ALL ART BURNS

[EDIT:  James Hennessey points out the book is in print again from Schiffer, ISBN 0764330241.]

An area I get distracted by often is tools for nomadic living. I grew up moving around a fair bit and I’ve spent much of my adult life dragging around a portable office of one sort or another. It used to be a leather Day Runner(tm), notebooks, a Sony Walkman(tm) and random art supplies; these days it’s a laptop, tri-band ham radio, sketchbook, iPod(tm), and random tools for safety and personal care.

What I haven’t thought enough about is the next step up from the overstuffed courier bag, actually taking my entire house and all my possessions from place to place on a regular basis. It’s one thing to move my office from home to cafe every day, but moving all my stuff from town to town on a regular basis? That’s something a bit more complicated, especially given how much crap I (as well as everyone else) tend to own.

Becoming a truly nomadic person seems to boil down to two simple steps:

Step 1: Get rid of all the crap you don’t need or put it in some permanent place. You’re going to need to do this before you get to the next step…

Step 2: Own only those things that are easily transported and that you absolutely need. One thing that most of us absolutely need is a bare minimum of furniture, and that’s where Nomadic Furniture comes into play.

Nomadic Furniture , by designers James Hennessey and Victor Papanek, is by not an exhaustive examination of all nomadic furniture but a basic overview of the fundamental types of furniture that people need and how those living the nomadic lifestyle can travel with the furniture they need.

It’s an interesting read now, as it was written in the 70s during the first big oil crunch. The attitude is dated but at the same time completely relevant in terms of the need to conserve energy, reduce consumption of resources, and follow the general model of reduce, reuse, recycle. (If you’ve read Cradle to Cradle, some of this will seem oddly familiar.)

Hennessey and Papanek don’t just show you pictures of furniture you can buy, rather they show you how you can make most furniture on your own. The diagrams are simple and straightforward and are such that they are easily modified and scaled to meet individual needs. Some of the plans are very much in the style of Danish Modern (or IKEA) while others seem a little quaint by contemporary standards. I doubt the dimensions for LPs and cassettes will be useful for many people making storage shelves in this century.

There are a couple of groups of people that I think would greatly benefit from reading this and photocopying some of the plans. The first group are college students who move on a regular basis and for whom saving every penny possible on furniture is worth a little labor. The second group are the true nomadic types, say hardcore burning man participants or people who travel and camp for weeks at a time. There are some creative sleeping and storage solutions in Nomadic Furniture that I will be trying out before our next trip to the playa.

There are only two problems with Nomadic Furniture that I feel the need to point out. The first is that it’s no longer in print, but used copies are easily found on amazon.com and half.com. The second problem is the nearly unreadable typography. I’ve been a huge fan of hand-illustrated and lettered manuals since my first copy of Muir’s How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot, but the strange typeface used in Nomadic Furniture is too much for me. It’s alien enough that the book is an amazingly difficult read, a distraction from the quite clean and readable illustrations.

Find it used, photocopy what you need, then sell/trade/give it to someone else who would find the information useful.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Nomadic Furniture, Pantheon Books, 1973, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, furniture, hennessey, nomadic lifestyle, papanek

…way too much going on right now, so I haven’t had time to post much. This stopped me dead in my tracks, so I thought I’d share.

Almost 10 years of Design magazine, digitized and OCR’d. This a part of a very massive data store about designy things.

Technorati Tags: design, reference

That sounds pretty sexy — I think that’s how I’ll describe what I’m doing this summer. Ok, I’m really just going to catch up on a bunch of reading, do some writing, practice drawing, and set up some metalworking equipment so I can make some things. But with a sexy title like that, my summer plans sound much better.

I took a couple of weeks to decompress for school but I need to get back into the study groove. I have a lot of real work (the stuff that pays) to do, but I’m going to try and stick to a self-study schedule for design, security and Japanese in my free time.

My books on the “In” pile so far fall into two piles, design and security.

In the design pile:

• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
• Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
• What Things Do — I haven’t read much design theory, so I might spread this out over several weeks so that it can soak in
• The Complete Japanese Joinery
  
• Industrial Strength Design ("What do you mean it’s not about EBM and stompy boots?")
• Universal Principles of Design
  

The stack of security books is big enough that I might end up skimming many of them:

• Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
• Physical Device Security
• Reversing
  
• Building Secure Software
  
• Silence on the Wire
  
• Security Warrior (could they have come up with more leet title?)

I’m also considering re-reading some of the classics that I read in school the first time around: Alexander’s design books, Foucault’s History of Science, that sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see how much my worldly experience changes what I get out of the canon.

Technorati Tags: books, design, school, security, summer

A few things I’ve wanted to write about in detail but I’m kinda swamped with work and school.

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. A collection of graphs showing the history and interconnections between various genres of electronic music. Lots of samples and written descriptions to go along with the graphs.

Processing, a new environment from Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Processing makes it easy for non-programmer types to do simple visualizations of data. Processing built on Java, and programmer types can easily take advantage of the full Java environment if they wish.

A Timeline of Timelines, from Cabinet Magazine.

James Victore will speak at Carnegie Mellon on Monday, March 19 @ 7:00 pm. His topic:
“Graphic Design Just Isn’t That Interesting: A discussion of the role of the designer in relation to ethics, morals and selling crap to people who don’t need it.” Margaret Morrison Breed Hall, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA.

Visual Complexity, a blog about complex visualizations of data.

Technorati Tags: cartography, design, idm, visualization

Here’s why you should be reading pingmag.

(school update coming soon, I promise.)

Technorati Tags: sake