Showing only Notes + Links tagged work
It took me a minute to realize that this is a photo of a real thing. That is amazing. CP+B has a way less glamorous but also awesome version of this that tracks the projects for their larger company.
The Panic Status Board - one of the things I’ve been working on lately. Read Cabel’s writeup!
“We procrastinate when we’ve forgotten who we are.” —Merlin Mann
Samurai Tree 1M, 2006, by Gabriel Orozco
For a year, from late summer 2004 through early fall 2005, Orozco worked “shoulder to shoulder” with Picoli, who had not been trained as a painter. But once Picoli’s skills were finely honed, and the project of turning the Invariant diagrams into paintings had been firmly established, Orozco departed. The work of painting is now one that he delegates to Picoli in Paris and Christian Macia in Mexico City.
All the genius mythology that once went together with the studio—isolation, inspiration, struggle, ecstasy, despair—is absent in the making of Orozco’s paintings.
—Ann Temkin
Craft is defined in its excess—in the element of work that is not required or demanded, but through which the maker makes a gift—unsought, unreciprocated—to others.Mandy Brown — On craft / from a working library (nicely paraphrasing The Craftsman by Richard Sennett)
Carey Young - Everything You’ve Heard is Wrong
1999
This piece is a video of a performance by the artist held at Speakers’ Corner, London in the midst of the traditional Sunday mayhem of speakers and onlookers. Dressed in a smart business suit, the artist gives a skills workshop on successful corporate-style communication. The video records her impassioned performance as well as the reactions of the temporary crowd of onlookers.
Speaker’s Corner has a long history in the public imagination, whether as a popular site for political demonstrations or as a symbol for unregulated free speech. It is a location renowned for entertainment, madness, and outrage, but particularly for extremes of religious or political belief. Today it appears somewhat an anachronism, with the almost biblical feeling of a souk. Passion, anger and laughter run high among this temporary community. Emotion and conviction are on the surface in a rather unfashionable way: this is not the apathy or irony of the times. Yet despite this sense of a backwards connection with history, the site is a model for the sort of free speech supposedly so central to the ‘information age’. Communication flows freely here, without the mediation of machines.
Third panel from Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator, 2008 by Sharon Lockhart
Three chromogenic prints; 24 3/4 x 30 3/4 inches (62.9 x 76.2 cm) each framed
(via Gladstone Gallery)
CP+B Job Tracker
Keeping track of all the jobs flowing through is a challenge for every agency. For about a year we’ve been fantasizing about a huge status board that was accessible to the whole shop. Something that was live and constantly updating. Like the arrivals and departures in Grand Central Station. Unfortunately, the status of “Project Ticker” has been ON HOLD for about 9 months and then I looked up yesterday and it was done. Man, it is really cool. Here’s what Director of Integrated Production, Dave Rolfe, has to say about it:
“The ProjectTicker is the real-time inventory of all of the jobs active in the Integrated department. It can be filtered by job due date, by account, by job-type (video, interactive, experiential, internal prods), by completion status, by CD or by producer. It also features a status bar that indicates the completion status of the job. All of this is automatically updated through our existent jobflow status process. So not only is it a thing of pride for the agency— in terms of the volume of work flow, accountability for that, and the diversity of jobs— but it also helps to highlight the importance of documentation on production status. Plus it is poised to truly demonstrate momentum. The Ticker will be manageable via a kiosk as well, which will be positioned at the front of the department, and the view-type can be adjusted by anyone.”
This is intense.
(via Monoscope)
It should be unacceptable for us to say that lying about one’s abilities is something that everyone has to do to get ahead. It should be unacceptable for us to say that arrogance and aggression are to be aspired to.
Instead we should be demonstrating that great projects, like the ones Apple produces, are at least in part based upon trying to produce the best thing possible, feeling the integrity in the product you’re making. Trying to do something good.
Tom Coates (plasticbag.org: Should we encourage self-promotion and lies?)
Generally good advice and the best answer so far to Clay Shirky’s sensationally titled Rant About Women.
A commenter points out:
I think what Clay’s getting at is simply: willingness to take calculated risks. His example of saying, “my drafting’s fine” in order to ensure a place in a class is a good example. It’s an obnoxiously macho thing to take badly calculated risks (e.g the financial crisis was not in any significant way caused by women, I bet), but it’s often a productive means to an end.
(via @caterina)
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.Kurt Vonnegut Jr (via tedr)
The startup super-pattern →
Paul Graham on what’s so different and mysterious about starting a startup:
The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what? Once you phrase it that way, the answer is obvious: from a job. Everyone’s model of work is a job.
Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises. It explains why people are surprised how carefully you have to choose cofounders and how hard you have to work to maintain your relationship. You don’t have to do that with coworkers. It explains why the ups and downs are surprisingly extreme. In a job there is much more damping. But it also explains why the good times are surprisingly good: most people can’t imagine such freedom. As you go down the list, almost all the surprises are surprising in how much a startup differs from a job.
All 19 other points are culled from the founders of the startups they’ve funded.
(via bobulate)
You pick a boss, not a job. Who you work for can matter more than what you do.Interesting advice from John Maeda on Twitter
Ellen Lupton, author of multiple books, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt museum, director of the Graphic Design MFA at MICA, and (to nobody’s surprise) a self-proclaimed workaholic, posted this funny-but-true comparison between high-functioning and sloppy workaholics. She also illustrated the cute image above to accompany the post on her blog Design-Your-Life.
[If the table doesn’t appear or looks crazy, make sure you’re viewing this on my site or Ellen’s]
| The High-Functioning Workaholic | The Sloppy Workaholic |
| Views sleep as research: an opportunity to get ideas | Views sleep as death: a movie trailer for the world’s longest coffee break |
| Starts early, like a farm woman | Works all night, like a rocker hopped up on speed and frappucinos |
| Checks e-mail while watching TV | Checks e-mail while driving on I-95 |
| Favors three-minute lunches | Forgets to eat |
| Becomes a smoothly running machine as pressure rises | Becomes a demented, vengeful bitch as pressure rises |
| Enjoys working during vacations | Believes vacations should be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions |
| Is aware of deadlines, sell-by dates, and the next scheduled increase of U.S. postal rates | Lacking any internal clock mechanism, is in a constant state of harried panic |
(via John Maeda)
John Maeda tweets:
The upside of overworking is in those rare cases where you feel you actually got something done.
Definitely feeling this way. And the worst is when you overwork and feel like you didn’t get much done!! I think a lot of artists and creatives work in bursts like these, of quietly incubating ideas then working furiously. People who don’t get it think that half of the time we’re doing nothing. HA.
