The concept was to help the user understand who I am as a person and a designer. I wanted to be personable, a “fess-up” to who I am and how I work. The three words I chose to do this were us, intimacy & desirability.

Each section told a story about me…

us – looked at people who inspire my work

intimacy – looks at my personal life over the previous year

desirability – is a useful penchant for a design piece. Something for someone to treasure.

Download an initial concept document outlining the aims & intentions of the project

credo_initial_concept

Details is a personal project created to showcase my design ethos to prospective employees. The Package contains a dual disc folio as well as a publication containing three words that leverage meaning in my life and their contribution to my design practice. Please contact me if you would like to receive a copy of Details.

Henry

I was driving to my girlfriend’s house the other night which is only a kilometer away and was shocked at how many computers had been left out on the side of the road for hard rubbish collection. Most of them were probably only 3-5 years old, and they would have been bought for $2000+. It’s amazing how quickly the cycle of technology turns and with it brings an enormous amount of waste. Surely there is an after-life for this product that is more sustainable that putting it in the ground?!

The European Space Agency has just released images showing all the satellites and human-made debris now orbiting space as a result of 51 years of launching stuff since Sputnik. That’s about 6,000 satellites up there of which only 800 remain operational plus thousands of other objects from launches and accidents. 

A funny take of society today, and at our rate of consumption scarily true!

by David Brooks, New York Times

THEY say the 21st century is going to be the Asian Century, but, of course, it’s going to be the Bad Memory Century. Already, you go to dinner parties and the middle-aged high achievers talk more about how bad their memories are than about real estate. Already, the information acceleration syndrome means that more data is coursing through everybody’s brains, but less of it actually sticks.

It has become like a badge of a frenetic, stressful life — to have forgotten what you did last Saturday night, and through all of junior high. In the era of an ageing population, memory is the new sex.

Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots. On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship.

On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.

This divide produces moments of social combat. Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

Your response here is critical. You want to open up with an effusive burst of insincere emotional warmth: “Hey!” You’re practically exploding with feigned ecstasy. “Wonderful to see you, too! How is everything?” All the while, you are frantically whirring through your memory banks trying to anchor this person in some time and context.

A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married. But the Proustian bully will give you nothing. “I’m good. And you?” It’s like trying to get an arms control concession out of Leonid Brezhnev.

Your only strategy is evasive vagueness, conversational rope-a-dope until you can figure out who this person is. You start talking in the tone of over-generalised blandness that suggests you have recently emerged from a coma.

Sensing your pain, your enemy pours it on mercilessly. “And how is Mary, and little Steven and Rob?” People who needlessly display their knowledge of your kids’ names are the lowest scum of the earth.

You’re in agony now, praying for an episode of spontaneous combustion. But still she drives the blade in deeper, “That was some party the other night wasn’t it?”

You lose vision. What party? Did you see this person at a party? By now, articulation is impossible. You are a puddle of gurgling noises and awkward silences. After the longest of these pauses, she goes for the coup de grace: “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

You can’t tell the truth. That would be an admission of social defeat. The only possible response is: “Of course I know who you are. You’re the hooker who hangs around on 14th Street most Saturday nights.”

The dawning of the Bad Memory Century will have vast consequences for the social fabric and the international balance of power. International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they have forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments.

There will be new social movements and causes. The supermarket car parks will be filled with cranky criminal gangs composed of middle-aged shoppers looking for their cars. As it becomes clear that a constant stream of blog posts and emails decimates the capacity for recall, people will be confronted with the modern Sophie’s choice — your BlackBerry or your mind.

Neural environmentalists will emerge from the slow foods movement, urging people to accept memory loss as a way to reduce their mental footprint. Meanwhile, mnemonic gurus will emerge offering to sell neural Viagra, but the only old memories the pills really bring back will involve trigonometry.

As in most great historical transformations, the members of the highly educated upper-middle class will express their suffering most loudly. It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

First they lose the subjects they have only been pretending to understand — chaos theory, monetary policy, Don Delillo — and pretty soon their conversation is reduced to the core stories of self-heroism.

Their affection for themselves will endure through this Bad Memory Century, but their failure to retrieve will produce one of the epoch’s most notable features: shorter memoirs.