P'unk Avenue Window

I want to tell people how to run their businesses. Like agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s irreverent consulting for Burger King—the ads featuring the King with the plastic head, the motocross chicken video game, talk of them writing a movie staged in an apartment above a BK, inventing new menu items and dictating their prices, Meat on top of Meat on top of Meat—I want to help a bank remap their offerings and help them be profitable in a post-apocolyptic banking universe.

1. One may have a rapport with his or her Bank Teller, but waiting in line at a bank is the worst. It’s laughable that for all the digitalization of commerce we spend a reciprocally large amount of time waiting for tables at restaurants, in the checkout line, the DMV (all of whom’s business could be conducted online), and so forth. Lines at those irreplaceable real world venues are getting longer. With regards to banking, ING has been quite successful at being paperless/branchless/painless. Unless you need to pay bills online…

2. Banks need the best websites. Intuitive e-billing, better graphs, trending, pdf creation. I use PNC bank for checking, their Bill Center is only OK…

3. It doesn’t make it easy to have a free overdraft protection solution (you had to pay to open ANOTHER credit card, I gave up). My various accounts (checking, savings, money markets) are unlinked. When I give them my money they put it in one large pool, why can I not do the same…

4. My main recommendation is to allow for account partitions. Instead of thinking in terms of Checking, Savings, etc. I should have one pool of money. If this is tricky under Government banking regulations, simply allow it to be visualized in this way. It should all earn the same competitive savings interest rate (ING is currently a cute 1.5%). It should be partitioned into custom pie slices: rent/mortgage, bills, tax savings (if you’re a 1099er), personal savings, pocket money, and any other useful partitions. Give me a simple interface to adjust partitions or add new ones. Perhaps I’d like to split my savings into rainy day and vacation funds…

5. Give me a line of credit and a credit card based on my cash flow. Make the rate fair and adjustable based on my payment schedule. If I don’t feel slighted by rising rates or bully late fees I won’t jump ship and get a new 0% card every year…

6. Incorporate the better features of Mint—comparative graphs and charts of my spending each month, long and short term trends. Don’t make me think, show me where my money is, what it’s been doing, why I should give it to you…

To put a weary metaphor to rest, I will do my best to never again refer to absorbing the internet as drinking from a fire hose.

At first I was reluctant to use Google Reader. Alex and John convinced me it was the civilized way to keep up with blog reading. I bought in and bought hard. I really love using the j and k keys to motor through unread posts. It’s something like elective torture a la A Clockwork Orange. I don’t even need those eyelid clips.

This has been an ongoing conversation lately among my peers. Are there repercussions from letting all of this stir together? I actually read/browsed/scanned four thousand items in the last four weeks. That doesn’t count links emailed to me, the New York Times, images shared in our work chat, and anything from real life. I still have some idea of “my visual style” and “my personal politics” at the end of it, but I feel wary.

Searching for influences in a piece of design used to be something like spotting a familiar sample in a Public Enemy song. Now, I find, it’s more like trying to keep up with the stream of provenance in Girl Talk.

A newish field of art has recently sprung a leak from the hose (last last time, I swear). I don’t know if it has a name, but it’s similar to the hybrid Curation Is Creation idea I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Joachim Schmid spent years as a photo archivist and collector of found photography. More recently he has turned to searching Flickr for torrents of images sharing uncanny visual similarities. Self-portraits of feet, plates of food, objects shot in harsh flash.

Penelope Umbrico has made several similar bodies of work, one including thousands and thousands of Flickr sunsets. Another consists entirely of the flash reflected in television screens for sale on Craig’s List. The prints were then sold on Craig’s List for the asking price of the original TV. I bought one of those, it’s nice.

In some ways this is all very exciting. All of this information flows over me and it’s warm and fuzzy. I’m less confident, however, with my retention. I star/delicious/share the good ones, but they are buried nonetheless. I suppose it’ll just be refreshing to leave it all behind and retire to a mountain house some day. It will have very little furniture, and plenty of books that take a month to read.

This post was going to be called Designing Under The Influence, but I realized that sounded familiar for some reason.

When is it too much?

I won’t bore you with too much of a history lesson, but through a certain sequence of events we (you and I) have taken over the role of industry (since industry totally sucked in 2008).

For the purpose of this post, “media” and “technology” are going to mean the same thing. (Everyone and their mom should totally read Understanding Media, it’s excellent.) They both represent any extension of humans, like a wheel lets us move around quicker and easier, extending our range. Paper, the same thing, you can give a note to a messenger and he or she can deliver your thoughts to someone very far away. All media until the telegraph had an explosive effect on humanity—better roads made for faster travel, the printing press let thoughts travel those roads, money allowed for power transfer and commerce to spread across regions. This explosion facilitated nationalism and shortly thereafter imperialism.

Electric media had the opposite effect, the complete implosion of culture. The telegraph connected people across the atlantic, making global synchronization possible. The radio, telephone, movies, television, cell phone all furthered the trend.

The addition of the Internet to this equation has curbed the implosion, or at least interfered with the trajectory of all those imploding particles. Many of us no longer rely on strictly one-directional broadcast media for news and other information. The internet has facilitated a retribalization of culture, not based on geography, but interest. I can read the hipster pinko news and chat it up with my post-conceptual photographer friends, while someone else can join a vintage rifles of famous assassinations message board.

One more step back before the final step forward. All this media is primarily used for political power, the variable is how it derives influence. Mechanical technology: making war and moving that war around faster. Early electric technology: making sure the war is going well because it’s really far away now. Broadcast electric technology: unify the masses by entertaining them with all the same entertainment, it will create fraternity. Consumerism: the war is over, let’s use all this industry to sell things to people and keep the economy going.

A long long time ago we all made everything we personally needed for survival (or at least someone in the family made everything). Then we got caught up in all that war and imperialism. Then we didn’t know how to make things, but we could go to the store and get everything we need. But we felt a longing for making things. In the last two decades there has been a trend of “creative consumption” or “authentic consumption.” Thinkers like Sharon Zukin posited that we buy the sneakers that express how we feel about ourselves, shopping is a creative act.

More recently this has changed. Buying culture wasn’t enough. We still feel empty. We need to create. We have entered Post-Consumerism. I refuse to buy stuff for the logo, the logos are all crappy. The shoe companies don’t design their own shoes, they have contests to have us design them. The number of tshirts has outnumbered the people buying tshirts.

So, we have in-a-way reentered an age of localized production and mass creation, but not for the same reason. I don’t create out of necessity, I don’t create for the process, I create in order to be consumed. We enter the world of Post-Modernism, scary. We all need a consumer base. We all are that consumer base. I have a flat file full of my friends’ art. Geoff has two. We have taken over the role of industry. I can buy handmade and feel good about it. The authenticity in consumption is restored. But only as long as we keep up both ends of the bargain. We are producer and consumer, so we can’t stop doing either. The economy would collapse.

Thus enter the Weapons of Mass Reproduction. We need factories: magcloud.com,
blurb.com, lulu.com, cafepress.com, threadless.com. We need storefronts: blurb.com, lulu.com, threadless.com, etsy.com, shopify.com, our own wordpresses. We need consumers: us!

The start of a new year allows us all the chance to reflect on all the things we did in the last one. In this age of ubiquitous data collection methods, this habit manifests itself ways that can be exciting and sublime.

Perhaps the most classic example of this is the Feltron Annual Report. This year’s edition is maybe less visually impressive than in years past, but it’s still both a beautiful demonstration of information design and a fascinating look into someone else’s life. Really spend some time going through his data and in your head you might find yourself imagining all those dinner parties, cab rides and drinks out with friends. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a book of statistics worth? Can a year really been distilled into eight pages?

I found myself even more excited about Feltron’s progress with his Daytum project. Still in private beta, it opens up the tools for any user to collect this same kind of data about themselves. Simple and elegant, just like the Feltron report itself. (Mycrocosm is another tool that does this.) And people are into it:

“It’s a natural progression from people sharing things like movies, photos and videos,” says Dennis Crowley, founder of Dodgeball, an early social-networking service for mobile phones which was sold to Google in 2005. “What’s left to share? Basic data.”

Even more: this year, Dopplr is sending personal annual reports to their members that show “data, visualisations and factoids” about their travels for 2008.

For my money, the most beautiful of these long zoom moments come in a form that is a hybrid between this data sharing and those more typical mediums from which it has progressed.

Every day in 2007 my friend Sonja took five seconds of video. She then edited them into a single, linear timeline and exhibited them in a Swiss storefront. The result was wonderfully effective. I can only imagine what kinds of detailed memories will be evoked when she goes back to watch it in a decade or so. Really, who needs a journal anymore? (I’m still waiting on her 2008 montage to be finished.)

For 2009, I have my eye on One Sound Each Day. It’s these tiniest of details that can really snap the bigger picture into focus.

What other year-end recaps have you been enjoying?

Raise your hands in the air if you love t-shirts.

Now stomp your left foot if you’ve ever rummaged through rack after rack of dusty second hands in a thrift-store-salvation-army-friends-closet to find that perfectly ironic, exquisitely vintage, super soft, one-of-a-kind tee.

Jiggle your arms if you’ve purchased something from Threadless or Busted Tees.

While jiggling your arms and stomping that foot, tap your belly rhythmically if you lust after every color of 50/50 American Apparel t-shirt (dirty sexy filthy mmmm). Keep doing this, don’t stop. This dance is just getting started.

Stick out your tongue and blow a raspberry if you have shirts that are ten plus years old and the armpits have fallen out, the collar has disintegrated, and your nipples are visible in even the darkest out-to-dinner settings. Does simply owning this t-shirt piss off your girlfriend (ex-girlfriend, haha)? – and you are wearing it out anyway!

Bob your head.

Bob your head if you can think of at least three people that refer to you as their friend with too many f*cking t-shirts. Yes! And just between you and me, this can be our secret, because you know we’re dancing together and all – wink at me twice if you bought a shirt online today – maybe it was during your lunch break .

Drop it to the floor if you screen print your own shirts. Buy band shirts. Sell band shirts. Kiss the fans of the bands that sell the shirts. Boutique. unique. limited run. small press. Internet. t-shirts.

Read t-shirt blogs?! Everybody scream!!! Haha.

Point to yourself if you ever said out loud “I wish that was on a shirt.” Now point to your friend if you then Googled it and there it was!

Now stop jiggling those arms, breath in. Slow that foot, relax your mouth, breath out. No longer tapping your belly, break down the head bob, your smallest movements. your sweaty t-shirt – though it’s not the weather for it. Feels good.

I really don’t think I have a t-shirt problem.

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The soundtrack for this post is Jerk It by Thunderheist