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Posts Tagged ‘2012’

Design & politics & newspapers who fire cartoonists for mocking pipeline companies

Sunday, December 30th, 2012

Well it’s the last day of 2012, the end of another alarming year in a string of alarming years. These are not times to be proud of in Vancouver, in British Columbia or especially in Canada.

Still, the First Nations-led movement known as Idle No More is a sign of hope that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in serious trouble.

Pack horse trip in the Northern Rockies: Muskwa-Kechika

Monday, July 9th, 2012

[Update: The Globe and Mail has finally run the story about our trip. Wilderness guide and Globe travel writer Bruce Kirkby came along on our leg of the ride.]

I just spent two weeks out of internet range, riding through the remote Northern Rockies on horseback. The expedition was led by guide Wayne Sawchuk who grew up in Northern BC, once worked as a logger and hunting guide and is now a wilderness guide and environmentalist.

This Blog

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest.

As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board."

As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more

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Book in progress: Habitat

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

Posts Tagged ‘2012’

Design & politics & newspapers who fire cartoonists for mocking pipeline companies

Pack horse trip in the Northern Rockies: Muskwa-Kechika

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