FUNNY FEELING

The 1000 year old egg is a delicacy for the Chinese. The eggs are preserved by "covering them with a mixture of clay, lime, salt, tea, and straw" and then burying them into the ground until the chemicals turn the inside of the eggs to black (from the Global Gourmet). When cracked open, you start to see that it looks like a rare stone and the discoloration in each egg is really unique in each egg. The preserving chemicals create rings of color in the yolk and sprout-like patterns in the egg white.

Every culture has their unique dishes and the dish that brings back childhood memories is the 1000 year old egg. The memory I have is being eleven and trying to explain it to my friend who is convinced that my family eats rotten eggs. Besides the embarrassing part, I formed the idea that the 1000 year old egg is like the Chinese heritage that is steeped in mysticism and tradition of a 5000 year old culture. In the essay by Andrea Codrington called "Contours and Colonies", she writes about the work of de Geuzen which addresses Dutch colonization in Indonesia. Their work uses a dress of a Dutch woman as a platform to raise issues of tolerance, dominance and assimiliation on a social level. In my response, I've chosen to use an egg to convey the idea of culture conditioning on a more personal level. My traditional parents and my environment create a mix of American and Chinese values that makes me reflect about my cultural make-up.

100 photographs of 100 square feet rooms shot in Hong Kong by photographer Michael Wolf. In a previous post, I mentioned my interest in smaller, more efficient living spaces. (Correction: Seth Godin coined the phrase "Small is the new big", not Glenn Reynolds.) Looking at these photos, it reminds me how efficiency was a "green" way of living but a cost-efficient and space-saving way of living. Each room is cluttered but with the essentials: bed, fan, refridgerator, rice cooker, television, and sometimes a dining/make-shift mahjong table. When you live in a small space, decisions have to made on each purchase. Because you have extra food storage, the food you buy needs to be eaten in a few days. No room for Costco members here. How small can someone live comfortably?

While these photos show Hong Kong, city dwellers in New York's Chinatown live in similar arrangements. Looking for cheap rent in Manhattan led me inside these apartments for a peek. One tiny studio apartment can easily holds four residents. Residents, mostly men, sleep in shifts so that only two are in the apartment at the same time. At $100 a month, it's hard to beat.

Amy, Qusai and I are designing a way of showing the passing of time in relation to the Sun. By turning a 5 inch miniature globe, the viewer can control where the sunlight falls on the Earth in a 12 hour cycle. Our idea developed after we brainstormed about blossoming morning glories, time-lapse video, shadows and sundials. In a 12 hour cycle, the viewer watches as day turns into night, flowers blooming and wilting, and the ebb and flow of Los Angeles traffic. Each rotation loops into a new 12 hour cycle.

Partially influenced by Charles and Ray Eames' Mathematica exhibition, we are interested in seeing the 12 hour cycle in the grander scheme. Personally, it would be great to see kids learn about the Earth's rotation using our design.

Los Angeles is a new city to me since I've only begun to become more familiar with the city's character. Amy Sheppard's project about "Cerebral Cities" have made me rethink how I relate to the city. In her response to the ELSE/WHERE MAPPING essay, she describes the process of mapping a city as a "blossom effect". As soon as you learn new paths and areas of the city, your mental mapping of the city shifts. Couple that concept with readings from Norman Klein's book about the forgotten LA and you start to see Los Angeles in an entirely different way. Norman Klein teaches a class at Art Center called "Los Angeles Histories and Myths". Layers of the city that have been built up by movies, stereotypes, music and pop culture begin to unveil.

For me, learning about LA in layers have made it smaller but richer.

Reading Norman Klein's book "The History of Forgetting", I ran into the word "imago" in the introduction and was fascinated by it. "Imago" is Latin for image but more importantly, it is used by the psychologist, Carl Jung, to explain the images that come from the collective unconscious. For example, I don't clearly remember when or where this shot was taken. And I don't remember being in New York at that young an age. However, I do remember it being very hot outside somewhere. It was a humid summer as most New York summers are. A part of me wants to associate that forgotten memory to the photo but I could be completely wrong. Other collected photos from my childhood piece together a very distant memory but nothing I could clearly remember being there.

One thing I do remember is coming home after work and finding my dog chewing on this photo.

Nothing really compares to hunting for wooden type blocks. Putting them together in a composition. Printing them and realizing it looks completely different than you expected. I had the pleasure of talking with Martin Venezky last term and he gave me a bit of advice that noone has ever told me. Lack of control is a good thing in design. He didn't say exactly that but, for a control freak like myself, it was a wake-up call. His suggestion was to add an uncontrollable factor into my process which would create unexpected results. Type Slam is all about happy accidents and even when I had no idea what the final output would be, it turned out better than planned.

Photo courtesy of Jean Ku.

Identities that never stay the same. Always changing and adapting. I'm attracted to identity systems that shift form in different applications. How much can you change the appearance of an identity without losing its core values? What are the pros and cons and when does it not work? In the example above, tomato redesigned the identity of TV Asahi to be a system of shifting polygonal shapes that change shape, positioning and color. It hints of multimedia and diversity, perhaps TV Asahi's way of shaking off their image of old broadcasting media.



Another example of a "flexible" identity system is designed by Mevis en Van Deursen for the city of Rotterdam. In a lecture given at the Walker Art Center, Armand Mevis stated that their intention was to create a toolbox for other designers to create the identity, not a final logo.

In the past, identities were designed to be classic and a method for institutions to say "yes, we've made it and we have a fancy logo to prove it." With identities that change form, it seems the public are ready for more conceptual ways of branding.
Other notable "shape-shifting" logos include VH1 and Nickelodeon. If anyone knows of others, please let me know.