-ups with the post-it note manufacturing industry!

In any case, I think I might visit the campus once again to know it better and also look at its art-gallery. I have noticed that the West Coast is much behind than the North East in the US in its cultural production and aesthetic standards. Rather, much of the thrust is on the aesthetic of the virtual space.  There are some awkward gaps in the physical spaces here, which I hope I am able to articulate eventually on sustained observation of this place.