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Austin, Texas-based URBS Studio is joining us for July’s Designer Desktop with a background that’s cool-tempered but energizing. Through her interdisciplinary design studio, Alyson Beaton explores the urban culture that surrounds her. The details and detritus observed all contribute to the whole of the studio’s work: grids, grit, signs, symbols, rhythm, scribbles, weeds, chaos, order, and more. URBS translates these visual tales of urban renewal and environmental sustainability through spaces, textile collections, children’s products, and more. The man-made environments that are part of our everyday lives are constantly evolving in different ways, and most of it’s nothing you or I have control over. But we’ll never tire of seeing creativity rise from the most unexpected of places.
For this month’s Desktop, Beaton shares her Glimmer design inspired by “The glimmer of light that reflects off the glassy buildings when the sun hits just right.” The trippy design is paired with the quote, “While you are looking, you might as well listen, linger, and think about what you see,” from Jane Jacobs.
Download yours with the links below!
Town Square Text
Whichway Cover
Metropolis
Flaneur Cushion
Facade
Glimmer
Alyson Beaton, URBS Studio
DESKTOP: 1024×768 \\\ 1280×1024 \\\ 1680×1050 \\\ 1900×1200 \\\ 2560×1440
MOBILE: iPhone XS \\\ iPhone XS Max \\\ iPad Pro
Learn more about URBS Studio here and follow along on IG here.
View and download past Designer Desktops here.
Meg and I had an amazing morning yesterday out in Elgin at Austin Wildlife Rescue: we got to spend some time up close with Thurston, a 4-year-old eastern screech owl, just like the Coconuts who live in our back yard.
One thing you might notice is just how tiny Thurston is! The screech owls look larger than life through the spotting scope, but they’re just itty bitty raptors.
Here’s a comparison of our screech owls to the famous Flaco, the eagle owl now loose in Central Park:
What’s funny about this is that one reason I love looking at pictures of the magestic Flaco is that I recognize so many of the postures and behaviors I’ve seen from my little owls:
I don’t know why this pleases me so much, this juxtaposition of the grand Flaco with the more modest but still majestic Coconut. Finding majesty in the mundane is one of my favorite things, I guess. The little behavior the same as the big behavior. (And I think a lot about how photography scales — big and small scale to the same size on the phone screen.)
It’s like Hedda Sterne said: “For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”
Back to SXSW this year! Hear about the conference, the speakers, and the themes. Tell us what resonates with you the most!
The post SXSW Interactive: Slow Down To Speed Up appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Here was a house that had wind chimes and bird feeders and monk parakeets mobbing the trees.
For the past year or so, as I’ve been riding around on my bike, I’ve been wondering what it does to your psyche to see little old houses disappear every week. Even though I know in my cortex what’s going on — the real estate market, tech money, post-pandemic coastal fleeing, etc. — it’s still deeply unsettling.
There is no shortage of pieces about how much Austin has changed, but I’d been waiting for a piece of writing to help me understand the feeling I was getting from it all. This feeling, not of bewildering change, but creeping… dread? Disappearance? Loss?
I found it, unexpectedly, today in Jon Mooallem’s piece about the pandemic, sociology, and dipping into a Covid oral-history project, “What Happened To Us.”
I was particularly drawn to this bit, “What is normal life?”
In 1903, the German sociologist Georg Simmel took a long, hard look at life in big cities and concluded — I’m paraphrasing — that normal life is basically a continuous bombardment of irreconcilable psychic noise. “Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences,” Simmel explained in an essay called “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” We enter each moment expecting that it will resemble the last one, and if we find that continuity between past and present disrupted, it pays to perk up. This was true in rural life at least, Simmel argued, where certain natural rhythms blanketed people in a “steady equilibrium of unbroken customs.” But a city never stops throwing new stimuli at us, engaging our impulse to notice and differentiate. In a city, there’s simply too much newness for a human being to perceive without breaking. The psyche therefore “creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption,” Simmel wrote — a dispassionate crust he called “the blasé attitude.” The blasé attitude, he wrote, is “an indifference toward the distinctions between things. … The meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless.” So, extrapolating from Simmel: One way to describe normal life would be as an arrangement of circumstances that can be successfully ignored.
The other bit that spoke to me was Émile Durkheim’s concept of “anomie.”
Durkheim introduced his concept of anomie most fully in an 1897 book-length study, “Suicide.” Suicides, Durkheim contended, “express the mood of societies,” and he was keen to figure out why their rates increased not just during economic depressions but also during times of rapid economic growth and prosperity. He concluded that any dramatic swing within society, regardless of direction, leaves people unmoored, plunging them into a condition of “anomie.” Swidler told me that, while the word is often translated as “alienation,” it may more accurately be understood as “normlessness.” “He means that the underlying rules are just not clear,” she said. Anomie sets in when a society’s values, routines and customs are losing their validity but new norms have not yet solidified. “The scale is upset,” Durkheim wrote, “but a new scale cannot be immediately improvised. …The limits are unknown between the possible and the impossible.”
Anomie, Durkheim said, “begets a state of exasperation and irritated weariness.”
It’s not just all the teardowns — it’s the ice storms, the power outages, the literal shifting clay of the soil. You’re constantly being made aware, day after day, of how unstable everything is.
I think of a city as a big collage in several dimensions, which is one of the reasons I like to live in one. There’s always something new around, something to look at, something to spark my imagination. It’s good for what Rimbaud called the “derangement of the senses.”
But there are times when it goes too far and other times when one wants to cease being an artist and just feel like a normal human. Some of the ways I’ve made living in the city tolerable from a perspective of peace: observe the seasons (yes, we have seasons here, you just have to pay attention), help Meg in the garden, bike around with my friends, watch the owls, establish dumb rituals with the kids, etc. The sociologists in the piece call these strategies, meant to bring about some kind of normalcy, “repertoires of repair.”
I like that term and will continue to look for more practices to add to my repertoire.
Today’s newsletter was inspired by this comic I found in an old diary and ended up being about this:
We come to books and to life with expectations. Visions in our heads about how we think things are going to go. Trouble — and possibility — happens when the vision and the reality don’t match up.
Something I left out of this piece because I thought it would make it unwieldy: How people carry an image of their city in their mind and as the city changes, it can cause them grief. (I subscribe to the idea that we can deal with change, it’s loss that messes us up.)
I liked the way Jason Stanford wrote about how living in the past blinds many Austinites to the Goodness and Weirdness right in front of them. (He was responding to Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker piece about “The Astonishing Transformation of Austin.”)
We can be blinded by the images in our heads, but we can also be blinded by the images that other people project at us.
Granted, like Lawrence Wright, I live a life of privilege in an extremely pleasant neighborhood, and they’re tearing houses down in every direction, and lord knows I feel like Rip Van Winkle every time I go downtown. But I consistently hear about how supposedly terrible the city has become, and then I go out for a bike ride or a walk, and I wonder where is this terrible place everyone is talking about? This place is pretty good.
Related reading: “It Ain’t Grand”
The University of Texas at Austin said tuition would be about $10,000 for its online master’s program in artificial intelligence.
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