An interview with Aaron Marcus

How does significant information come to the surface of our attention, present itself in an orderly fashion, and enable us to make good decisions that affect our own lives and that may affect the lives of many others?

Effective personal, community, professional, national, and global decision-making is always there as a challenge.

Anyone’s current decision-challenge might concern whether I should reach for that next snack, in relation to my current cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and family medical history. Or, it might concern whether I should reach for that next email message among the 50 that have just arrived in the last half hour. It might concern which of 500 channels of media I should watch during the next 30 minutes of my life. It might concern whether I should deploy missiles targeted to certain positions where I have determined national threats to be located. Or, it might concern what strategic facts and personality traits of delegates around a conference table might enable me to make the right proposal to negotiate a peaceful resolution to a complex political conflict. Read more…

Men wanted!

A startling trend, affecting half the American population, is happening and happening fast. According to Guy Garcia, in his book “The Decline of Men, How the American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up and Flipping Off His Future,” the dominant American male, as we know and love him, may soon be extinct.

In this thoroughly researched book, Garcia offers up surprising, eye-opening statistics to support his take on this cultural upheaval in America. His premise is as women are strengthening their place in the world and increasing their earning power, younger men are confused by the new rules of masculinity and are not only falling behind, but opting out all together.

As media and pop culture portray and foster this image of the young male as a video-game playing buffoon, it seems men are falling prey to this stereotype and no longer wanting or able to take care of themselves, let alone a wife and family.

Drawing on research and talking with experts in a variety of fields including human reproductive science, education, marketing and pop culture, Garcia paints a detailed, fascinating but somewhat perplexing and frightening view of what is happening to the American male.

I remember working in offices when men ruled and women made the coffee and believed that the goal of promoting feminism was not only to create opportunities for women, but to give men more freedom as well. So it was distressing to read these statistics and see this oncoming demise of men. Fortunately there is hope, but men must recognize what is happening and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just like any self-respecting man would do – and in the process meet women halfway.

About the Author

Guy Garcia is an award-winning journalist, novelist, and multimedia entrepreneur. He has been featured in the major newspapers and publications as well as has appeared on ABC, Univision, NPR, CNBC, PBS and the Tavis Smiley Show. Once a staff writer for TIME, Garcia wrote groundbreaking stories on American culture, For more information, please visit http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061474811/Decline_of_Men_The/index.aspx

More than Words: Books on Design.
Book reviews by Junction Blogger Deborah Plunkett (Book Review section in the top right column)

There are a myriad of books on design published each year, but in our corner of the web, we hope to bring you ones that are related to cross-cultural design issues, problems and solutions. If you’ve read the book, we’d love your feedback; and if you’ve read another that totally informed, inspired or influenced you, we’d love to hear about it, too!

What about the human condition needs improvement?

Claiming a personal and a collective uniqueness can be achieved in the participative action of designing our environment.In its essence, this declaration of uniqueness through the design and transformation of place, speaks to the power of branding and is illustrated in the Rugerero Genocide Survivors Village in Rwanda (see my previous blog post, Finding Your Rwanda, designing and debating our role in social responsibility). The cooperative design and building of a genocide memorial and the painting of murals on the mud brick homes of the village changed the spiritual and physical essence of this wounded place.

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Scratch, Tear, Build, Rebuild, and get Dirty: Patricia Cué’s escapade with students into Mexico

“Instant Messaging” was the name of the show that exhibited their capstone project: they own cell phones and use social-networking sites, dubbed themselves the “IM Generation” and me “IM Picante”.

Technology- and brand-savvy, this was a group of twenty design students that traded T-shirts for grapefruits and ate crickets at the market in Cholula, Mexico, during a ten-week-long, full immersion cross-cultural experience.

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Measuring the Power of the Visual.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies, 2008

This poster by Chaz Maviyane-Davies was the first to run in the 30 Reasons internet campaign. Mr. Maviyane-Davies is originally from Zimbabwe, and for more than two decades has taken on the issues of consumerism, health, nutrition, social responsibility, the environment and human rights.

Join us in evaluating the role of the graphic designers in shaping the political dialogue or in promoting political agenda around the world.

Or, Why I Voted for Barack Obama: Identity Politics for the 21st Century

I am a middle-aged white man, and I voted for Barack Obama. I did not vote for him because he was African-American, young and charismatic. I voted for him because he addressed the most difficult issues of our troubled time in a reasoned manner based on concrete analyses that offered the possibility of pragmatic solutions. I voted for him because he transcended the histrionics of fear-based ideologies on the left and the right and spoke to all sides with the respect and concern that the citizens of a representative democracy deserve. I voted for him because he placed intellect above emotion without sacrificing his humanity. I voted for him because he harnessed the power of words in order to defeat the demagogic populism that pandered to our most easily frightened fellow citizens.

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Designing and debating our role in social responsibility.

I accepted AIGA XCD’s offer to open a blog on social engagement with the idea of provoking discussion on how we Designers can reach into into our “Tool Box” and make a difference in our world today. Many designers–Shiego Fukuda, Grapus, Herb Lubalin and Tibor Kalman, to name but a few–have committed their talent to sensitizing their audience to the problems that plague humanity, provoking thought and inspiring action.

My path has been somewhat different, perhaps a reflection of the evolution of social activism as we’ve come to know it and what I believe is an example of our increasing ability to design our own roles in social engagement.

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A True World Language

When Europeans initiated their first fully-documented oceanic voyages, they unleashed centuries of cruelty, suffering, destruction as well as wealth, opportunity and unprecedented cultural cross-fertilization. The first Portuguese, Spanish, English and Dutch explorers unwittingly transformed European culture by importing textiles, porcelains, sculptures, prints, painting and manuscripts that at first befuddled and ultimately conquered their owners. The adventures of 1492 and 1498 began as predatory raids and ended with the transformation of the raiders’ descendants and the beginnings of an arguably global, multicultural civilization.

Countless books have been written about the economic, political and social consequences of the Age of Exploration. The subjugation and at times destruction of First Nations peoples is a growing field of scholarship with increasingly sophisticated documentation. Unfortunately, the study of cross-cultural communications has yet to go beyond art history, musicology and literary studies. To be sure, those are important fields, but they do not always address the deeper human aspects.

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Lend a Hand, See the World

At the tail end of last year, Firebelly Design closed its office for 2-weeks and took a volunteer vacation in Thailand to work with Buddhist monks, serve the Thai people and bond as a studio.

The trip was facilitated by GlobeAware, a nonprofit organization offering short-term “adventures in service” in several countries including Cambodia, Romania, Ghana and Peru. With a focus on cultural-awareness and sustainability they could best be compared to mini peace corps.

We arrived in Bangkok and met our home stay host: Duangjai Thitayarak aka Mammee. Mammee is a 60-something firecracker with a big friendly smile and a twinkle in her eye like she already knows all your secrets. We traveled by van about an hour north to Ayutthaya (eye-you-TEE-ah) province and settled into our home for the next 8 days: simple wooden houses on stilts, open to the outdoors, no running water, no electricity–and it was perfect.

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