The Negative Emotion Project

I'm laughing as I type this because I remember a time in my life when I was told tat I was too emotional a person. While other artists swear by the ruling of their emotions, over the last few years I have come to realize that it's okay to be emotional but I still needed better control over how things effected me.

Always looking for a creative angle, my partner inspired me to undertake a new artistic project with a painting. I marvel at his patience and depth of character so undertaking this was as much a tribute to him as it was to myself.

The goal was to take a canvas and apply a layer of paint or strokes to it every time I had to deal with something emotional that seemed to be having a negative effect on me. I tried the project for two weeks and the conclusion is that I have a lot more peace and calmness in myself. I am of course, grateful for his suggestion because it was a constructive method of feedback that worked in harmony with who I am. While merely pointing out a character flaw is easy, it takes a good deal of trust and strength on my part to accept the idea and run with it.

As you can see here, the piece is not like my more typical structured paintings. Maybe one day I'll examine the correlation between my stuctured work and the almost desperate way I cling to that structure versus my current emotional state. I would venture to say somewhere in there my own control issues are prevalent. But with this piece I can say first and foremost it's been fun.



Several times during those two weeks, 14 times to be exact, I applied a layer of black paint to the canvas in an effort to expunge some negative emotion I was feeling. Anger, sadness, exhaustion, frustration... they all came out in layers of varying thickness and depth, with any number of brush strokes.

By the end of it, I think the work has a definite underlying structure and still appeals to my aesthetic side. All my thanks to N. for believing in me.

Art Auction Benefit

Artwork by Stella Hultberg

As many of you know I support causes close to my heart and donate works annually in support of them. That said, I hope you can all join me next month at a charity auction that is near and dear to my heart.

Many women around the world and even within my own family have suffered violence, poverty, and incredible indignity solely based on their gender. In support of the Care.org organisation, please come say hello and share a toast at Industrielle's Charity Event: KIND WOMEN FOR WOMANKIND: AN ART AUCTION TO BENEFIT WOMEN OF VIOLENCE

MAY 8, 2008 7 - 9PM
HORS DOEUVRES, ENTERTAINMENT, ART!!!

Bidding on pieces including my piece "Stones No. 3 - Balancing Act" will take place in-store or online at INDUSTRIELLEGALLERY.COM

PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT CARE.org

Industrielle Gallery
33 Grand Ave
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 271-0633

Asking the Hard Questions

In my life outside the art world I am an Interaction Designer... among other things. I would like to think that what makes me so good at my job is the fact that I attempt to understand people's motivations and the effects that certain behaviours can cause on certain environments. A lot of designers spend a great deal of time merely planning out the functionality of a product (how a user gets from A to C) but few of us rarely seem to question other aspects like, does this product really truly serve the needs of the user and how greatly should I consider abuses of my product?

We rarely talk about the dark side of the way products can be abused unit it's too late. Today most major portals have removed open chat features from their sites because of rampant abuse. MSN was one of the first to close down their chat rooms because of abuse of minors. While we rushed to build a great new communication tool, why did it seem we were incapable of protecting our most valuable asset, our users? And is it even our right or responsibility to do so? (Is this what people refer to as corporate responsibility?)

Over the years I've started feeling personally responsible for the things I help create and foist on the world. I feel responsible for helping maintain a level of trust between my company's products and the people who use them. It DOES bother me to know that a product or tool I've helped design may have contributed to causing harm to a person or other entity no matter how good my intentions were or how much money I stood to make with this new bigger better must-have web service.

Sometimes people look at me like I've got lobsters coming out of my ears and they seek to remind me that it's really choosing the lesser of two evils in most situations. I am often reminded that we live in a free market economy and that capitalism remains. If I don't like it I should just get out of the business.

I'm also reminded that you can create a great product but there will always be someone perverting it. True. But when I look at how greatly the internet has changed the face of society and social interactions, I find it kind of hard to NOT feel partly responsible for aiding some of the negative effects it's had as well.

Maybe I just choose to take responsibility for myself in this case.

Anyway, last night I posted a question on LinkedIn to the broader community and asked the following:

"Should sites like LinkedIn be used by recruiters to poach employees from the same company or teams? Let me be a bit controversial if not offensive by asking if it is proper business etiquette for recruiters to use sites like LinkedIn in this way. I've noticed recruiters requesting to be linked to me if only to get access to my contacts. I find it even more appalling that they try poaching people from the same company if not the same teams. Are they not aware that we generally all know each other and that at some point word will spread that the same recruiter is offering the same position to 4 or 5 different people on the same team? This behaviour turns me off of sites like this."

The response both publicy posted on the site and sent to me privately were all mostly defensive. Apparently my question ruffled many feathers but people were missing the point. I don't loathe recruiters or have any animosity towards them because through them I've found some of the most satisfying jobs in my career.

However, the wider issue is this. LinkedIn presents a very unique situation where what is happening could very well be considered poor business practices and could turn people off social media sites whether they are at a professional level like LI or more collegiate like Facebook. Just by asking my question, I've received a ton of private responses from people who say it is an underhanded practice to take advantage of the links that initiating a contact affords you.

From an academic standpoint, as I'm trying to understand the nature of use (and abuse) of social media sites, could behaviour like this become an issue? Could trolling a list of "friends" or contacts expose a persons own social or business network hierarchy? And should users of a site be concerned about such things? (Do you see what I'm getting at here with the bigger picture?)

Imagine a similar scenario where a stranger on say Facebook initiates a friend request with you just to get to your network of people for the purpose of say dating? Imagine you are still linked to your ex and they start trolling your friends list for information about who you might be seeing next. How comfortable are you with people being able to see your family structure simply by perusing your network? My questions may seem extreme but it is possible to get a lot of information about someone's social structure in this way.

Yes, privacy features abound and I have the right to make use of them or not. No one is questioning that. In fact I'm glad that those options are there. But the average user may or may not know this and could find themselves in compromising situations down the road. In the case of LinkedIn, which is geared to a more professional base of users, I questioned the tactics of HR recruiters because it was an obvious look at the logic behind a site set up for such people.

Maybe I just feel very protective of the people I am linked to. I also think recruiters potentially play a dangerous game when they try to recruit from the same pool of people in the same organization. If the hiring candidates talk amongst themselves, it is very likely the topic of salary and remuneration will come up and for the hiring company this could be very bad. Interested candidates could force the numbers up because they know what the other candidates are asking for in salary and packages. It also exposes a company's salary hierarchy to the recruiter because if they ask enough team members from the same group what their base is, they will find out.

I'm not saying this doesn't benefit the recruiter or in most cases this isn't info they already know. (They benefit from placing a candidate at a higher salary package because they get a cut much like a "finder's fee".) I just wonder if in the case of social media networking sites for professionals if this is a good practice. Most of the people who responded assumed I didn't want to be contacted concerning job offers when they couldn't be more wrong.

I'm just intent on understanding the motivations, successes and failures behind how and why we build certain products. The phenomenon of social media sites isn't going away any time soon so I hope other designers and developers like myself can address the more subtle differences in motivational behaviours behind their users.

I will keep pushing people's buttons because their emotional responses are incredibly interesting. My question still has 7 more days on Linked In before it is archived. Here's hoping for a lot more dirt.

============================================================
UPDATE:

This has got to be the most telling response I've read thus far.

"But how is that any different than anyone looking through your contacts and conecting to them and then doing business with that person? The entire premise behind this site is 6 degrees of separation and that we can reach out through others to meet new people for business reasons. This is not a social site, it is a business networking site."

Ummm... okay. We know it is a business Networking site, but if LinkedIn is not a social site, then maybe my interpretation is wrong when they use the following descriptives on their homepage. And I quote:

- "LinkedIn: Relationships Matter."

- "LinkedIn brings together your professional network. Stay in touch, Discover job & business opportunities, Get expert business advice."

Are these still not social interactions? We might not be trading family photos and talking about the latest Britney Spears debacle but this is still very much a social environment that they've only limited to discussions of a professional nature. Is it really any different than if someone like MySpace said, okay let's build a MySpace for Platonic Friends Site, a MySpace for Dating site, a MySpace site for Families, a Myspace for business networking, A MySpace for Environmentalists? It's a social networking site that has chosen to seek out it's users on a more granular level it seems.

There's nothing wrong with using this as a business model. I still wonder though.

Exhibition Review: Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today @ NYC MoMA

I'd been dying to see this exhibit. All I had to hear were the names Ellsworth Kelly and Sol Lewitt for me to hop a plane to New York to catch what I was hoping would be an amazing show.

A trip to New York, Manhattan specifically, would also mean a nice sit with the family and a bit of shopping.

As my usual style, I took in the exhibit early Friday morning by myself, coming into MoMA alongside the crush of school groups and foreign patrons. The neat thing about visiting museums by yourself is the ease of maneuverabiity solo travel provides. Since I was only there to see the Color exhibition, I didn't need to waste time in the lower galleries fighting the crowds. I avoided the slow wait for the elevators and took the escalators to the 6th floor. I basically had the entire exhibit to myself for a few minutes which seems unheard of at MoMA. (Photos were not allowed inside the exhibition but my digital cam is very stealthy and of course I broke the rules.)

I was immediately effected by what I saw. Rooms full of bright swatches of color made me giddy and reel with excitement until I moved in to the pieces for closer inspection. I admit, I'm one of those people who looks for the seams, the lines, the frayed edges, the brush strokes. I get as close as I can to the canvases before the security guards start worrying.


So I did something I rarely do. I compared myself and my own work to those artists I considered my masters. And suddenly I found myself disappointed. While I spend hours and days making every line perfect, every curve just so, and making sure no color bleeds into another or no piece of canvas left only partially done, I saw many works that seemed to do just that and seemed to have been crafted of poorer quality.

I'm not in MoMA, and it'll no doubt be a long time before any work of mine will ever find itself in such an exhibition, but the sense of quality did make me feel something about the show was lacking.

Another issue I had was that the show seemed incomplete. There were pieces that should have been in this show that seemed a no brainer. Where were Sol Lewitt's more daring color band series like those hanging in MoMA out in San Francisco? Where were ANY works by Josef Albers or even Rothko? Those bigger and better influencers on colour were somehow missing so that the show, while enjoyable, seemed lacking to me.

If anything the show was a beautiful reminder of why I do what I do, and why I love it so.

“Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today” continues through May 12 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400 or moma.org.

Wrong wrong wrong!!!!

This pains me to look at. For anyone with my type of Synaesthesia this causes so many issues. No wonder my parents thought I was learning disabled.

Viewing

The new colour series "Grant's Window" will be available for viewing for the month at February at:

2735 Broadway (cross street is 27th)
Oakland, CA

Stop in for cocktails between 5-7pm Tues. - Sat.

All works are for sale.

Design Think Challenge

Lately I've been challenging myself to think like a designer again. I'm not too sure exactly what that means other than turning a more critical eye towards things in my every day life that can be improved.

As a designer, when I approach a problem or interface issue to be solved, I always start from certain knowns. Okay this is failing here. Okay I need to somehow add or layer this in on top of pre-existing functionality... I posed a question to a large group of professionals in my circle of colleagues by asking them, "If you could improve one experience in your every day life, what would it be?" The answers varied according to personal need and I thought what I'd presented was a brilliant approach to improving the overall experience of some aspect of life.

This morning while in my favourite brunch spot with Nate, I made the effort to reverse my design thinking by asking a different question. What if you could standardise one object or aspect of something in every day life, what effect do you think it would have?"

My first thought was something that has bugged me as an international traveller for years. Having to lug around power adaptors for my various devices and interchanging power plugs is the bane of any traveller's existence. If the end of the adaptor that plugged into the device itself were standardised, we'd only need one plug for everything. The AC power portion of the plug could be swapped out based on international wattage and power standards.

Ever in my search to simplify things at a mental level, I posed this theory to both of us. Imagine I standardised all the doors in the world. To enter via a door, it would be only a pull mechanism. To exit, it would only be a push. If no other variation were allowed on the entrance and exit to a place via a door which operated in this manner, what sorts of problems would this present for architects? Look beyond issues of style, and think of things like how spacing and manual function would be hampered by a door that needs to be opened outward. Handle design and accessibility for opening a door by pulling...

Many of us have this ingrained behavioural knowledge that when we approach a door, we pull to open. But if you've ever been in an office or building where the model is reversed or confusing, then it becomes a pain point and ultimately as a task, you fail.

At my old office in Sydney, we had these glass security doors that locked and were accessed by a magnetic tag at the top of the door. To enter, you swiped your id badge and the magnetic lock disengaged. You pull the door to go in. Exiting the office was a problem for many people.

On the opposite side of the door, you'd push a release button to disengage the lock and then you could exit by pushing on the door. However, the problem resulted from the visual cue presented to people trying to leave. The inside of the door had a handle identicle to the one on the outside which was for pulling. People naturally would pull... over and over, continually thinking the unlocking system had failed.

The frustration generated by this failed system and experience might seem minimal, but think about this. Imagine you had a client leaving from a meeting that didn't go so well. Is the last experience you want to provide them when leaving your office one of more frustration and disappointment over something so simple as a door?

The cartoon below is a perfect example of my new approach to design thinking. If we'd only replaced that handle with a large rectangular push panel. No handle would give users enough of a clue to push and not pull.

My brain is still considering all the pros and cons of standardising door mechanisms around the world.