iam blogging - by gmo

Curiosity

When did you stop being curious?

I would not be able to guess the date, but I can tell you what happened in your life. You stopped having fun! You turned your tribe into a factory, and became preocupied. In the end, the world had already been decyphered by someone else.

Stop the excuses! You screwed up big time, and took everyone else with you. Stand up, ditch the production line, get busy... Above all, be curious and experiment. New logics are coming, and we need you to find them. Be more like a kid and less like a grown up.

Now you understand why young people are beginning to take over the world.

HAVE FUN!!!

The lesson from the big 3

Architecture loved the 1950's rise of Ford's assembly line. And developers had rose side by side with automakers. And their latest demise is connected with them again.

Just like the American automakers, they were too shortsighted; and became used to have things their way. They started building cars that were design with the old standards, forgetting about the contemprary need for performance. And while at it, produced what they were sure people wanted, and made it look good, and affordably cheap, to at least hide what was not being done. This rendered a series of hyper-generic dumb objects... which translates into a devaluating asset.

And then when the people follow, it turns out not only were they paying with money they did not have, but they were betting on cost becoming value, which was never there.

The future, just like with the big three, does not lie in a bailout. The future lies in believing all the small guys, and in leading young and up to date designers whom are in it without prejudice, and for stuff that matters more than money.

HAVE FUN!!!

Brief History of Value in Design & Architecture

Value used to be a simple subtraction.  "Buy low, sell high".  In it's first update, the meaning was "standardize, make it cheap, sell it expensive.  In it's third update, it became "quantity!  the more i build the more i sell...  people will buy anything". And in the fourth update it was "standardize, get a big name, blow up the price, and try to build as much as possible".

Within this context, many starchitects came out and recognized themselves as "architects of the market".  Soon, they forgot about the true meaning of value, and got in the train of developer architecture: "give me a name, an image, and a specific building.  Suddenly, mediocrity was into form...  and gimmicks.  If the market collapses, and you were an architect of the market, you get to either reinvent yourself, or die!.

My prediction, finally an upgrade to value will happen, and it will be "how can we optimize the design [or the strategy], to become particular enough [not generic, not specific], take advantage of it's scenario [fuck standards], build a city [aka systemic approach], and make it special [perform]; summing it all up with the word quality".   This will build amazing stories, hopefully fresh, but at the very least not-that-much-standard.  This will also bring forward social work from the most capitalist profession of all; without social meaning charity.  For intellectual purists, this definition is complicated since all those terms are "subjective". Be post-post-critical about it, and make it work for you! 

And if you are good, you will have a forward attitude about this, and take us on the journey with you.

HAVE FUN!!!

Design - The Bar is Raised

I wrote throughout last year, that good design had three main fields.  Value, optimization and story. 

I wish to start the new year by noting that the crisis has taken care of raising the bar.  To avoid confusion i feel obliged to clarify that this does not cancel out the "anything goes" attitude of design and architecture of the recent era...  think of it as an upgrade rather than a different software.

If you are not creating value, optimizing according to the desired result, and leading an interesting story, you are simply not designing, or managing architecture for that matter...  Please forget that idea of design as top-down and architecture as bottom-up, and therefore what is bad for one is good for the other.  This is the point where they both meet.  And if you are not working within all three of the fields, it is neither developing  leading a design technique nor building performing an architecture strategy.

During the next posts i will put to the test each of those three fields, and show that unlike in the early 90's, iam not discussing about a single path or something that by simply being measurable is ok.  There are many paths that lead to Rome, the problem is being in them when you are not going to Rome.

HAVE FUN!!!

Test

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