How We Read

LeVar Burton, of Roots and Star Trek: Voyager fame, recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to to get his kid's show, Reading Rainbow, back on the air. It blew through its funding goal, hitting $1 million in pledges on the first day. One of the rewards available for crowdfunding backers is a free subscription to the new Reading Rainbow app, of course -- the way the kids read these days. It's also, not coincidentally, a business model, sold to classrooms on a subscription model to generate a potentially evergreen revenue source.

I've been absent from this blog for a few weeks because of another app, called Medium. Founded by the guys from Twitter, Medium is a long-form "content creation platform" with a "social dimension." It's a blog, connected to your Twitter account, that allows you to both write pieces and follow writers or topics you like to read. I put up two articles, similar to this blog, that present a case study of my Zip Tie Lounge Chair (Pt. 1, Pt. 2).

William HolmanJune 11, 2014writing, reading, medium, instapaper, longform, twitter, flipboard, oyster, kindle single, pulse, google readerComment

Michael Thonet

Over the last few weeks, I've been up late and wrestling with the roll-out of the Zip Tie Lounger, now available on OpenDesk. Specific design aside, the whole project was an experiment with process, looking into ways to design, distribute, and build physical products by moving around information instead of matter. For most of history, moving around matter wasn't much of an issue, as the limits of horse-drawn transportation limited any practical shipping radius. The clipper ship, then the railroad, then the truck, and now the container ship (or airplane) gradually expanded those radii until they encompassed the whole world.

In the course of my research, I mostly focused on IKEA as the modern extension of all these ideas, as they have brought flat-pack furniture to perhaps its truest expression of form. Along the way, they stole ideas from the best, combining big-box retail and old-fashioned catalog sales to bring their retail model to maximum efficiency. But IKEA, Sears Roebuck, and even OpenDesk have roots that run far deeper, back to the early part of the 19th century.

ELIOOO

Last year, the lady gave me a book for my birthday. At first, I didn't know what to think; it was a small, unassuming paperback with an indecipherable title -- ELIOOO -- written by an author I didn't recognize, Antonio Scarponi. But, as I flipped through the pages, it was clear to me that she had found something that knit together a number of design obsessions I had investigated since childhood, wrapped up in a package straight out of the new maker economy.

In fifth grade, I found the Kid's Whole Future Catalog in the school library and was forever warped by its vision of an integrated green future, where we all lived in arcologies and commuted in velocars. In 7th grade, for Mrs. Mason's geography class, we had to make a 3-foot square diorama of a working farm. Instead of patiently pasting toothpicks to replicate a hundred acres of petrochemically-fed corn, I made a survival pit greenhouse modeled after another library book. James Dekorne's prototype was a solar-heated, self-contained ecosystem that used compost tea to grow plants hydroponically. Rabbits in cages underneath the planters pumped the space full of CO2, which sped photosynthesis. A huge tilapia tank bred fish for eating and worked as thermal mass to store heat after the sun went down. The rabbit crap fed the compost heap, the fish water fed the hydroponic system, and on it went into a meta-hippie version of the Grand Unified Theory.

Shigeru Ban, Pritzker Laureate

About a week ago, Shigeru Ban was announced as the 2014 Pritzker Laureate. Established in 1979 by Jay and Cindy Pritzker, the yearly award honors a living architect for "whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture." The Pritzkers, native Chicagoans, made a fortune at the helm of the Hyatt hotel chain, and modeled the award on the Nobel prizes. Laureates receive a $100,000 cash prize and a bronze medallion.

In the past, the award has mostly honored older (at least in their sixties) architects for producing a solid collection of major buildings, pushing forward the field through form and theory. It's always been a sort of inside-baseball prize, for "architect's architects", those of weighty monographs and leaky roofs. Some, like Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, were better known for their writings and drawings, and used the validation of the prize to win some major commissions. Grumblers referred to them as "paper architects," more famous for unbuildable, extravagant thought experiments than built work. Ban has turned that sly derogative on its head, rising to acclaim because many of his buildings are literally made from paper.

Object Guerilla: The Book II

Some time ago on the OG blog, I was pleased to announce the completion of my first manuscript, a DIY guide to the tao of the guerilla designer. Nine months on, I figured it's about time I offered up a little update on the progress of my toddling manuscript as it navigates its way upstream.

Shortly after mailing off a stack paper representing nearly ten years of my work, me and the lady hopped in the car and lit out from Chicago, taking a 5,500 mile road trip through the Southwest. Upon return, we packed our belongings into a remarkably small cubic volume and moved back east, landing in Baltimore, land of pleasant living (and my birth), in August. And then came the edits.

Made in the U.S.A

Last night, I finally finished Made in the U.S.A: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing, by Vaclav Smil. It is a dense barrage of statistics, marshaled in support of a simple thesis, oft-repeated by politicians: the loss of American manufacturing has gutted the middle class, and, by extension, the economy as a whole in this country. However, unlike the politicians, Smil sees few ways to reverse this trend, and imagines a grim future of ever-expanding sovereign debt, energy shortages, a declining standard of living, and the loss of America's dominance in world affairs.

The book, put out by MIT Press, prominently features a quote from Bill Gates on the cover, who says "There's no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil." His Amazon page is studded with similarly glowing reviews, praising him as a (tending dystopian) futurist oracle. In an interview in Wired out last summer, he comes across as a gleeful contrarian, dismissing technology companies with a shrug. "Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there’s nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right?" His critique is pointed -- Apple employs 25,000 people in the U.S., the bulk in low-end retail jobs; FoxConn has 250,000 employees making phones in China for (relatively) middle-class wages. He goes on to point out that Germany, supposedly a pioneer of renewable energy, has actually seen its carbon emissions rise since it began heavily subsidizing solar and wind production.

Tudor Farming

Having previously confessed devotion to DIY television shows, mostly on PBS, it should come as no surprise that I also have a touch of a weakness for the BBC. Not Sherlock, not Dr. Who, and definitely not Downton Abbey, but Tales From the Green Valley, a documentary series about a team of historians and archeologists recreating life on an English farm in the 1620s. TFGV dedicates one half-hour to each month in the farming year, explaining the tools, technologies, and processes at work. It came out in 2005, and is available pretty much in full on YouTube.

I stumbled across it via a later spin-off show, Tudor Monastery Farm, discovered through the urban homesteading blog Root Simple. TMF itself is really just one branch of the rabbit hole, however, as TFGV has spun off half-a-dozen shows, including Wartime Farm, Edwardian Farm, and Victorian Farm. The format for each is a kind of modified reality show: what happens when four historians are locked in a thatch-roof stone house, dressed in weird woolen underwear, fed a 17th century diet, and forced to work for their supper? It is unclear the extent to which the participants are actually living the lifestyle 24/7, as the show is edited a series of explanatory segments.

William HolmanFebruary 19, 2014tales from the green valley farm, bbc, diy, tv Comment

Alley Walkin' III

I moved to Baltimore six months ago; time has blurred by in a slurry of work, friends, family, design projects old and new. As previously chronicled, I settled on the banks of the Jones Falls, on the edge of Hampden-Woodberry. I live in, and am surrounded by, renovated textile mills, once responsible for 80% of the world's supply of cotton duck. This rough canvas was used primarily for sailcloth and military equipment. 100 years of booming manufacturing brought in substantial numbers of sold, blue-collar jobs, supporting the independent community of Hampden until it was annexed by the city of Baltimore in 1887.

Hampden is situated at the center of present-day Baltimore, but due to quirks of geography it can seem isolated. It is cut off from the west by both the Jones Falls itself and the Jones Falls Expressway; hemmed in on the north by a series of dead-end streets and Druid Hill Park; and peters out to the south into Wyman Park and an industrial maze of one-ways. These factors contribute to Hampden's greater sense of insularity, relatively low crime, stable property values, and overwhelming whiteness in a majority black city.

William HolmanFebruary 9, 2014alley, walking, ramble, baltimore, hampden, woodberryComment

Flat-Pack Design: Methods and Materials

IKEA's vast particleboard empire is built on one prime directive: affordability. Each product in their 10,000-item catalog starts with a price point and then backs into materials, colors, ergonomics, structure, and fastening systems. A key part of the cost strategy involves flat-pack, ready-to-assemble designs that are up to seven times more space-efficient to ship than conventional furniture. All of this tweaking and tinkering is done by a crew of 16 in-house designers and about 100 freelancers (a crew that is always looking for pitches!). The process is intense, taking up to five years, and involves close coordination with sawmills, manufacturers, distribution warehouses, and focus groups.

It would seem, then, that IKEA would be the authority on flat-pack design. Yet people hate putting together their furniture, generating memes in equal proportion to wobbly bookcases the world over. Frustration seems to cluster around two things: language-agnostic instructions made up of impenetrable diagrams, and fickle fasteners that never seem to equal the holes meant to accept them. That said, from an engineering view IKEA's hardware is ingenious, combining simple tools with self-registering systems that (hopefully) force pieces into alignment as they are assembled.

William HolmanJanuary 30, 2014IKEA, flat pack, ready to assemble, hardware, fasteners Comment

Flat-Pack Design: Past, Present, and Future

Twice in the last few months I have been out to FabLab Baltimore, at CCBC Catonsville. Last week, I took the introductory workshop that is a prerequisite for using the facility. At home, I've been hard at work on the CAD files that will translate my Ziptie Lounger into some form that a CNC router will understand. All of this is in preparation for prototyping my first machine-made piece of furniture, which I've posted over at OpenDesk, a platform for distributed design. Distributed design, in its simplest form, operates something like Instructables -- a central online repository of DIY manuals that folks can follow to make their own products. However, making something from scratch still presents significant barriers to entry, namely skills, tools, and time.

OpenDesk, along with similar startup Assmbly, are challenging (or, to use a current term of art, "disrupt") the traditional design-manufacture-wholesale-retail model that the furniture business has operated on for a hundred years. Designs are uploaded to the OpenDesk site, where they can be downloaded directly for free or, for a fee, sent to a local networked fabber who will cut, sand, and drop-ship the parts to the consumer's doorstep. Everyone in the chain -- OpenDesk, designer, and fabber -- make a small profit. Due to the nature of both the fabrication machines and the distribution network, all of the products are flat-pack.

William HolmanJanuary 21, 2014assmbly, opendesk, wikihouse, ponoko, IKEA, ikea, sauder, kem weber, gillis lundgren, swedwood, louise brigham, michael thonet, flat pack, flat-pack, plywood, furnitureComment

The Baltimore Rowhouse

This week, I finished The Baltimore Rowhouse, by Mary Ellen Hayward and Charles Belfoure, which traces the development of the rowhouse from its English origins on up through the present day. Many cities have certain architectural types -- New York is a city of apartments, Chicago a city of three-flats, and Los Angeles a city of bungalows -- but the rowhouse, more than any other typology, has come to define the architectural, social, and economic fabric of Baltimore.

Rowhouse construction began in earnest in Baltimore in the 1820s. Narrow (12-14' wide) homes were packed into tight blocks in what is now downtown, the Inner Harbor, and Fells Point. Two concepts from England -- connected superblocks of housing with shared party walls and the idea of "ground rent" instead of land ownership -- spurred development. Ground rent allowed someone to own a house, but not the land it sat on, instead renting the land from a landlord into perpetuity. Ground rents, in turn, could be packaged, sold, and traded amongst landowners, a kind of early derivative investment. Much like mobile homes today, removing the cost of the land from the purchase price made houses much cheaper upfront. Built on a speculative basis, most of the houses sold to people of limited means -- sailors, shipbuilders, shopkeepers, and carpenters. Efficient use of land kept the city from expanding beyond a walkable radius, key in an era before public transportation or widespread private vehicle ownership.

Farm Hackin'

In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich took a detour from his usual research subject -- butterflies -- and wrote a book called The Population Bomb. As with many alarmist books, it was a bestseller, and quickly landed its previously obscure author on The Tonight Show. Ehrlich argued that the world was headed into a state of perilous scarcity, where an exploding population would overtax the planet's ability to produce fresh food and water. This led to a bet with economist Julian Simon, who posited that human's ability to innovate would always outsmart obstacles to growth. Like Malthusians before and since, Ehrlich was proven wrong, and paid up in the late nineties, despite a doubling of Earth's population in the meantime.

Scarcity is still a popular topic amongst both the libertarian, gold-bugging right and the organic, kombucha-brewing left. And it makes basic sense, right? American farmers, once the vast majority of the population, are at only 2% of the workforce now. Very few of us are directly involved in growing food. Less and less of our land is devoted to agriculture. And the land that is out there seems to be giving out, worn down by a century or more of highly productive monoculture. It seems only logical that the oil, the gas, and the infrastructure will give out one day, disrupted by plant diseases, climate change, water scarcities, and unsustainable demand.

Adhocism

After a protracted struggle with dense, recursive text, this weekend I finally made it all the way through Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver. First published in 1972, it is a manifesto for readymakers, arguing that everyone is a designer and all the world is a mash-up of disparate elements. In some ways it is very of its time -- swept up in the hippie-futurism of Buckminster Fuller, Drop City, Stewart Brand, and Archigram -- but in other ways it is remarkably prescient, fully predicting the internet and the resurgence in maker culture that we are seeing today.

William HolmanDecember 15, 2013charles jencks, nathan silver, adhocism, adhocist, readymade, mit press, improvisationComment

Zip-Tie Joinery II

Two months ago, I began researching zip-tie joinery, looking up a half-dozen furniture and architecture projects that used zip-ties as the primary fastener. Three dominant structural systems emerged from that research: pure zip-tie, panel-on-frame, and panel-on-panel. A few days after that post, I began a series of experiments with models, made from dumpster-ed cardboard.

William HolmanDecember 8, 2013ziptie, zip tie, zip-tie, cable tie, zip tie chair, prototypeComment

Buy Nothing Day

Last week America feasted, reenacting a foundational myth of the Republic -- that benevolent "Indians" saved innocent "Pilgrims" from certain starvation, celebrating a nascent friendship that would last, well, until everyone got smallpox and died. The reality, as we now know, is a bit more complicated. America's traditional day of gustatory gluttony is followed by Black Friday, 24 hours of unrestrained consumerist capitalism. We've all seen and heard the stories -- folks camping out for weeks to be the first in line for deals, fights over the last flatscreen TVs, store employees trampled to death.

William HolmanDecember 2, 2013buy nothing day, adbusters, black friday, thanksgiving, brian ulrich, dark stores, build fridayComment

DIY TV

As a kid, I was often up first on Saturday mornings. I tended to wake up early naturally, a trait that has served me well later in life (though I don't bounce up quite as clear-eyed as I used to . . .) Being up first had a lot of advantages in a household of six -- free of supervision or sibling interference, I could put sugar on my cereal, and I could get in front of the TV without being bothered. We didn't have cable growing up, and I never much cared for cartoons, so I tuned to PBS and got my DIY on.

Pole Houses

This weekend, I helped my brother construct a deck on the back of his house. We got the foundations dug, inspected, and permitted, then spent two days pouring concrete and framing. I became intimately reacquainted with muscles that have lain fallow for quite some time . . . The deck will hover about 12' off the ground, with an entrance off of the kitchen and a winding staircase to the driveway. It overlooks a sloped yard, so the platform is eye-level with the leaves, floating in the trees.

William HolmanNovember 18, 2013pole house, ken kern, pierre koenig, deck construction, object guerillaComment

Belgian Solutions

David Helbich, an artist and photographer, has been living in Brussels, Belgium for the last eleven years. Brussels is the capital of the European Union, a complex patchwork of nations, languages, and ancient neighborhoods. The citizens are fragmented along various cultural lines, but co-exist in a city-state of blasé bonhomie. Helbich, a native German, began going on long walks to learn the geography of his new home. Eventually, he started taking his camera to document wrinkles in the urban fabric that he dubbed Belgian solutions.

Terror, Designed

Semantically, politics and war seem to track one another. They share the word campaign and the generic lexicon of fighting, filtering down through thousands of associated words thumbed up from the thesaurus. Now and again, design language seeps in around the edges, as in the architect of a strategy .

Design (n.)

a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made.
purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.

A Preliminary Atlas of the Killing Fields , by Tim Maly, refers to the second definition. He traces, through satellite photos, the planning and intention that exists behind the action (strike) of a material object (drone). He drew on the incident reporting of Dronestagram and other publicly reported sources. The strike itself was designed by a protocol that differentiates between targeted strikes on known enemies and signature strikes, which target groups of men by analyzing their patterns of movement.

William HolmanOctober 30, 2013drones, preadtor, reaper, terror designed, object guerillaComment

Knock-Down Shelves 2.0

A little over a year ago, I posted about a new apartment, and the pieces I had made to populate it. In the intervening 12 months, a lot has happened, and I am in a another new apartment, in a new/old city.

Much of my furniture collection survived the move, modified as it may be. The desk we shared, made in Alabama from an old door with inset aluminum panels, was cut down a little on both ends to fit into a tight new space. The kitchen work table, an ancillary counter for the last apartment in Chicago, was chopped from standing height to sitting.

William HolmanOctober 21, 2013Comment

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