Chimamanda Adichie has given what has to be one of my favorite TED talks of all time. In The Danger of a Single Story she discusses the problem with listening to just one story to the exclusion of all others.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story…
The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar…
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity…
When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Those are the highlights of the talk, the phrases that struck me as I was listening to it. You’ll want to hear the whole thing, though, for the stories she weaves through the entire talk.
As a kid, I loved Maurice Sendak’s books. It sounds like the man himself is a force to be reckoned with:
One of the neighbours complained about this “eyesore” farmhouse . . . And said he’d personally help remove it, if Maurice so desired, thinking he was being a big guy to help the old man get rid of the eyesore. And Maurice told him if he ever mentioned it again, he’d turn that stable into a whorehouse.
I’d recommend reading the rest of the Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers discussion about the making of Where the Wild Things Are. There’s a lot about following your vision, rather than doing things the way everyone else thinks they should be done.
FailCon sounds as if it was a lot of fun. How could a bunch of people getting together and talking about their failures. The Wired covereage of the conference has this great bit on iterative sketching and failure:
Consulting firm Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer counseled companies to avoid failure by going out and finding their target users, in order to figure out what they need. Then, the key is to build ‘empathy’ for those needs into the product.
But more importantly, companies need to learn how to fail in the right ways.
Schauer points to a sketch online that supposedly is the original sketch of Twitter — which looks much like the current (and wildly popular) service as it is today.
“This is how we tell stories of brilliance and innovation, like Newton having the idea of gravity just coming upon him,” Schauer said. “But that’s not actually how things work.”
By contrast, when his company works with companies, they go through many design sketches, with participants finding their fourth sketch in a row is the best one, far better than the first.
I’d love to see a similar conference organized here in the UK.
Umberto Eco has been invited by the Louvre in Paris to curate an exhibition. He has chosen lists as his organising principle.
Making lists is often derided as a cop-out: something that we do instead of actually creating or making something. Lists have recently been called a degenerate case of essay.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Reading the rest of this interview makes me wonder if there is really a clear distinction between curation and creation or whether the two are inextricably linked. I strongly suspect that behind every act of creation lies a long history of curation, which is effectively the act of making lists. Every truly amazing musician I have known has had an equally amazing record collection. Good writers almost always have a fantastic library. In the world of user experience design, there are numerous examples of pattern libraries. Everything is made out of something, and we tend to collect before we create.
On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.
After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.
This was a key and traumatic event in Vonnegut’s life, but he is almost casual in his description the carpet bombing of Dresden and its aftermath. I guess this is the nature of trauma: we hold things at a distance until we are better able to deal with them. It took Vonnegut over 20 years.
