Tim McCormick

the “Walkstation”, from Steelcase.  starting at $4,399.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to unplug, particularly from desktop computer use.  I’m long inured to epic computer sessions — many-houred trance states, almost. Some people can go for 24 hours or more at this with just snack breaks, which can’t be good.

For many reasons, especially health in all forms.  As discussed in the recent NY Times article “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity”, new research suggests there may be a huge health issue caused by pervasive unhealthy sitting postures, and computer-use postures, and just the fact of pervasive *sitting* at all;  it may be a prime factor in the incidence of obesity in our society.  The article focuses on obesity and related issues, but in addition there’s the millions of cases of repetitive-stress injury, and who knows what in eyestrain, general stress, back problems, and general unhappiness.

I have a pet analogy:  in earlier times, scientists and technicians working on atomic energy projects would walk around carrying unshielded radioactive materials;  factory workers painting watch faces with radioactive luminous paint would routinely lick their brushes to sharpen them;  nobody knew, or knew for sure, that these were deadly activities, until the workers began to die of cancer at epidemic rates.

Likewise, I imagine that decades from now, people will look back at our time and be horrified that once, hundreds of millions of people in (mainly the rich) world would sit in a chair for 10-15 hours a day, directly in front of a monitor, typing or using a mouse.   They’ll say, but how could they have gone so long and not seen the correlation to ….  cancer rates. or perhaps epidemic obesity and metabolic disorders, or pervasive developmental and mental disorders like ADHD,  etc.   I know the bulk of humanity aren’t office drones, and may have other, more prosaic concerns such as lack of clean water, or AIDS,  but let’s focus on the leading-edge first world for now.

The obesity and developmental-disorders problems mentioned might more likely correlate to television watching.. but maybe the office computer is like a workplace version of television, from a health standpoint:  a great vegetating, obesity-generating, mind-numbing force.

Anyway so here are just some ideas, mine and others’, of ways large and small, symbolic and real, to reconnect virtual (inside your computer) with real world.

1) Weather webcam:  bring the weather / street to your desktop
Set up webcam at your office building, pointing outwards to show weather, daylight level, and street life.  (if you hopefully have street life, and haven’t been virtualized away to a lifeless office park or campus).  Then, on employees’ computers, set the default wallpaper  (desktop background) to be an regularly-updating view from the webcam — there are various free programs to do this. The reason is obvious:  in a lot of offices, a lot of people are getting very little natural light, or cue as to what’s going on outside.   I’ve thought about this one for year and years, since way back when I first worked in a cubicle in the ’70s.  But I haven’t heard of it being done anywhere.

2) Social webcam:  bring the lobby / atrium / cafe / bar to your desktop (a social variation on #1):
Set up or designate some communal social space — e.g. a break room or lobby area or part of the cafeteria — and designate it “live”.  Set up webcam onto this space.  Feed webcam stream into default employees’ computer wallpaper.  So, you can have some remote connection to who is hanging out, you can perhaps join your friends if you see them there, and you can go there yourself and have more chance of running into your friends.

A more public version of this is the bar or cafe that sets up a webcam and puts it on the Web, so presumably you can check out who’s there before coming down.  This used to be done occasionally, back in the day when webcams were relatively new.   Obviously, privacy concerns arise, so I think the practice faded.  I don’t know if anyone tried what I was thinking of, visibly designating just part of the venue as “live”.

3) Standing meetings
Borrowing a technique from agile software development, do meetings standing up when possible. Not only does it help keep meetings quick and focused, but it keeps people’s bodies in motion, and works against the relapsing into Blackberry / smartphone or even laptop use that can happen during a sit-down meeting.

4) Treadmill workstations
Actually quite simple:  mount a desktop over a treadmill, walk while you work.  These exist, are in production from leading office-furniture company Steelcase: the “Walkstation”, from Steelcase.  starting at $4,399.  (see photo at top of post).  The ones that exist are made for office environments, thus presumably walking, but I’ve been thinking I could really enjoy something like this at the gym.  Rather than five TV channels of trash that I have to choose from now, I’d be most happy if I could carry on my preferred news-reading, Web video-watching, Wikipedia-reading, and general Web foraying, while running or bicycling.  I see an opportunity for high-end, professionals-oriented gyms here.

The treadmill workstation (right, the vendors don’t call them “treadmills”, but I will) is greatly ironic:  it’s like a comically absurd symbolization of the modern office worker as poorhouse drone;  but in fact, might be a great gift to the employee.  Yes, and gift of employer to itself, by reducing health-care costs and health-related productivity loss.

5) Office computers that make you take breaks
Set up office computers so that every so often, say every two hours, the system will gently log you out for ten minutes or so.  It will be unavailable for that time, so you may as well take a power nap, do you calisthenics routine, or walk around the block once or twice.

Ok, there are some practical issues like not interrupting you if you’re on a conference call or Webinar, etc., but it can be worked out.  Perhaps, you can get a button to override for one hour, or the logout won’t happen during scheduled critical times.

6) Office computers that make you take musical chairs breaks
In offices where workstations and seating positions are relatively interchangeable, and people use thin terminals (i.e. their files and programs are on the network drive, not local), periodically the computers log everyone off for a period (as in #5).  However, in this version, the twist is that after ten minutes, your session with your open files and programs will become reavailable on a different workstation somewhere in the office. After doing your power nap or coffee break, you have to find out where in the office you’ve been transferred, which involves a fun game of everyone roaming around shouting out who’s where.  Then, you have to adjust your body to the chair settings, monitor position, different lamp, etc., of the workstation’s prior user.  Hilarious!  Alright this isn’t quite serious but the point here is to make us think people.

7) Shifty office furniture
The recent Mayo Clinic research from that NY Times article tells us that unchanging, sedentary body positions greatly impact our metabolisms.  Common sense and experience tells us that an unchanging position in a chair, or craning at a screen, is uncomfortable.  Yet, unchange and crane we do, as the research shows.  Concentration apparently immobilizes people, and so we really ought to keep changing our positions.  But why rely on us to remember to move, when we have machines to be clever like that?

So, the monitor:  mine, for example, sits on a little platform I made that rolls easily in all directions and fits the keyboard in underneath.  It would be quite simple to make a monitor stand (hello, Steelcase!) that was like this but had a few little motors attached to the rollers and randomly timed such that once in a while, it would gently slide left or right or forward six inches.

More sophisticated applications of this idea would be monitor arms that changed positions, or adjustable-height desks that changed.  You could also put your lamp on a timer so it would periodically conk out, and you’d be forced to get up to reset it.  (I know, neither your cubicle / table segment nor mine are big enough to require any “getting up” to change the lamp;  or, also bad, there is no lamp that you have any control over, just totalitarian ceiling fluorescents or whatever.  So plug something in whose outage will cause a reaction.  We’re just trying to get metabolism into the work environment, however how).

Change up the form factor:  smartphone, tablet, wallscreen
Different computing devices pull people into different physical positions and activities; and the more mobile a device, obviously the more it can be used embedded in the world
When people started using and got used to smartphones, especially the iPhone, often they were and are surprised to learn how many formerly “computer” tasks can actually be done with it.  Particularly with a beautifully-designed implement like the iPhone, people become attached to it in a way that they don’t generally feel about a desktop PC, and they want to use it instead of the PC, even perhaps for, say, tasks that seem to be large-screen oriented.

I find that I’ll walk over to my desk to check email, and pick up my iPhone to check on it rather than looking at the desktop PC.  The phone, I pick up and hold in just the position most comfortable to how I’m standing;  the PC demands that I stoop to it.  It’s like the old distinction between “lean forward” technology such as the PC and “lean back” technology such as the television.

Likewise, a common experience with the new tablet computers (led by Apple’s iPad) is to feel released from the desktop, or even a desk/table (i.e. as laptops are typically used on), and find oneself using it on the couch, in bed, or in new places on the go.

More speculatively, I also imagine devices / interfaces becoming widely available that are wall- or room-sized.  As perhaps most famously imagined in the 2002 movie Minority Report, in which the detective played by Tom Cruise uses a special room filled with panels of transparent LED displays, controlled by laser mice in his gloves, to rapidly explore ream of image and database data about his suspect.

(See Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demoing his current version of this at a 2010 TED event).  Note, in both cases, the user is standing up, and making significant body motions (arms) to work the display;  also, there is a social component, because the operator’s activity is displayed large enough for colleagues or an audience to watch and participate.

Yes, many of these design ideas have been villified by other interface designers as unusable, clueless fantasies.  Yet I can imagine the room-as-interface (what Underkoffler calls the “luminous room” concept) having important applications.  For example, in collaborative meetings and videoconferences, where groups of people must gather a lot of visual materials, brainstorm, decide, perhaps working from far-separated geographic locations.  Or, educational software (including training materials, in the corporate context) that employs large-scale interfaces — and perhaps gamification (use of game-play mechanics) — for a more effective and healthy whole-body experience.

Some of the above techniques assume that computer immersion is a problem requiring interruption.  Others propose integrating motion into immersive computer activity.  Ultimately I think the latter has more potential, because obviously it’s not disrupting the user’s concentration.  It suggests a new definition of unplugging:  being plugged in to the computer while still thoroughly plugged in to your body and the physical world.

[if you got this by email, and it's garbled or missing images, please try reading it at http://tjm.org/2011/03/29/snobbery-filtering-for-email-overload].

Oh Gmail.  We’ve come a long ways, over the years.  I shared with you my deepest secrets, you gave me filters and keyboard shortcuts and Gmail Labs.  I love you.. but darling, you must, you MUST, you must stop constantly introducing me to your random uncouth friends.

Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (1848) Ch.3 engraving

Dear, it’s called a boundary.  I will entertain, I will invite in our friends and acquaintances of quality; but I will not live outside in the gutter.  I expect there are some very nice persons among your.. people, but the rule simply must be, I shall invite chosen acquaintances to my home;  rather than having all comers wandering in through our wide-open front door, and using the facilities.  I cannot be spending my time sorting through this horde of interlopers, and worse, having to strain and scheme trying to force this human muck back out the door, an effort often futile and unchaste.

Accordingly, I must ask that from now on we observe certain standards.  Such as, oh, DOORS:  unless I invite in one of your people, he shall remain firmly outside.  Further, in these mixed and foul times, we must insist that anyone whom we have not chosen to address, shall have no claim upon us, nor shall we look upon them or deign to hear them, unless we so decide.

. . . . . . . .

Analogously to the indignant lady-of-the-house speaking above, maintaining a proper household, I’ve been thinking about the perennial problem of how to block unwanted strangers (or acquaintances) from your inbox.  Typical email systems have a presumption of validity, delivering any email that is not filtered out e.g. as spam (which, of course, follows the normal practice of pre-digital mail systems, that basically, deliver to you whatever has been mailed to you).

If, on the other hand, you accept mail only from pre-approved senders, you have a “whitelist” or “trusted sender” system. This takes a less democratic or trusting view: that anyone not my friend or acquaintance is presumptively, my enemy.

Given the “toilet that is email”, as a friend aptly put it, my suggested approach is what I’ll call Snobbery Filtering, a derived, exclusive, whitelist system:

1. exclusive whitelist in that only mail from whitelist senders is accepted; strangers are preemptively diverted;
2. derived, in that whitelist is mainly inferred from to whom I’ve sent email

So, concretely:

1) In my Inbox, show me only email from addresses which:

a) I have previously sent email to  (spoken to…); or
b) I have manually whitelisted, i.e. designated as a permitted sender. (see 2) below).

2) For all other email, divert to either

a) a Holding folder, where mail can be periodically reviewed and the sender tagged as whitelist or blacklist; or
b) a Spam folder for anything that triggers general or personal spam filters.

It seems too simple, yet it seems like the above Snobbery Filtering would address the key problems that most people have with the medium.  I really can’t figure (without more research..) why this is not widely implemented and available. I’d be happy to turn it on for my email:  despite years of frustrating filtering effort, there are still rubes walking through my (inbox) living room with muddy boots, regularly.

Maybe people too often do want to invite strangers in;  or perhaps it’s that such filtering requires a lot of calculation — examining each email relative to each addressee, rather than just examining the message in isolation.  But computer power is ever cheaper, and I think a bit more of it to keep strangers out of my living room is a no-brainer.

I know there have been various related efforts in the past, such as restricting incoming mail to senders in your Contacts list (AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail? one or more of them), but it’s never seemed to be implemented well enough to be adopted on a large scale, that I know of. For one thing, your set of accepted senders is not synonymous with your Contacts list — we have aggravating, chain-letter-sending cousins, and we have newsletters we want that aren’t sent by a “Contact”.

Plugins like Xobni, or enterprise mail filtering services like Postini probably use something like Snobbery Filtering as a factor, but as far as I know they still work mainly via probabilistic rules, not a solid “front door”.  In all, I’ve never used a consumer or corporate mail system that wasn’t obviously, if occasionally, letting in strangers.

Thackeray - The Book of Snobs - XXVI - page_99

Gmail’s recently-launched Priority Inbox feature aims to do filtering something like what I’ve described, and I’ve been testing it out. But, not surprisingly for a Google service, it is algorithmic, i.e. is about “training” various rules to identify Important mail.  Unfortunately, you as user are enlisted in this “training” efforts — so we now seem back to the presumption of email validity (show mail to addressee unless it is filtered as spam or, in this case, as not Important).  It’s still letting a lot of people in to your house, off the street, and asking you to throw out the ones you don’t like.

Then there is filtering by your ISP (Internet Service Provider).  This is a bit like a security post at the entrance to your subdivision or private street, looking out for ne’er-do-wells.  It might be helpful, but on one hand, you can’t trust it enough that you’ll leave your house’s front door open; and on the other hand, some of your friends you do want to visit might get hassled or shut out by the guard.

Also, bad guys, or salesman, might bribe the security gatesman.  That’s the case where a large-scale email sender, e.g. marketer, makes a deal with an ISP to let its email through.  In a widely controversial 2006 case, AOL and Yahoo made a deal to use Goodmail Systems’ CertifiedEmail system such that mail from senders who prepaid 1/4 cent per message would be delivered directly to users’ mailboxes without being subject to spam filters.

Well so much for your ISP preventing spam!  It turns out, they may have an interest not only in letting in spam, but in overriding your local spam barriers!   The gatesman might not only take bribes for letting unscrupulous salesmen through, but he might give the salesmen keys to your house.

So, we are back to our Snobbery Filtering – simple, user-centered, and under our control.  What interests me really is, how much of email’s main problems, for how many people, could be addressed with Snobbery Filtering?  As compared to the far more complicated systems used by Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.?  Or, how many people might prefer this arrangement than their present one?

I think email services should have, long ago, built and evolved trusted-sender systems like this.  The services seem to have settled on aiming for mostly right, and for thinking mostly in terms of spam vs. non-spam, rather than in terms of filtering by use of discoverable social relations — e.g. deriving filters from your email usage patterns.  To me it is quite remarkable that only now has Gmail come out with their Priority Inbox feature, which takes a Snobbery approach — think if they’d launched it five years ago and actually product-developed it until now, to learn all the nuances of how to do it well.

"the 'Gmail Killer' Facebook Email system...replaces the internal message system and now incorporates emails, Facebook messages, SMS, other chat clients....will also feature the Social Inbox."

Unfortunately, while email services have been fiddling, Rome has burned:  much of the online world’s momentum is moving to trusted, comparatively closed systems such as text messaging, Twitter, and Facebook.  There, for the most part, one deigns to communicate to people;  rather than they deigning to walk right into your inbox, right in your front door. However, these systems lack many of the virtues of traditional emails:  inherent opennness to all comers, transparent technical standards, extensibility to all computing environments, etc., which made email the greatest universal medium ever.

But a tide is turning:  already, plenty of people I know are not reachable reliably or at all via traditional email;  they are, by Facebook or Twitter or SMS.

Email was an exercise in democracy that, for many people, has failed — in large part, for its lack of manners, its social mixing of friend and stranger:  in short, its lack of snobbery.  To maintain this world-changing and essential medium, what we need is renewed separation between the classes, and widespread unkindness to strangers.

…

Images:  W.M. Thackeray, wood engravings for his The Book of Snobs (1st edition,1848).  scan of book copy from the Bodleian Library, Oxford; via Google Books, France.

Brian Eno interviewed on BBC about creative strategy and Oblique Strategies

Oblique Strategies (subtitled “over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas”) is a set of published cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt first published in 1975.

Each card contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation.  Examples include:

• Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
• Look at the order in which you do things
• Work at a different speed
• Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify
• Not building a wall; making a brick
• Repetition is a form of change
• Don’t break the silence
• What wouldn’t you do?
• What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate
• Disciplined self-indulgence

“It’s kind of art school stuff, turned into a lifestyle really.”  Eno comments.

Random Oblique Strategies (gives you 1 at a time, from OS vols 1-5):

See also the idea of “Lateral thinking” from Edward De Bono, 1970:

You’ve probably seen the recent, widely-distributed alert about how Facebook’s News Feed (wall) changed:  now it shows you updates only from friends & pages you’ve interacted with recently.

So, possibly a huge portion of the daily connections between FB users has been quietly suppressed, to achieve this greater focus.  A lot of my network, perhaps, has gone silent, and I’m now invisible to many of my “friends,” but I don’t know which.

It is like you are walking around in public, and many of the people you see are actually ghosts, holograms, but you don’t know which.  If you greet people or tap them on the shoulder, often they don’t respond, and you don’t know if they’re just indifferent or they’re just ghosts.  (ok, years of living in NYC talking here).

You can change your wall settings back to how they were, so *you* see all your friends’ news.  (see how, at bottom of post).  But you’ll may still be invisible to them, unless they changed *their* settings.  And it’s a well-known principle in software design that most people never change default settings.

Of course, this recent change just implements en masse what could happen before by people turning off or dialing down updates from specific people.  Some friend was annoying and prolific in posting, so you clicked on “less from this person”.  Thus you could disconnect from people, without their knowing.  We never really knew to whom we were ghosts.

Naturally, all this leads to the question:  how *could* I figure out who’s just become a ghost to me, and to whom I’m a ghost?  For the former, you could go through your friends list, go to their profiles, look at their recent postings/news (if any), and compare to your news feed.  (Yeah, not really feasible).

To figure out to whom you’ve become a ghost, I suppose you could post on your wall, then write to all your friends and see if they saw it on their wall;  or you could ask all of them to change their settings to show all.  Right… you’d annoy a lot of people, most wouldn’t respond, and you wouldn’t know who’d actually changed their settings in response.  Besides, if 25% of FB users wrote to all their friends, you’d get an average of 40 messages, which would be 20 billion messages total, and FB would probably go down in flames.

I’m not a Facebook expert, so perhaps one of my better-versed friends can clue me in here to some better solution, a clever FB app perhaps… anyone?  anyone out there?

It goes to show, Facebook has an awesome power to unilaterally, perhaps silently  change our new social structures, our social identities — we 500 million worldwide active users, 50% logging in on any given day.  Godlike.  Seeing our every move, even guiding which moves we’ll know, or choose to take.  And that data, practically infinite data, flowing ever inwards:  has there ever been a greater project of social observation (or surveillance) and precise social engineering?

But this experiment is one-way:  we behave, they observe.  To a large degree, they engineer this “public” realm, and we inhabit it.  They are all-seeing, and we are ghosts among ghosts.

* “Facebook has changed its News Feed, so that by default, you can only see updates from people you’ve recently interacted with! To change this, click on the arrow next to ‘Most Recent’, then ‘Edit Options’, and check the box to receive updates from ALL Friends! Then save. “

At the recent International Contemporary Furniture Fair, my favorite item was not any of the high-priced furniture and decor items, but an ingenious student project.  It was featured in the Designboom Mart, sponsored by global design organization Designboom, in which winners of an international student design competition offered their low-priced items for sale.

The project I loved was “IScreen” by Li-Rong “Lisa” Liao from Taiwan, a student in the graduate Industrial Design program at Pratt Institute in New York. (portfolio, personal site).    IScreen is a system for making a modular, tradition-Chinese-style lattice screen, based purely on the abstracted characters of her English name, “LISA”.   Four or eight of these modules can be combined in a ring to form a larger module;  these larger modules can in turn be combined into a larger unit, and this can be extended arbitrarily to form a large screen or wall decoration.  For a visual explanation, see the image below; click here or below to see full-sized explanation.  There is also a good explanation on Li-Rong’s web site.

A detail I found interesting is that Li-Rong used her adopted English-language name (i.e. Latin characters), to form a screen which has a clear affinity to traditional Chinese lattice-work.  As I note in the image below, the screen is produced by a series of transformations beginning with the substitution of her given Chinese name into Latin characters and a Western name, “Lisa”, and then the subsequent geometric treatments.   What does this suggest, that the relatively abstract Latin characters have a universality?  (after all, Romanizations or phoneticizations of Chinese have been proposed for centuries, and it is claimed Mao Zedong believed latin characters would replace Chinese).

[continued after the picture]

anyway, congratulations Li-Rong (Lisa) — beautiful beautiful work!  See her portfolio and her personal site for more, and ask her about buying a set of IScreens units for your home or workplace or as great gifts, for a screen or a wall decorations or as coasters.  At the Designboom Mart, she was selling them for $6 apiece, for very nicely finished, laser-cut wood pieces.

And now back to me.

I noted on Li-Rong’s personal site that “In the future, users can go on line and order customized screens with unique graphics made from their desired characters.”   Now that was a thought I wasn’t going to let rest.  So I decided to work out a lattice system using my name “T I M”, using a core pattern abstracted from Li-Rong’s (or so I thought….see below).

So, here’s the series of transformations leading from my name to an arbitrarily extensible screen.  You can watch it as a slideshow on Flickr, or see the images below.

now add the “I” as a horizontal element connecting “T” and “M”:

now take that unit, rotate 90 degrees counter-clockwise, and attach at top:

repeat that move twice more, and now we have the module below.  Let’s call it the “4 Module”.

The “M” characters form nice connectors, so we can put two of the 4 Modules together like this:

If we do this twice more, we have the new form below, made of 4 “4 modules”.  Let’s call it the “4 x 4 Module”:

now it turns out that the 4 x 4 Module can, itself, be repeated and plugged together as in the image below.  Let’s call this resulting new super-module the “4 x 4 x 4 Module”.

Now, here is the mystery. In the steps above, a “TIM” is multiplied by four to make the 4 Module.  The 4 Module is multiplied by four to make the 4 x 4 Module, which is multiplied by four to make the 4 x 4 x 4 Module.  It seems intuitive that there is a sequence in which, at each step, four modules combine into one super-module.  You’d think this would continue.  Li-Rong’s screen, upon which I based mine, works this way.

But look what happens next:  when you try to join four of the above 4 x 4-up modules into one super-module.  It take five modules to form this final module.  So we have the 5 x 4 x 4 x 4 Module.  Why?

Highly counter-intuitive.  Can anyone out there suggest why this happens?  Huge cash prize for the first successful answer submitted. There’s probably a simple explanation, but it escapes me.  I like the look of the screen though..

For more information on Chinese lattice designs (i.e. screens), I suggest  the “bible of Chinese lattice design”, Daniel Sheets Dye’s Chinese Lattice Designs (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 5-6.).  $13.10 on Amazon.  Better yet, buy me the book so I can study more of the fundamental forms of Chinese lattices — and maybe design a lattice for you.

I used to collect bibliographic lists — Modern Library 100 best novels, for example — and put them up at my site LiteraryCritic.com.  This was back in 2000 or so, back when I and the Web were young. For years it attracted book hunters who clicked from my pages through to Amazon, earning me commissions which, to my amazement, were sometimes as much as $100 a month.

Now it’s just another moldering dead project, and I even lost the domain name by not renewing in time, losing it to someone sharper who… has done nothing with it.

But I digress. I’ve resurrected the pages and put them at tjm.org/literarycritic. I might even update and add on to it.  So, enjoy, and may I recommend Harold Bloom’s magisterial summation of the Western canon as he sees it.  Also, send me any lists you’ve come across, no matter how obscure.  In fact, obscure is good, because when Google crawls my site and finds the names of obscure authors and books, I get good Google rank on these items (because hardly anyone else on the Web mentions them).  Thus I probably make more Amazon commission money on these obscurantists, searching for, say, 19th-century Hungarian authors.

Send me those lists..

“To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom…I wish to go more and more outside to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places.” ~Joseph Beuys.

great BBC radio piece profiling self-initiated mobile library cart operator Martin Murrillo, in Cartegena, Columbia.

“After earning his living as a Cartegena street vendor selling water, Martin decided to not only to teach himself, but to also teach others – especially street children – to read.

“He swapped the water for books that people can borrow from his wooden library cart for free.

“During the week he goes round schools where he talks to the children about the importance of reading and of the books he likes most.”

One of the telling details about Murrillo is that his home is so book-crammed he has to sleep on top of books… like, umm, me.

1932 RCA Victor radio, designed to look like a row of books with bookends. Nice example of a new technology imitating an older one — like early radio and television imitating theater.

What I wonder is, did the makers or the buyers of this radio expect it would deceive anyone?  After all, you don’t have to see it very closely to realize it’s a radio.  Unless, perhaps, you had never seen a portable radio set.  I think the concept was that some portion of buyers would want a radio that would blend in to their parlor, with its books.  Or perhaps a book-less parlor would be dignified by these false books.

The rich iconography in the facade of University of Washington’s main Suzzallo Library has been well-noted by commentators.  For example, in the Wikipedia entry for the library, or in the architecture guide by Norman J. Johnston published in Princeton Architectural Press’ “Campus Guides” series.

The guides I’ve seen all mention the 24 sculptures of famous cultural figures, set on the outside faces of the building’s buttresses.  Several also note the three figures set over the main entrance, by the same sculptor as the buttress figures, representing Thought, Inspiration, and Mastery.  However, the 24 figures are far up, hardly visible from the ground;  and the three big figures are not visibly labeled  (that may be why Johnston gets them mixed up in his commentary).

Strangely, I can’t find mention of the inscriptions which are easily the most visible to any person actually entering the library:  the brasswork directly over the six doors, representing six famous figures in printing and publishing: Tao Feng, Gutenberg, Caxton, Aldus, Estienne, and Elsevier.

If this brasswork is as old as the building (1926), it’s actually quite remarkable that the Chinese “father of printing” was given the first place in this pantheon.  It’s strange, however, that the screen presents his years as “954-881″, i.e. B.C., about 1900 years earlier than the real Tao Feng (aka Feng Dao), whose years are the reverse, 881-954.  The Chinese are ancient, yes, but not always that ancient.  (and once again, I feel like I’m the only guy who ever studies these plaques).

Above the fourth door, centermost of the “in” doors, the inscription reads “Aldus”, for the famous Venetian printing and publisher Aldus Manutius.  I wonder if this placement had any part in the naming of Seattle-based Aldus Corporation, whose creation of Pagemaker software started the “desktop publishing” revolution.

Speculation aside, I think the position of these six printer/publisher names, directly above the doors, is poetically apt.  Further above is Thought, and Inspiration;  and far above that, the pantheon of Moses, Dante, Adam Smith, etc.;  but usually the main pathway to Learning is by books and printing, represented by these printing/publishing figures which make up almost literally part of the door into the library.  Intentional or not, the positioning of this group expresses a fundamental truth about learning.

more photographs of Suzzallo library.