William Gibson

William Gibson, Douglas Coupland and other Vancouverites speak out

October 12, 2009

A number of Vancouver’s most high-profile cultural figures have spoken out recently about the British Columbia government’s recent assault on arts and culture.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

LSD was the gateway drug to long, belted sweaters

June 10, 2009

Overheard dialogue on Twitter, if Twitter is capable of such a thing as dialogue:

GammaCounter: Seriously lamenting that I missed out on the era of long Belted Sweaters https://bit.ly/belts
GreatDismal: LSD was the gateway drug to long, belted sweaters

For those of you who don’t know, GreatDismal is fellow Vancouverite William Gibson.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Street Use – “The street finds its own uses for things.”

December 9, 2008

This post is about design in the broadest sense, as a process of problem-solving that leads to interesting and strangely compelling solutions. Above is an improvised streetcleaner in China found on Street Use, a truly fascinating blog about DIY and general inventiveness.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Steampunk

October 11, 2008

From left, Deacon Boondini, the Great Gatsby and Giovanni James of the James Gang, a neovaudevillean performance troupe in NYC in full steampunk gear.

I’m not the first to blog about this, but I couldn’t not jump into the fray.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

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 ____________________________________

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. ____________________________________

William Gibson

William Gibson, Douglas Coupland and other Vancouverites speak out

LSD was the gateway drug to long, belted sweaters

Street Use – “The street finds its own uses for things.”

Steampunk

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