Sitting last week in a workshop on the theme of ‘design’ I found myself uncomfortable with the tone and tenor of the offering. I realized eventually that the source of this discomfort was the assumption on the part of the workshop facilitator that ‘design’ was a manipulative process, a means of imposing one’s will on the world, of giving the world a shape related to one’s ‘picture’ of how things might be or should be.

I found myself wondering about alternative ways of practicing design which might be...

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A side project, and a source of considerable joy - Universal Placebos. The idea came originally from a class I was teaching at QUT. The discussion was on branding, and moved our thinking to the value of untraded intangibles. Pet Rocks. Cans of L.A. Air - things with no intrinsic value but (potentially) considerably actual and commercial worth.

My immediate interest in placebos, or more precisely, the so-called Placebo Effect, is in the realm of health and wellbeing, and our family has had recent experience with it. Ella was born with cerebral...

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"In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn't be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms ... of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical systems of any...

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Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Laurie Anderson
 

In 1994 we stayed for a couple of nights with our friend Klaus Maier, Director of Theater von Menschen für Menschen in Nürnberg.

Not a terribly gloomy place - I think Ella had ice cream - parks, gardens, leafy walks, lakes with ducks and, quite suddenly, Monumental Monolithic Masonry, The Zeppelin Field. Staggering!

The word zeppelin is very evocative, at least to me. It's quite possible still to imagine a great airship nuzzling gigantically to the ground before us,...

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