Phenomenate

Xena: Warrior Princess has been off the air for eight years, yet the cult status of the TV series still drives thousands of fans to their annual convention every year. The show itself was a spinoff of a separate show, Hercules, which has no cult following. Why do some characters/stories reach cult status while others fizzle and collect dust in the basement of studios?

During the final two seasons of the show the producers saw the rise in popularity of Xena amongst the lesbian community. Xena had a friend, Gabrielle, who traveled with her on adventures. There were moments of sexual tension between the two characters throughout the show. To cater to the emerging popularity in the lesbian community, the producers designed into the story plot the characters’ affection for each other, although keeping their sexuality ambiguous. The memory of Xena has been kept alive and vibrant by the community of lesbians who related to this aspect of the story. Xena was also an ass-kicking feminist icon which was also a good fit. This conscious design decision to play-up the sexual ambiguity is what gave the series an afterlife. The popularity of the show has lasted longer than the actual time it was on-air.

Star Trek enjoyed the same status of a great afterlife with die hard fans of “Trekkies” and “Trekkers”. Sputnik Satellite orbited the earth in ’57; Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, orbited the Earth in ’61; and Gemini 7 orbits earth 206 times to confirm a trip to the moon is possible in 1965. Star Trek first aired in 1966 and promised what the future could be. The final year of the show 1969, was also the same year man first steps foot on the moon. Star Trek captured the imagination of many and the imagination of a certain subset of young male aspiration of the future.

The recent 2009 movie however, although highly successful in the box office, will not generate the same kind of new following that the TV show produced. The movie is certainly fun to watch with all the intergalactic space explosions packed into a 2 hour roller coaster but it was just another Hollywood spectacle. The Vulcan was Syler, the Romulan was also Hulk, and Sulu was Harold, there were too many characters in too little time to connect to any single one, at least enough to dress up like one.

The Design of Cult Status seems to require these components for it to succeed.
1) ) Design for Embodiment of the Culture. A deeper connection with the people who are in the culture is required. Designing for a focused (target) audience will create meaning and a connection with the people involved in the culture. It must embody an iconic representation of what the culture stands for, whether it’s gblt rights, scifi promises of tomorrow, or rising up against oppressors (like vampires).

2) Design for Preciousness. As opposed to disposability, needs to be incorporated into the design. It needs to be fragile (unpopular). It will feel like the design will die without you.

3) Design for Remembrance. For it to become a cultural icon though, it must die, it must no longer exist. People will fight harder to keep the memory alive. Nostalgia and paraphernalia will rise and created in it’s memory. This becomes a multimillion dollar business.

4) Design for Hero Status. The designed character must be unique, stand alone, and worthy of worship. It’s not merely enough to “like” the character. The character must reflect the audience and reflect the culture. It must be the beacon of who the audience wants to aspire to become.

5) Design for Inclusiveness. The characters must have a physical form which can be imitated. A hero character dressed in a tshirt in khaki would be rather boring to imitate.

Filed under:
Uncategorized by KoNakatsu

“Lars and the Real Girl” (slight spoiler if you keep reading!) is a film about Lars who genuinely believes that his girlfriend Bianca, a life size sex doll, is real. Yes, the premise is a bit creepy, at least in the beginning, but he never has sex with her and it’s all rather innocent. The audience soon empathizes with his delusion, as does the whole town. So to help him, as the psychiatrist in the movie suggests, they all start pretending that she’s real, until Lars can get over this delusion. The townspeople take Bianca to the local church, dances with her at parties, has her volunteer at the hospital, and she starts having a “life” of her own with the assistance of the towns folk. Lars wholeheartedly believes she’s real and the entire town, including Lars’ brother and sister, pretend that she’s real. Bianca is certainly a doll and never says a word but as the town keeps pretending, the audience, the movie watcher, starts believing that she’s real too. Bianca is no longer a doll, but is Bianca. If a group says something is real, it becomes real. Actually, they only have to pretend it’s real, and as an outside audience we can observe this phenomenon.

Children have the capacity to pretend and there is no social stigma attached to that act. As adults we never really pretend any more, unless you are involved in virtual worlds. The 64X64 pixel gift on facebook that you can buy for a friend for a dollar, has meaning. The sofa bought on Second Life, the Atiesh Greatstaff of the Guardian bought on World of Warcraft are all real in the sense that there is an agreed upon consensus by the players and users that it is in fact real and relevant. What started out as Pretend Reality transcends to Regular Reality once the consensus is big enough. The extreme end of that is that Lars and the town were able to bring an inanimate doll to LIFE. Understanding and creating this kind of phenomenon is essential to designing for a future world where most things are digital or non-physical. What needs to be studied is how to promote, facilitate, and design consensus.

This is a phenomenon that I’d like to investigate further. It seems that an agreed up on set of rules or beliefs is important for a phenomenon to occur. It’s not just in the digital realm that group consensus for a designed event occurs. The most popular of designed phenomena which involves group consensus are group dynamic games. Football, basketball, raquetball… for a game to occur in a given space there needs to be a consensus of rules and agreement on the “reality”. The Pretend Reality is one which says “getting this ball into that hoop, matters. And it matters A LOT.” Pretend Reality and the strong belief makes it real. Humans are capable of bringing meaning and enjoyment to things that were not once there. Footballs to Sex Dolls, can we design phenomena around them?

Filed under:
design of consensus by KoNakatsu

My friend worked as a designer at one of the top housewares manufacturers in the country and was also moonlighting as a beer vendor at Sporting events. “Get your Old Style heeeeere!”. When we hung out at parties or design events, strangers would ask him the ultimate small talk question “what do you do?”. Sometimes he’d answer “designer” and the conversation would flow “what do you design?” “so you draw?” etc. but other times he would reply “I sell beer at Cubs games”. People’s reactions differed greatly based on his answer.

Small talk usually bubbles up the question “What do you do?” Which is a shorthand version of “what do you do with most of your time by which people define themselves?” Most of us reply with our respective professions “scientist” “researcher” “designer”, implying that it is what defines us. For most of us we are only truly a designer (or an artist, scientist, etc.) a part of the day. If I visit you in your design firm and you are designing at the time, then you are a designer, but if I happen to catch you mowing your front lawn, are you still a designer? You wouldn’t answer “lawn mower”, we have machines for that now.

Who you are, is not what you do but how you do it. We aren’t defined by our profession. The importance of understanding who we are and how we articulate ourselves is the first step in designing ourselves. With careful observations of our behavior, we can then make conscious decisions with good intentions to design our way of life.

Jesus H. Christ, Buddha, and Mohammad all shared their vision on a way of life. Miyamoto Musashi is another historical figure that designed his life. One of the greatest swordsman to have ever lived, he fought many battles and duels throughout the 16th century. He was never defeated and even died a natural death, something of a rarity if you’re in that line of work. One week before he died he wrote a set of 20 precepts (plus possibly one more), The Dokkōdō, “The Way to be Followed Alone”. They included all the learnings he acquired from direct experience with life. #17 “Do Not Fear Death” was a key precept for a Samurai for he must be focused on the battle that any distraction of worrying about surviving is detrimental to the purpose. #4 “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world” is about connection we can have at the core of our being where the depth of the world can be understood. Only when you design your life in such a way that you can detach your significance can you truly become deeper in meaning.

The design process for a way of life for Miyamoto Musashi was through experimentation. He believed that he had to experience events first hand to understand and learn from them. Although the teachings of Buddha served as an inspiration, intellectual exercises were not enough for him to internalize the truth. Stefan Sagmeister‘s fairly recent book Things I have learned in my life so far is also a set of 20 maxims from direct life experiences that he shared graphically with the world. Some of Sagmeister’s insights echo Musashi’s precept like “Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself or others” while Sagmeister has internalized it as “Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.” Both take direct influences authentic to their own experience to learn and actively design their life.

Sharing these learnings may be the final output of a designed life. In the back of the book The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember the American icon of Nice Guy Neighbor shares “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.” and by doing this Sagmeister might add that leaving a part of yourself behind is good for the soul because he says “Everything I Do Always Comes Back To Me.”

The conscious act of designing ourselves might start with research, an introspective self-awareness followed by an iterative experimentation with a direct need to experience life. How we decide to do things are phenomena that will help us define ourselves and design a designer. I’d like to keep using this forum to design the way. How do we design the way to live our lives. This design is going to be different for all of us.

Filed under:
design of the way by KoNakatsu

We sit in a diner and talk. Intense discussion between him and I, great conversation, great flow from one topic to the next. Then at some point we argue on a moot point and so to add meat to the bones of my perspective, I pull out a little black illuminated brick that connects to the internet and he waits awkwardly.
As I flick through.
And load wikipedia.
I want to assure him that skinhead culture existed before the neo-nazis, and that the pansy-ass left-over remnant Nazis are the ones that stole the tough Skinhead look. I want to show him the skinhead anti-racist groups like S.H.A.R.P (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice).

“I believe you” he insists, but I sense slight doubt in his voice, “no, no, it’s almost loaded”.
I wait.
For the gift.
From the omniscient internet.
To load my proof.
The consequences of the capabilities of this device, births my anti-social behavior that stops the human-to-human flow of a conversation. A friend and I started calling this phenomena “wikipause”. This behavior didn’t exist before the portability of the internet, and if it did, they were probably in a library. When a product or object with any cultural significance is released to the public, it changes our behaviors for better or for worse. Object-Catalyst Phenomena are observable behaviors that is in direct response to a physical object existing in the environment. Cellphones are just one example of this object. I hope to find others to observe and dissect. How else have products negatively affected our lives? How can we design objects so that the resulting behavior is intentional and positive?

Filed under:
object-catalyst phenomena by admin

I set up this site to chart my thoughts, develop a process, and create a framework to design phenomena. I’m using “phenomenon” in the broadest sense, much like the sciences, to mean “observable occurrences”. Phenomena occur all around us, slipping into existence before our eyes and disappearing soon after. I wondered, can we design them in such away that when they do flash into existence that our designed intent is embedded into the phenomena?

Imagine if you will, that at this very moment that not a single soul in the entire universe is playing soccer (aka football), the most popular sport in the world. If this is the case, then does “soccer” exist? It’s merely a set of rules in the collective mind of billions of people; It’s just an idea floating in the ether. Objects that assist in the existence of “soccer” like soccerballs, fields, goals, and cleats, surely exist in a tangible sense, but if no one is actually experiencing with the equipment, then “soccer” doesn’t really exist. As soon as a couple of Argentinian kids start kicking the ball toward a chalk-drawn goal on a brick wall, only then does it become an observable phenomenon.

The objective of this site is to identify these phenomena, understand how and why they occur, and study how it can be designed. From sports rules to nation building, from education systems to cultural rituals, from ways of instilling hope and affecting human behaviors, all of these phenomena can be designed in a positive direction. My hope with this project is that we can start a dialogue about how we as creatives can touch, influence, design and phenomenate these intangible occurrences.

I look forward to our discussions.

- Ko Nakatsu

Filed under:
intro by admin