.

“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution.
Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

~ Thomas Alva Edison

“There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity”

~ Tom Peters

“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the ‘still small voice’ within.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.”

~ Albert Schweitzer

“Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless
if there isn’t the will to do what is right.”

~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others.
In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.”

~ Immanuel Kant

“No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.”

~ Ovid

“The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.”

~ Confucius

“It is curious—curious that physical courage should be
so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.”

~ Mark Twain

“Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.”

~ Albert Einstein

Montréal, Quebec

There’s a good reason I have not posted to my blog in nearly a week… I have been completely immersed in Icograda meetings—with our great Secretariat Staff, the Interview Committee that is charged with replacing outgoing Managing Director Brenda Sanderson, and with the Icograda Executive Board, meeting for the third time in this 2011-2013 term. All of this is by dent of my having agreed to take on the interim role of ‘Acting Director’ with Icograda to help with the transition between Brenda’s departure at the end of April and the start-date for the new Managing Director (likely in mid-July).

On a personal note, I realize this may be of little interest to those of you who do not know what Icograda is or means; on the other hand, those who know me will likely also know that over the years Icograda sort of grew to be the “family I never had”—for better or worse (I wrote about this in a post back in 2007, here). It’s wonderful to back in a tighter orbit with Icograda, and also a little overwhelming, to be perfectly honest…

Captions for photos above: Members of the current Icograda Board, left to right, who were present in Montréal this past weekend: Jeffrey Ho (Singapore), Sophia Shih (Taiwan), Yesim Demir (Istanbul), Leimei Julia Chiu (current president, Japan), Iva Babaja (Croatia), Gaby de Abreu (South Africa), Kyle Kim (Korea), Sali Sasaki* (France), and Gitte Just (Denmark)—missing were Russell Kennedy (Australia), Vesna Brekalo (Slovenia), and Lawrence Zeegen (United Kingdom) | Brenda and Leimei at the farewell dinner for the outgoing Managing Director | Gaby, Iva, and Sali at the same dinner | Sophia, Iva, and Yesim—”smokin’-hot” outside the hotel, to quote another board member. | The view from Mount Royal on the evening following the board meeting (we were hosted to a dinner in the pavilion there by Culture Montréal along with international delegates from the UNESCO Creative Cities Network).

*On Sali’s behalf, I feel I need to explain why she is wearing sneakers and not fancy shoes by Jimmy Choo or the like in the top photo… unfortunately Sali was hit badly by a luggage cart (commandeered by a rude and pushy woman) when she landed at the Montréal airport, causing serious harm to one foot.

Deep peace of the running wave to you.

Deep peace of the flowing air to you.

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.

Deep peace of the shining stars to you.

Deep peace of the infinite peace to you.

(for you-know-who)

(worldwide)

Special wishes to the estimated 2.3 Billion mothers on our planet on this special day…  have a Good One!

Vancouver, BC

A big, warm, heartfelt Thankyou! to the design community in this fine city for making me feel so welcome at the 2012 Salazar Awards event yesterday. It was a real honour to spend the evening with you… I look forward to hearing from attendees regarding your design ideas and design actions that “aim higher” in helping to unfuck the world and to help solve the problems that our design professions have abetted (often unwittingly).

You can contact me here.

Frankfurt, Germany (a re-post from 2008)

Having grown up multi-lingually on several continents, I’ve never really been “at home” in any particular place, and have often felt a bit like a chameleon. I’ve also eschewed (mostly unconsciously) being woven into a single community or cultural fabric. This likely explains why I live in the woods (without neighbors or a local community), yet have spent my life heavily involved in professional and global peer networks, and seem to have an ongoing “restlessness to move” and travel on a continual basis. I’ve often used the ironic quip: “If you don’t care where you are, you’re never lost.” as a truism I can really relate to. While being rootless does have its advantages (one tends to be more tolerant of others; adapting to new environs is easier) this identity struggle also brings a raft of other social and psychological issues along with it in its sojourns, including reverse culture shock and a sense of disengaged melancholia.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered this phenomena has a taxonomy and name of its own—Third Culture Kids, often abbreviated “TCKs” or “3CKs” or “Global Nomads,” referring to “someone who, (as a child) has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture.” By definition, “the TCK tends to build relationships to all cultures, while not having full ownership of any,” and “develops a sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere.”

The concept of Third Culture Kids was introduced in the 1960s by Ruth Hill Useem (1915-2003), a sociologist who used the term to describe children who spent part of their developmental years in a foreign culture due to their parents’ working abroad.” Her work was the first to “identify common themes among various TCKs that affect them throughout their lives.” TCKs tend to have more in common with one another, regardless of nationality, than they do with non-TCKs from their own country—over the past decades, TCKs have become a heavily studied global subculture. (My cousin Faith, also a TCK, authored/edited the book Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global, documenting “a life of growing up in multiple nations, cultures, and language regions.”)

Old photos: I always had this thing for small cars (perhaps in reaction to the hulking ‘Strassenkreuzer’ Studebaker my parents shipped over to Germany); on our Stettenstrasse front stoop, my first day of school in Frankfurt.

Montreal, Canada

Best wishes to designer colleagues and creative communicators near and far on World Communication Design Day, which is also the 49th birthday of Icograda. This week I took on a new interim role as Acting Director at the Icograda Secretariat, providing advisory and management services and helping to ensure a smooth transition between outgoing Managing Director Brenda Sanderson’s departure and the inauguration of a new Managing Director in the coming months.

Cheers!

Milan, Italy

Franco Brambilla likes to mix nostalgia from the past with cute aliens and beings from Sci Fi movies. See lots more of his creations in this genre here…

Oberweißbach, Germany

Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel was a German pedagogue and a student of Pestalozzi, who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities. Fröbel developed the concept of the “kindergarten” (literally garden for children, coining the word now used in German and English) and developed the Froebel Gifts educational toys—these emphasized sensory exploration and manipulatives, and are credited as forerunners of abstract art, a source of inspiration to the Bauhaus movement, and a formative influence on Maria Montessori.

I attended kindergarten in Frankfurt, Germany as a child; like countless others in the fields of design, the elegant maple geometric “building blocks” derived from Froebelian toys that I was given to play with had a lasting effect on my sense of three-dimensional composition and perception of planar elements. (The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright also assimilated many influences into his architecture, and credited these learning tools with the geometric clarity that typified his work).

“From objects to pictures,
from pictures to symbols,
from symbols to ideas,
leads the ladder of knowledge.”

 ~ Friedrich Froebel