226 days ago
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I finished reading the book, A perfect mess, today. Honestly, I was closing on it about 4 days ago, when there were only about 10 pages to go. But, I kind of put the book off in an effort to, you know, organize some thoughts and ideas and facts in order, which turned out to be doing absolutely nothing! So, in an effort to try it for some more, I have extended the borrowing period today, giving me yet another one week to do absolutely nothing at all about the book. Remember, I already finished reading the book?
Here comes one of the tidiest version of the history of Western fine arts. It’s somewhat lengthy, but it’s not like we’re reading 100 pages-long theses on the Western art tradition. So, try it, and you will be surprised to figure out how one can succinctly put the entire history within a couple of paragraphs, around such irrelevant theme as the mess. So, here it goes:
The West was a bit slower to catch on. When the visual arts blossomed in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a widely embraced guiding principle was to hold up order, in its various forms, as an ideal. In balanced, standardized, uncluttered composition, in the heroic stances or graceful curves of subjects, and in virtuous and biblical themes, artists often strived to reveal order as a form of beauty and vice versa. There were certainly exceptions, especially among Dutch painters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt, who by the mid-seventeenth century were already experimenting with crowded, random-looking placements of figures and objects. But it was during the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century that artists began to pick in earnest at the ordered conventions of painting, by literally blurring images, employing thicker and even lurid brushstrokes, and dropping the Sunday-schoolish lessons in codes of behavior. There is little of the neat and orderly in Delacroix’s dreamlike depictions of lions tearing into horses.
Impressionism widened art’s rift from the orderly, often taking the stuff of everyday peasant life and visually refracting it into bursts of color. Van Gogh took this messy process so far that even today many experts tend to regard his genius as the flip side of his mental disintegration. But madness wasn’t a prerequisite for pushing art into the realm of the disordered. While romanticism and impressionism were assaults on the orderly, expressionism and cubism, which followed in the beginning of the twentieth century, demolished it. After centuries of trying to nudge reality in the direction of perfection, the task of the artist had become in part to mess reality up.
Indeed, one of the greatest challenges to contemporary artists has been to come up with novel, provocative ways of being messy. Dadaism got this endeavor off to a rollicking start around 1915 by self-consciously breaking away from the established order of art in all ways — even by pointedly refusing to be a clearly definable movement of art. That is, to the extent that it was about anything, Dadaism was a disorganized embracing of disorder. That’s not easy to top, mess-wise. But many have tried. The formless blotches of abstract expressionism, the bizarre pairing of images employed by surrealists like Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, the riotous dribblings of Jasper Johns, the scrap collages of Robert Rauschenberg — all are at least in part attempts to employ some form of disorder, be it clutter, mixture, blur, noise, or convolution, among others. Today there are hundreds of established painters and sculptors who prominently incorporate elements of mess and disorder into their works. Among the messaphilic artists who have been the subject of major shows in recent years: Richard Tuttle, who wrangles bits of wire, plywood, rope, and other round objects into small, abstract works; Jon Kessler, who assembles video monitors, moving contraptions, and blotchy paintings into sprawling kinetic sculptures; Chris Jordan, who photographs industrial refuse such as sawdust piles, bales of recycled metal, and discarded cell phones; and Elizabeth Murray, who paints on a jumble of screwed-together minicanvases. (A perfect mess, pp. 294 — 296)
233 days ago
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A perfect mess (remember? I am not done with this book — yet) is not a quick guide to business etiquettes or, for that matter, mess or anything else. But, it certainly contains a couple of tips just in case you have to deal with — say — the corporate structure of a Japanese company. Like, in Japan,
1. Employees are seated in a room just like the organization chart shows. That is, the organization chart is not only a tool to show you the power, delegation, authority and final sayers, but it’s essentially a map (for navigating around the company physically) in Japan.
2. During a conference, it is quite common that the senior-most person naps, often snorting and snoozing aloud. If you’re in the situation, don’t get alarmed if you’ve been boring him out or what. According to Abrahamson, “In a society that insists on both group consensus and deep respect for the opinions of superiors, how can group decisions be reached at meetings without either excluding the boss or failing to defer to his opinion? Easy: the boss kicks off the meeting, falls asleep, and wakes up when consensus has been reached.” (p. 217)
Excellent observation, and nice explanation, isn’t it?
234 days ago
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Chapter 5, mess and organization, of A perfect mess may be one of the most interesting part, if you’re interested in the management or stuff. Take the example of the explanation on modular companies (it’s somewhat long, but it’s certainly worth it):
The basic thinking behind this more freewheeling sort of structure is to focus on new, “spin-up” business units that quickly pop into existence when an opportunity present itself and then compete for resources within the company. If the spin-up thrives, it’s allowed to quickly expand without limit, pulling whatever it needs from other parts of the company, even if doing so hurts the rest of the company. If it doesn’t thrive, it’s quickly put out of its misery. It’s a different way of thinking about a company — not as a seamless whole, but as a fractured conglomeration of transitory, semi-independent units, some leaping into being and growing quickly, others withering away, with employees and funding flowing freely and fast between them. University of Milan researcher Mario Benassi refers to spin-up-friendly companies as “modular” companies, and espouses three basic principles for them: growing in pieces instead of holistically; being as quick to shrink or get rid of logy pieces of the company as to invest in the promising ones; and being prepared to reorient its efforts around any of the pieces. “Modular companies are more focused, and faster,” he says. “They can quickly get rid of activities they’re not interested in anymore.” Traditional companies, by contrast, tend to be so fixated on preserving the same core business that potentially hot new markets are poorly served — if they are served at all. As challenging as coming up with promising new spin-up ideas may be, the hardest part of the process may be to quickly close down those ideas that don’t show signs of panning out. Nijkamp says a company with a spin-up failure rate of 60 percent would be doing quite well, suggesting that the key is to keep a high churn rate. In that light, the spin-up concept starts to look a little less like brillian business planning and a little more like trial and error. (pp. 167 — 8)
Inertia is a terrible force. You would envy if you happen to find a person or company that defies the force over and over again. But, that doesn’t mean mimicking whatever it’s doing, you can defy the force, too. Thinking like this, however, undermines the basic assumption of the science of management: There is a certain way to make money. If somebody succeeds, by all means copy them and emulate their success. The science of management will be happy to help you out.
Very well… Try copying those successful modular companies, like Scientific Generics, “located in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, England” (p. 167). And, good luck.
235 days ago
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A couple of days ago, Channy wrote something about The rise and decline of web services: economics of exhibitionists and peeping toms. The gist of the essay is: For a web service, you need to have a delicate balance between satisfying exhibitionist desires and those of peeping toms. By way of example, he describes the history of the most successful web services in Korea: Daum cafe, sayclub, cyworld, naver cafe/blog combo and me2day.
An interesting observation, certainly, but I cannot but doubt if it’s somewhat an overstatement to see them through the eyeglass of the socio-psychopathological concepts and devices. I mean, no new insight or advice could be gained by maintaining such a psychodramatic perspective, but to trigger readers’ interests. It might as well be called in more pristine economic expressions maintaining the basic idea that web services need to get a balance betwen the need to advertise (show the entire world what they are up to) and the desire to be informed (see what everybody else is up to). The use of phrases such as “exhibitionists” and “peeping toms” distracts rather than informs readers like me.
Actually, their failures — for example, by being used as an instrumentality for whores in the case of sayclub — doesn’t appear to be the result of their failing to keep the balance and tilting one way or another. Rather, it might as well be attributed to their failure to keep spams from swaying the system (Here, I have used the word spam broadly, suggesting indiscreet or indecent use or exploitation by users for quick money, thereby harming those users sticking to the intended use).
I believe the issue of spam is where you really need to balance yourself. You want to attract as many users as possible, but those many users inevitably will include people who would try to gain (system-wise, or economic) advantages through means never intended by the system designer. Take the example of those spam blogs shamelessly and ruthlessly copying contents from other blogs in an effort to gain search-wise advantage. It’s not a desire to expose to the entire world that he’s a spam blogger, or to stimulate others to see what they are up to is really proliferating meaningless spams (I mean, they’re meaningful for the search engine, but meaningless for actual users) which encourages the generation of spam blogs. They’re only trying to trick the search engine. It has nothing to do with indiscreet desires of peeping toms or exhibitionists. Difficult problem is, where to strike the balance between encouraging users and usage (with appropriate, healthy incentives) and suppressing excessive spams.
236 days ago
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You can’t see a lot of (English) information on Noguchi Filing System even using google, probably because the most important link went 404. Wikipedia also doesn’t have much. See explanations on it on 43 folders.
Some help from Boing Boing:
New documents (envelopes) are added at the left end of the “envelope buffer,” and whenever a document is used (i.e., the envelope removed from the shelf), it is returned to the left end of the bookshelf. The result of this system is that the most recent (and frequently) used documents migrate to the left, while documents that are not used often or not used at all migrate to the right. After the system has been in use for a while, the shelf starts to look like the following.
And, one and two posts by Edward Vielmetti. Interesting quote from the second:
Noguchi’s ideas are largely inspired by discoveries related to the use of computers… Nevertheless, when building a database there seems to be no way to avoid using fields, which amounts to classifying. Similarly, the entire process of tagging, be it in SGML or XML formats, involves labeling items of knowledge, often for commercial purposes. The digitization of data in itself does not necessitate classifying, but the use of database applications compels it to a certain extent. Categories, even the most sophisticated ones, once used necessarily reflect the limits of our vocabulary and conceptual horizon.
The strength of it is it is so natural, you can’t digress from it. You can use vertical Noguchi System (meaning you just stack papers on top of other papers) instead of Noguchi’s horizontal one and claim that it’s the most advanced hyperorganization scheme, as Eric Abrahamson says in p. 157 of “A perfect mess.”
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