Artefacts

If you’re a tea or coffee drinker, having the right mug is very important. We drink tea and coffee for pleasure, and for functional purposes like making us feel slightly less asleep after a late night solving relativistic field equations or whatever it is we happen to do. However, drinking tea and coffee is also a ritual, and if there’s one thing you need for a good ritual, it’s paraphernalia.

For example, I have two mugs, one for coffee, one for tea. There are various aspects to their importance, besides that imbued simply by being my mugs: the functional, the decorative, the semantic. Let’s start with the first of these.

A good mug needs to be sturdy, so as to survive the occasional mishap, such as having something dropped onto it by a clumsy or thoughtless housemate. It also needs to be the right size and shape, to feel right in your hand, to have a handle robust enough for you not to feel like it’s going to snap at any moment. These are all quite personal things: hands and appetites differ markedly from person to person, so what’s right for one person often isn’t right for another.

Visual appeal is also a must. That mug’s going to be sitting there on your desk or coffee table for—if you’re anything like me—a reasonably significant portion of the day. Even after you finish drinking your tea or coffee, chances are you won’t go and wash it up immediately. Make sure you have a mug you like looking at. My family have a number of mugs from the Ashmolean Museum’s shop, which sells a beautiful set of Kafuh designs including this bamboo one and this crane (they look better “in the flesh”, with classical proportions and a delicate glaze).

Having a design that’s meaningful in some way, at least to you, is a nice bonus. My tea mug is a solid piece of white china from Traidcraft, with a wonderful, bright African design of two lions roaring at one another. It says, “Beware of Noisy Lions.” They don’t sell anything nearly as good anymore, so remember, if you see a mug you like, buy it! Good mugs are few and far between these days, so any opportunity to get something that really appeals is not to be wasted. Good hunting!

When I redesigned this site last September, several people didn’t seem to quite realise that the fish in the header weren’t some Photoshop creation, but an actual mobile of cardboard cutout fish. The last of their kind, I rescued these poor souls from extinction in exchange for using their image for various nefarious purposes. They currently reside above my washing machine, bringing joy to all who see them.

Now you too can join this noble cause, and adopt your very own family of cardboard fish. Now available for download is a printable template which you can use to make your own fish mobile, in whatever colour you like.

I’m going to add images of people’s mobiles to this post as they come in; if you make one, please comment or email me with the image, I’d love to include it.

I meant to write about this article on Shigeru Ban in the Guardian when it first came out, but in all the chaos of moving into my new house, I forgot. Fortunately, the internet has a better memory than I do, and while browsing through my bookmarks I noticed that Dan Hill had linked to it. The article has a fascinating discussion of Ban’s work, especially his use of paper.

Above all else, though, Ban is known for his achievements with paper: he is to paper what Le Corbusier was to concrete, or Norman Foster is to steel. He has spent a good portion of his career exploring its possibilities and repositioning it as a viable, potentially invaluable, building material for the future. In doing so, he might have exposed a giant hole in our current assessment of what good architecture really is.

Architectural possibilities aside, I love paper. Plain, lined, squared; recycled, acid-free, waxy, onionskin; paper is fantastic. It’s incredibly versatile: full of structural and artistic possibility.

I’m always surrounded by paper: books, notebooks, envelopes, sketch books, origami (my sister made me a crane), Post-It notes, journals, papers, drafts of articles and essays. I’ve never really liked doors, so maybe when I build my house I’ll go for paper screens instead.

When Apple first announced their partnership with Motorola on an iTunes-equipped phone, a spirit of hope was abroad in some quarters. Apple was obviously leveraging Motorola’s handset technology and connections in the phone industry to create a co-branded phone: the “iPod phone”, as it was then almost universally known, would do for mobile phones what the iPod did for portable music players, injecting some much-needed design sense into a market packed with horrible interfaces and obese feature sets.

It was not to be. The Motorola ROKR turned out to be just another phone, albeit a phone with iTunes on. Sure, it’s another step on the road to what Khaled refers to as “the Digital Swiss Army Knife”, but it’s no more than that—a step. The ROKR raises more questions than it answers.

Why did Apple go down this route, of simply adding iTunes functionality to a phone that is otherwise entirely Motorola’s? Was it never part of the plan to make their own phone? Steve Jobs told the Guardian that Apple were “dipping our toes in the water”, which makes it sound like the ROKR was an experiment, but what were they testing?

The usual argument about the iPhone, as I suppose we’ll have to call it, goes something like this: the iPod dominates the portable music player market because of its manifestly superior interface and brilliant design. Apple are perfectly placed to do the same thing in the mobile phone market, or even go further and create an all-in-one device that does pretty much everything the plethora of portable electronic devices we cart around currently do.

I question the credibility of this claim, not because I doubt Apple’s ability, but because the current mobile scene is a very different place than the portable music landscape at the time when the iPod was first created.

The road to iPod domination

The iPod revolution took advantage of a profound shift in the portable music player market. Since the Walkman, portable music players—whether the medium was cassette, CD or MiniDisc—were designed around playing ten or twelve songs, accessed in series, and the interfaces reflected this. Play, pause, fast-forward, rewind—all were much of a muchness.

With the advent of hard drive-based music players, the market was changed utterly. Now one could have hundreds, even thousands of songs on a single device, with no need to change tapes. Moreover, access was no longer serial; one could skip around the contents of one’s music collection with far more agility than older devices allowed. Lastly, the broad acceptance of the mp3 standard and the proliferation of personal computers gave this new platform a huge potential userbase.

Apple’s attack on the market came on two fronts: the interface, and the beautiful design. The intuitive nature of the wheel, and especially the later click-wheel iterations, has been much praised elsewhere, and for good reason; it’s simply the best out there, a mile ahead of any competing device. Industrial design has always been a strong point of Apple’s, and the iPod is the perfect example of why design isn’t an optional extra, it’s a necessity. The iPod is iconic, in striking white and chrome, well-proportioned with subtle curves and textures.

Talk of two fronts is, in a sense, misleading; what really sets the iPod apart is the unity of form and function. You can play a few games on it, or add contacts or notes; even view photos. But what the iPod really does is play music: it’s a single-function device, and it performs that function superbly.

Phones are different

Speaking blithely of digital Swiss Army Knives is all very well; to make one is quite a different matter. Modern mobile phones perform a large number of tasks, not always well: sending and receiving phone calls and text messages; taking photos; browsing the internet; email. So, let’s say for argument’s sake that Apple was going to make a mobile phone that did all those things, and also played music. What would the problems be?

To begin with, there is a preexisting design paradigm: the 12-button interface. Originally designed to make phone calls easier, given our base-10 numerals, this design has proved remarkably robust, if not a little because of its familiarity. So, what to do? As far as I can see Apple have two choices: augment or modify the 12-button interface, or replace it altogether.

Modification is the most obvious choice, and as we can see from this leaked picture of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, it’s what companies trying to pack all these functions into one package are currently going for.

Despite this, the latter option isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. When you call someone, do you use the number pad usually? No; you have their number saved, and simply select it from a list. I certainly wouldn’t mind using a click-wheel as a way of scrolling through people’s names. (I don’t mean that Apple could simply port the iPod interface to a phone; I’m simply demonstrating that there are alternatives to the current standard interface.) However, there are fundamental problems with the replacement approach.

Firstly, a phone is going to be rather crippled if you can’t add numbers, manually, without plugging it into a computer. Moreover, one needs this method to be quick and efficient; what if you’re in a club and want to take down someone’s phone number? Scrolling through digits and clicking on the right ones (a potential way to add a number using a click-wheel) just won’t do.

One alternative would be to use local, device-to-device connectivity like Bluetooth to add phone numbers. Just met someone? Search for phones within range, and issue an invitation from your phone to the one that belongs to the person you’re talking to. They then accept the invitation, and voila, contact details are exchanged.

The problem is backwards compatibility, and adding numbers on the fly for phones which are not physically proximate (for example, land lines). It looks like we still need those twelve buttons.

Speculation

Having outlined some of the problems Apple would face if they decided to get into the mobile handset game, here are a few speculations of mine. To begin with, Apple may not even want to get into the mobile phone game. An iTunes-equipped phone may be, to them, simply a way to safeguard their revenue stream and keep their options open. The revenue stream argument isn’t one I find particularly convincing, since the iTunes Music Store is basically a way for Apple to sell iPods, but who knows.

One way that Apple could streamline the phone interface is by having a nice big touchpad screen, as well as some more traditional button controls. They could then employ a ‘virtual’ 12-button interface that only appeared when you had to type in a phone number. The rest of the time, you get a nice big colour screen to… view photos on? Watch videos? The list goes on, but the question of whether the technology is there yet remains. Probably not, I’d judge, or at least not at a low enough price; if it were, I imagine someone would have done it by now.

In conclusion, then, the current mobile phone market is a very different place to the burgeoning portable HDD/mp3 player market Apple stormed onto with the iPod. There are plenty of problems and challenges to be overcome by someone, and a lot of money to be made. Whether that someone turns out to be Apple, we’ll have to wait and see.

I read with wry amusement this post by The Little Professor about spicing up the opening sentences of letters to (for example) the Times Literary Supplement. A sneaking suspicion is forming in the dark recesses of my mind that this is advice I could do with taking.

As previously remarked, a large proportion of this blog’s raison d’être (about 64.25%, by my last assessment) is to provide me with experience. The business of churning out strings of verbs, adjectives and possessive pronouns should, in theory, improve my writing. According to a friend, that theory is even beginning to translate to reality. He’s right, I think: I sound more like myself now, the neurotic self-referentialism and self-criticism has started to recede, my prose is less stilted.

So what’s changed? Has my work really, over the course of eight thousand words or so, improved perceptibly? I think it has, and I think I know why: tension. Or rather, a reduction in it.

I’ve always been tense, with the usual caveats that “always” means “as far as I can remember, and maybe I’m just projecting my current state of mind into the past”, and all the standard sceptical worries. It arises, as far as I can make out, from failing to attribute value to myself, at least to the correct degree (that normative standard arising from what we view as ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’, that is, able to carry out a reasonably happy existence, unimpaired by constant doubt). When I look at myself, I see failure. An unhealthy attitude, to say the least. But when I relax, I work better.

This is why I’m good at exams. When you’re sitting there in the exam room, locked inside your head with only a pen, paper, and the question, you are in a sense liberated. There’s nothing you can do now except right. It’s like being tossed off a cliff: terrifying, perhaps, but you can’t do anything about it so you might as well just get on with it. So you put your head down, and write, and feel better for those three hours than you have in months.

Coming back to the blog, there are two main points. Firstly, it was in itself a way of reducing the tension associated with writing. Do more writing and it becomes more normal, a less fraught activity, just part of the routine. Secondly, in order to keep writing—keep blogging—I needed to find some day-to-day coping mechanisms. This is something I’ve become better at lately, simply through realising that I had to. I had to stop being proud, stop thinking I would do things, write things, suceed simply by some kind of self-realising genius.

I started to carry a notebook everywhere; while I’d always taken my Moleskine in my rucksack, I didn’t have anything ultra-portable, so I bought a pack of new Moleskine Cahiers (pronounced kä-yā, apparently). These are little 64-page things with a cardboard cover; there’s a good review at 43F. I’ll probably post further about these at some point, but suffice to say that one now accompanies me practically everywhere (even to bed; I’ve borrowed a torch so I don’t have to clamber out of bed when that brilliant idea strikes me at three in the morning).

Inside the front cover of my current Cahier is a Post-it note, where I put down one-line blog post ideas. The temporary nature of Post-its invite the most deranged ideas, spur-of-the-moment thoughts. Since you can abandon them at will, there’s less second-guessing. Is this really a good idea? Probably not, but who cares? Down it goes! I have to feel free to scribble, to be scrappy, to just jot things down regardless.

The last component is implicit in the previous two: create a routine, force habits on myself. Put pressure on doing the little things (carrying the notebook around, keeping the right implements handy, writing several times a day) and the big things—like writing blog posts, even stories—take care of themselves.

Being social animals, human beings tend to allow their better judgement to be stampeded by the crowd’s impulses. This applies not only to the followers of trends, but their critics: the bigger the icon, the bigger the kudos accorded those who accomplish its takedown. This is only aided by the ephemeral nature of popularity: both sides laud–or criticise–things based on their aura rather than the true nature of the thing itself.

A recent example of this is the Moleskine notebook. Produced by the Italian company Modo e Modo, Moleskines are essentially copies of a French design. Their advertising copy links them to a number of literary and artistic luminaries: Hemingway, Chatwin, Picasso. Since all of these people are dead, they can’t complain that they never, in fact, used the notebooks in question, although they may well have used very similar ones (Chatwin certainly did; his were purchased from a Parisian stationer, until the supplier closed down in 1986).

This is really where the trouble starts. Coupled with their good looks (the Moleskine is a very attractive notebook), the cachet of the artists and writers essentially providing endorsements for them gave Moleskine notebooks the jumpstart they needed. It’s important to note that the kind of person who will spend time looking for the perfect notebook is generally the classic “early adopter” so beloved of computer technology companies, and I suspect they (we) are perhaps more vulnerable to the lure of the Moleskine’s whispered promises. “Buy me,” it seems to say, “and you too can be inspired to write like Hemingway.”

Marketing does not fool us, exactly; it hands us the lines we feed ourselves. Seduction is something we allow to happen, and investing objects with mysterious power is an old trap. We want to believe that possessing these items is what will give us power, or wealth, or inspiration; we want to deny that ‘genius’ is a label we apply to those who are both supremely gifted and work harder than anyone else. Olympic athletes have a genetic makeup that makes them suited for their chosen sport, but this is at best a starting point; potential will always go unfulfilled unless it is accompanied by a daily grind of back-breaking labour. Nobody wants to hear this; it’s not a cheering message. The idea that we simply lack some talisman, owned by those whose powers we aspire to possess, is a far more attractive one.

The story so far: early adopters are drawn in by a combination of factors, one of which is the mystique evoked by Modo e Modo’s marketing copy; the cult of the Moleskine grows, and they begin to crop up in a multitude of stationery, art and book shops, helped along by distribution agreements with several major chain bookstores (Barnes and Noble, Waterstone’s). Enter the critics, with the message that Moleskine fans are clearly being taken for the proverbial ride, Hemingway and Chatwin never bought Modo e Modo products, and that the talismanic qualities that are (implicitly or explicitly) being appealed to do not, in fact, exist.

Several lines of argument appear in response to such sceptical claims; I do not claim any of them as my own, merely hoping to summarise the main position.¹

1. They’re just good notebooks, better than anything else on the market; yes, you pay a premium for them, but it’s worth it to have the best.
2. The talismanic qualities do exist; I write more and better in my Moleskine than I did before. Of course, the Moleskine only serves to evoke this response in me–it isn’t some kind of immaterial power residing in the notebook itself–but if the effect is real, surely the end result is the same.
3. I just like them, it’s a personal aesthetic preference. I don’t deny the marketing argument, but you have no basis for criticism as far as subjective preference goes.²

There isn’t much consensus on #1; some think that there are better notebooks, or cheaper notebooks that are just as good. Many don’t. Personally I haven’t found any that are both as well made and suit my personal needs as perfectly, and I suspect many of those needs generalise well. Briefly, the pocket Moleskines are compact, with a high page count for their size, and good paper (albeit with well-documented feathering and bleed issues; you need to choose your pen carefully). They are stitched and bound in oilskin-covered card, which makes them resilient. Lastly, they have several nice touches that make them stand out from the crowd. The built-in bookmark and elastic snap that keeps it closed while not in use are of obvious utility; the back pocket grows on one. I use mine to carry library photocopier cards and Post-it notes.

The second argument is trickier. Merlin Mann calls the Moleskine a MacGuffin, which seems to have a certain truth to it. However, speaking of the Moleskine in these terms does it something of a disservice, and does not tell the whole story by any means. On the one hand, it may draw out certain good behaviours in some people: writing more, writing better. The Moleskine, when evoking these tendencies, helps define an ideal we aspire to (it may do this by instantiating a certain ideal itself, that of the ideal notebook, or at least coming closer than other notebooks).

As portentous as this sounds, it is only one side of the truth; the downside is that a Moleskine can inhibit as much as inspire. By declaring this ideal of good writing, it poses a challenge–or an obstacle. If one is constantly second-guessing oneself, worrying about whether what one is writing is in some way ‘worthy’ of being written down in a Moleskine, then it is that much harder to write anything. The loudest voices may be of those trumpeting their new muse, but this does not mean that those who find the Moleskine a mental burden do not exist; perhaps they are ashamed of their failings, or simply don’t recognise the syndrome for what it is.

Having suffered from this problem myself, I suspect that which side of the fence one falls on is due to temperament, and how one views one’s writing. When I initially purchased a Moleskine, several years ago, I wrote fairly prolifically about a story I was trying to write, but I didn’t get much of the story itself written. Entering a period of greater depression, my doubts assailed me with more vigour, and my writing petered out. Whenever I did try to write, I had to use simple sheets of lined paper; if I sat down with my Moleskine, I would stare at the empty page, trying to think of something worthwhile to write. As my condition improved, I began writing more often in the Moleskine, and now I write in it at least every couple of days. Many of the posts on this blog began life as musings in my Moleskine.

There is a third point, of course, which is that whatever the Moleskine is, it is not simply a talismanic object. It is, in fact, a notebook–and rather a good one at that. In my initial paragraph I warned against the seductive nature of the aura surrounding a fashionable object, and here we can see that warning realised. The fan claims that the Moleskine helps them write more, and better; the critic responds that in many cases, using a Moleskine may actually hinder the writing process. All this does is polarise the debate: what we should be doing is looking at how these claims really relate to an individual choice (that is to say, whether or not they buy one, if they’re thinking about doing so). I don’t mean to claim that a given transaction (or the set of all such transactions) is the only thing that gives this argument meaning, but it is certainly an important nexus of it.

What do I mean by this? Well, to begin with, the decision puts these arguments in a context, relates them to behaviour, and generally provides some much-needed perspective. The question of how an individual’s writing will be affected by using a Moleskine is an individual one: it depends on their circumstances, their nature. Moreover, there are practical questions: is this the right kind of notebook for me? What does it do better than the rest? Is the price worth it? These issues depend on the individual, on the context in which the questions are asked, not on spurious normative claims. The hard work of answering a question is done once the terms of the question and the context in which it is being asked are defined closely enough.

These questions of individual circumstance bring us to the third argument. Essentially, it grows from a confusion about subjectivity: the word ’subjective’ is used as a shorthand to mean “circumstances specific to me”. When someone says that buying a Moleskine is “A personal preference”, or “A subjective judgement”, what they really mean is “It suits my needs, but not necessarily yours.” This isn’t what it really means for something to be subjective: the circumstances on which the choice is based are in fact objective facts; if you were in their position, you would make a different choice. There probably is an element of subjective aesthetic appreciation, but I think that if it exists (this is a point of philosophical contention) its influence is overrated.

I have several Moleskines in current operation: a sketchbook, some Cahiers for ultimate portability and throwaway scribbles, and a lined notebook in which I write… well, pretty much whatever I feel like. A couple of months ago I wrote the following in it:

Decided that too much sanctity is stifling me. Need to loosen up. Consequently, this notebook will loosen up—starting with some Post-it artwork. The Moleskine craze is apparently, just like the iPod, big. Now I’m just one of the crowd. Still, nice to be an early adopter for once, even if I haven’t written in it as much as I might (I put this down to the aforementioned desire not to violate such a beautiful notebook with incessant and unremarkable scribbling).

Post-its are another good way of avoiding this problem; I draw on them, badly, then stick the good ones in the Moleskine. However, I’ve decided it’s high time I did more of it—so I bought a Moleskine Sketchbook. We’ll see how it goes.

This post on SimpleBits reminds me of the point in time when I briefly surrendered to a mousepad obsession; mulling over reviews, specification sheets and user comments, I spent about a week weighing up my options. Then I bought a RatPad and have barely thought about the subject since.

Focusing on a particular thing like that, for a short period of time, is an extremely effective way to make decisions. Do vast amounts of research, weigh up the options, make your choice, and stick with it. Then you can get on with life, secure in your choice (unless you have cause to regret it; however, minimising the chances of this is what the brief obession model is all about).

It’s been a few years, and the RatPad is slightly warped, the label is half rubbed off, and some of the rubber feet have been lost. However, it remains far and away the best mousepad I’ve ever owned. Doubtless at some point I’ll replace it with a new one, but for the moment it remains much as it was when I bought it: slick, durable, utilitarian. Every so often I take it downstairs and wash it (as you’d wash a plate, essentially—washing-up liquid and hot water).

I have a number of things like this: useful but almost invisible. Compaq keyboard (just the right size, just the right stickiness and sounds of key); pad of super sticky Post-it notes (actually stay stuck to things); Uni-ball Micro pens (thin black lines, a great feel). These small items shape our world without us noticing, allowing us to perform the tasks assigned to us that little bit more easily, lightening the load just enough to make it bearable.