A certain kind of pop academic study invokes my most cynical Reader Hat, and I kept the hat on for the entire duration of Designing for Social Change by Andrew Shae. Though my critiques came frequently—mostly in the form of snarky margin comments—the collection as a whole is a smart and worthwhile examination of how designers should (and should not) approach projects that work for positive social change.

And yes, it’s more accurate to say that the book examines “projects that attempt to create positive social change,” rather than the lofty “designing for social change.” I’m critical of how many case studies were initiated in academic classes or relied on grant dollars. The grant/academic financial model promotes small-scale, singular projects and is incapable of creating widespread social change.

All the projects included in the book work within existing systems of capitalism and academia—and to be fair, they offer smart, often impressive, strategies for designing in that context. The question which is not covered is how artists, designers and other creative people can work to challenge or re-design the systems themselves.

Pro Bono won’t get you into Heaven

William Drenttel’s foreword impressed me early on by questioning abstractions such as community-based design and social change. He distinguishes the scope of this book from what most designers consider “designing for social change,” which is essentially “designing for nonprofit work”— a kind of aesthetic charity. To my great pleasure, he also questioned the oft-cited “working with not for” approach: what does “designing with” actually look like on the ground? When a designer possesses a skill set or expertise, how does she design “with” a community, neighborhood, or client?

To answer that question the book examines twenty “community-based” design projects grouped under a variety of strategies. While strategies such as “Immerse Yourself” and “Confront Controversy” are a bit problematic, others such as “Identify the Community’s Strengths” and “Utilize Local Resources” will be particularly useful to designers who come from a typically charitable background.

Frustrated with the case studies that relied on classrooms and grants, I surveyed the projects which did not rely on those funding streams and examined their methods and models. A few projects were initiated by conventional or nonprofit design firms, but design collectives and public coalitions carried out the majority of non-classroom, non-grant projects.  These included:

• Design Trust for Public Space — a nonprofit that assembles unique groups stakeholders and creative teams for each individual project
• Moving Design — a group of designers, architects, street artists, educators and engineers
• Society of Design — a design collective dedicated to design education and community service
• Center for Urban Pedagogy — a nonprofit that brings together art and design professionals with community advocates and researchers to improve civic engagement and demystify policy issues.

I hesitate to say that the classroom and grant-based projects were overall less effective than the collective/public ones, but they suffer from the preexisting limits of semesters and foundation budgets. The most effective of these alternative models did not attempt isolated, self-limiting design projects, but instead sought to create connections between existing entities or strengthen existing resources. One paired architecture firms with nonprofits in need of design and planning (something that my father’s firm specializes in), while another collected New York City’s complex vendor laws for a large, multi-lingual population of street vendors.

Case studies stood out from the rest when they prioritized the effectiveness of the project over design ideals and funding restrictions. I was especially impressed by UCLA students creating a homeless services resource guide called ProjectOPEN who had their city funding pulled when they decided to include information about legal rights on the back of the map. (Public officials want homeless people to know where food and showers are, but not their own rights). Instead of changing the design, the map went unprinted until the students secured funding four years later from within the university.

Branding as Political Power

The most surprising case studies made me rethink design concepts (such as branding) in a political context. Made in Midtown is at its core an identity/branding project for the Garment District in Manhattan, but it was initiated in response to proposed changes in zoning regulations. By creating a more cohesive public identity—one which is consistent with the informal identity shared by workers and manufacturers—the project gave the community more political power. Eventually, the city withdrew its proposal to rezone the area.

A final section on funding social design outlines the variety of methods used by the projects in the book. The small overview of self-initiated funding—in which designers created “microeconomies” through crowdsourcing or other creative means is a subject that I’d like to see expanded into a more radical book. (But that’s another project entirely).

Design Mistakes

I frequently forgot while reading that case studies are precisely that—cases to be evaluated and not necessarily emulated. Several projects embodied a superficial ideological rebranding or a naive attempt at community-building; of these, only some recognized their mistakes or identified where they went wrong. But the projects which are superficial or ineffective offer tools too, and Designing for Social Change provides a strong strategic framework for readers and designers.

The range of case studies prove that designers are privileged and esoteric at their worst—and scrappy and inventive at their best. We’re a good bunch, I think.

I’m working on some pieces that are more graphic than my usual work—mockups for graffiti and graphic-novel-style paintings. While traditional dip pens will work for detail work, I didn’t have anything to create precise lines on a larger scale, so I picked up some new ink tools from JetPens.

First up: the tiniest erasers in all the land

Above are two Tombow Mono Zero Eraser (rectangle and round versions) next to a wood case pencil (also made by Tombow Mono). Supposedly these are the smallest erasers on the market, which you can see more clearly in comparison to the average eraser stick sold at art supply stores.

For smaller-scale drawings, I always found regular stick erasers too clumsy to clean up any lines; these Tombow micro erasers are immensely useful for turning the loose sketchy phase of a graphite drawing into the tight line work phase.

And: two styles of brush pens

My old Pentel Pocket Brush Pen met its demise a few months ago, so I ordered a replacement (above, left) as well as a Uni-ball double-sided pocket brush pen (above, right). I’ve only briefly worked with felt-tip brush pens, so I was hoping to get some more practice at using them for broader, less-expressive lines. (The Pentel’s flexible bristles are terrible for long, even strokes).

Apparently the Pentel Pocket Pen’s ink bleeds more on newspaper than the Uni-Ball, but both are superbly waterproof. I suggest waiting 5-10 minutes after inking before erasing any pencil marks or the lines will smudge.

The Pentel Pocket Pen, like most bristle-style brush pens, is best for tiny hairlines and for lines with a lot of variation in width. Still, I was impressed by the precision I was able to achieve with the Uni-Ball felt-tip.

Above, the Pentel Pocket Pen compared to the Uni-ball fine tip side. So far I haven’t used the Uni-ball fine tip because the Pentel is more effective for delicate line work. Instead I use it for steady, standard-width, boring lines—pressing it down and totally ruining its potential for any detail.

It’s worth noting that I’ve mostly used these tools on Arches cold press watercolor paper, which is very likely horrible for brush pens. So if nothing else from this overview is useful, avoid doing that.

“Paper is interesting,” says Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit, “Once you commit to using something physical to display data, you tend to think about it more.” —A Look at the Tiny-Printer Trend via Wired

The most apt description of hip young crowds I’ve ever read: “A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.” —The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.

“A novel is that rare place where you can simultaneously find yourself and lose yourself.” —Stephen Parolini on Twitter.

How is Julia Child so effin quotable? Found this past week: “The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” And even better: “I think every woman should have a blowtorch.”

From the Theorizing the Web conference, I learned that Google has folklorists on their marketing team. 

From Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer:

“The world is full of natural outsiders, except we don’t call them outsiders; we refer to them as young people.”

“Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibility of something new. In fact, the only way to remain creative over time—to not be undone by our expertise—is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don’t fully understand.”

And reminding me of current discussions around the New Aesthetic: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.” —Steve Laseter of Pixar, qtd. in Imagine

The slingshot organizer is a handmade, pocket-sized planner from The Slingshot Collective, who also publishes Slingshot!, an independent, radical newspaper issued quarterly since 1988. The 2012 organizer is the 18th edition they’ve created, putting them historically on par with many (much larger) companies.

Although I doubt their politics align, the organizer’s introduction page made me smile and think of my fountain pen friends.

Making a day planner by hand like this is a throwback—a dumb paper book in a smart phone world. Worse than that, the organizer isn’t even that organized—it’s chaotic, cluttered and messy. A lot of the art is drawn by amateurs, pasted together with wax in an overcrowded loft late into the night — scruffy people spilling coffee on the pages and negotiating for any flat available surface. The printed contents lack the depth, timeliness and clarity easily accessible with a Google search.

Which is perhaps the point. The meaningfulness of our lives is more complex, messy and difficult than straight, computerized lines. The counter-culture we’re a part of is raw, rowdy and on the margins, but it is headed in the right directions: toward a beautiful, pleasurable, sustainable world where people are free.

The Slingshot Organizer isn’t there to be a clean, invisible template for your life; it intends to make a statement. Needless to say, this is a fairly unique approach in the day planner industry. With different doodles on every page and extra notes packed into tiny corners, you can spend as much time exploring this book as you do writing in it.

I really like their approach to “important dates,” wherein instead of culturally-specific holidays the planner highlights important radical and revolutionary events in history (even up to 2011, such as Tunisian protests on March 27). Many of the events listed are completely new to me, and they pique my curiosity to research them more.

For example, March 24: Two teenage girls lead a successful mob attack on a mill in Bolton, England. (Badass!)

Or September 19: U.S. cites politics in barring Charlie Chaplin from reentering the country from England. (Who knew?)

These moments in peoples’ history are little narratives, making you want to know the full story. I can’t say I’ve ever done that with regular organizer.

Ink geeks will be glad to know that this paper is flippin’ awesome. Even more impressive is that it’s 100% recycled, which is usually a disaster for fountain pens. I’m considering contacting The Slingshot Collective just to know who makes it.

There’s almost no bleed through—the few spots in the image above are from a pen that’s using a watered-down ink, which inevitably soaks through more than a regular ink.

The Slingshot organizer also includes the basics that one might expect from a day planner, such as full-month calendars in the front and blank pages for notes in the back. There’s also a book recommendations/zombie escape plan page:

As well as a thick section of radical contacts across the country (in case you’re ever on the lam—or, er, on a road trip I guess.)

You might think that a messy planner hinders organization, but instead I’ve found that it begs to be used functionally. I write down only what’s necessary and I don’t take extra time to make it beautiful. As such, it encourages more interaction and flexibility in my daily life—and in a way, more productivity because I’m forced to write down only the one or two most important tasks on my to-do list.

An afterthought: the unfortunate part of “pocket-sized” organizers is that they’re designed for men’s pockets (A pocket-sized planner for women’s pants would be the size of a matchbook). They also offer a larger desk-size version for those that need a little space.

The Slingshot Organizer is $6 at the beginning of the year; I got it for $4.50 from AK Press.

For when you don’t want to pour a glass or fill your flask, there are still so many wonderful ways to incorporate whiskey into your day.

Pasta with Whiskey, Wine and Mushrooms

Korean Whiskey Sour Noodles

Pear Tart with Whiskey Cream

Mini Whiskey Oatmeal Cream Pies

Whiskey Chocolate Cake in a Jar

On the first day of fourth grade we walked into the classroom and found the word DIARRHEA (n.) scrawled in the upper corner of an otherwise-empty blackboard. I suppose we would have laughed more readily but the double-r-plus-h didn’t resonate visually with the actual, spoken word and therefore didn’t cue our potty humor radar as it should’ve.

Our white-haired teacher, Mr. Palmer, had a habit of touching his fingertips together and rocking back and forth on his heels like a river reed. He was also an extraordinarily good Language Arts teacher. I don’t mean that he was dynamic, the way teachers today are forced to use bro-ish charisma and pop culture to befriend their students and trick them into learning. Mr. Palmer was just good.

We knew that kicking off vocabulary lessons with the abject was a shtick—there’s always something contrived about an adult using poop jokes to appeal to kids—but it was an interesting shtick. Especially since the chalked word—diarrhea—is strangely beautiful when written, much like other visually-appealing words that invite cognitive dissonance: procrustean, Chevrolet, vaccine.

More than my journals or bookshelf, my iPhone apps are probably the best evidence of the word nerdishness which has lasted into my adulthood. Dictionary.com app sends me notifications with the word of the day (yesterday’s word, hsien, I “favorited” to remember later). The New York Times Crossword app also buzzes me when new puzzles are available. When I was preparing to take the GRE, I downloaded the Kaplan GRE Vocabulary app and I still haven’t deleted it although the test was two months ago.

And I should probably include the literary apps, like B-Rhymes (the slant-rhyme dictionary), Poetry (the randomized poem spin wheel from The Poetry Foundation), [The Complete] Shakespeare, or Verse Daily (which is not technically an app, but that I saved to my home screen for daily access).

…I won’t take the time to elaborate on nerdy science apps, which are a whole essay unto themselves.

I was one of the more disdainful students toward excremental humor; even so, I never missed an SAT word that began with dia–, through, or failed to see the connection between rhein (“to flow”), the river Rhine and the word rhythm—rhythmos—the pattern and flow of a song.

At the top: some of my recently fav’d words in the Dictionary app. (Secondary advertising for Gilt is unintentional.)

Don’t ask me how pharaoh-ballerinas relate to lectures on poverty.

I didn’t realize until after finishing how much her hand gestures toward The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—and that’s when I figured out my painting’s title.

Watercolor and gouache, 22″ x 30″

Color adjustment: fail.

Satisfaction with this project: 6.5/10.

By day, I play the role of designer and marketing manager for a nonprofit that works with local food and food security. And with kids (so many kids). By far the best thing about designing for gardens and food is the verdant array of photos that you get to work with: so many macro shots of vegetables and dirt, so many overwhelmingly adorable kids.

These rack cards represent the four core programs at Local Matters (focusing on kids education, community food security and food access, farming/gardening, and cooking skills, respectively). Along with the organization’s general brochure, the rack cards function as an introductory piece to each of our strategic focus areas.

I took a risk in choosing rack cards over pamphlets or brochures. Rack cards are not exactly known for their design excellence— they’re a material for real estate companies, day spas, and tourist promotions. The key with this project was assembling the cards as a set—together, they signal that they’re a more informative resource while remaining an easily-distributed introduction to Local Matters programs.

Although I love libraries, I don’t usually borrow books from them because I have an incurable habit of writing in them.

Always in pen.

Sometimes I underline AND highlight. With doodles!

—Ahem. While I’m in the middle of reading I’m marking the pages spontaneously and without pattern, but after flipping through a few already-read books I discovered that I have an informal code. One involving hearts and smiley faces, surprisingly.

If a sentence or phrase makes an interesting observation, summarizes a central point, or teaches me something I didn’t know before, I underline it. Or if it describes something in an unusual way, like this:

And if it’s particularly exciting and important, I even draw a star in the margin. Like this:

If the text gestures toward a subject I already know about, but is still very dear to my heart, I draw a little heart in the margin. As such:

And sometimes I disagree entirely, which makes me sad.

I also write counter-arguments in the margins or exclamation points when I get pissed. If I’m trying to keep track of themes or characters I keep a running list of page numbers inside the front cover.

In conclusion: being an English major made me an effective reader (and an ineffective library member).

I’m interested in the marks and codes that other readers use in their books—any strange ones out there?