I, along with every other American, saw James Cameron’s Titanic when it first debuted in theaters in 1997. My motivation for doing so wasn’t due to any sort of preoccupation with tragedies, Leonardo DiCaprio, or seminal Hollywood blockbusters. Rather, I went to see Titanic — at the time, the most expensive film ever made — simply to understand what a $200 million film budget looked like. 

There’s a part of me — the finish my plate / save my plastic bags / turn that old skirt into a pillowcase part of me — that was incredibly unnerved by the excessive amount of waste in that film. Wikipedia’s notes on pre-production describe the film’s massive and meticulous approach to achieve historical accuracy:

For the ship’s interiors, production designer Peter Lamont’s team looked for artifacts from the era. However, the newness of the ship meant every prop had to be made from scratch. […]The sets representing the interior rooms of the Titanic were reproduced exactly as originally built, using photographs and plans from the Titanic’s builders. “The liner’s first class staircase, which figures prominently in the script was constructed out of real wood and actually destroyed in the filming of the sinking.”

Entire cabinets of exquisite china, reproduced to exacting detail with the original White Star Line insignia, were constructed and styled simply to come crashing down at the perfect cinematic moment — heralding the catastrophic end of the RMS Titanic and so many of her passengers.

And while I may be the type of person who hears an exorbitant figure as such and can’t help but wonder which countries have a GDP smaller than Cameron’s budget, or perhaps, what I might do with $200 million were I given the opportunity to administer it, I left the theater haunted by this adjacent notion of Creating to Destroy.  

Since then, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to revisit this and examine my own relationship with Impermanence (the slightly less nihilistic cousin of Creating to Destroy) in my creative practice. I’ve never attempted performance or installation art; rather I’ve always gravitated toward working in fixed media with long shelf-lives — be they physical or digital. A number of years ago, I was contacted by a small gallery to inquire as to whether I would be willing to install one of my pieces at large scale on a wall in their space, as part of a group show that would be up for approximately two weeks. I agreed, having never created anything that would take nearly as long to produce as it would exist in this world. Ultimately, the show was cancelled, but I was left trying to reconcile the disconnect between makers and viewers. For makers, the value lies in the act of creation; for viewers: the outcome. Like others who have chosen similar vocations, I make things because I’m in love with making, because I can’t imagine a life without it, and because I secretly enjoy all of the angst, self-flagellation, and learning that comes with the territory. Given the option of: Would I prefer to A) spend every waking minute making terrible work that never saw the light of day or B) wake up every morning to discover that I had made amazing work in my sleep, I would choose A every time, and I’m willing to venture that I’m not alone here.  

My latest work in progress, the Dead Artist Baked Goods series, has been an exercise in Impermanence, while at the same time, an attempt to bridge that gap between maker and viewer. It all began innocently enough and certainly without any overwrought intentions. Before the holidays, my friend and I discovered that we were both harboring a shared desire to bake. She actually had an excuse — an upcoming cookie party in which attendees would exchange baked confections — whereas I had no rational explanation for this urge whatsoever. I was merely obsessed with the idea of replicating modern artworks in royal icing; there was a sweet irony in democratizing and de-contextualizing some of the most revered and unattainable works of minimalism, color field painting, and abstract expressionism. And thus, I began. 

The first series I completed was in honor of Ellsworth Kelly (who, BTW, is 88 and very much alive by all reports), then Mark Rothko’s Multiforms, and most recently, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism. When I recently posted the Malevich cookies on Instagram, a conversation between myself and fellow designer, David, ensued:

DH: “Seriously you have too much time on your hands!”

MC: “I take my personal work seriously, regardless of medium ;-)”

DH: “But do you eat your personal work?”

To which I respond — truthfully, I’m not much of a cookie person. I’ve been known to eat a reject here or there. I do it for the love of doing it, and have taken to forcing the outcomes on my underfed colleagues at GA. Throughout it all, we’ve explored both media and technique (corn syrup- vs meringue-powder-based icing; almond extract vs. lemon zest and lemon extract; application via paintbrush vs. decorating tips, squeeze bottles, and toothpicks). Laugh as you might, but the process of baking has involved the experimentation and failure required of more serious creative pursuits, and in many ways, has been equally gratifying. I’m finally Creating to Destroy. Happily.

(Apologies to Josef Albers)

A friend of mine was recently accepted to the MBA program at Stanford. Somehow we got onto the topic of the essays required for his application—especially one in particular:

Essay 1: What matters most to you, and why?

The best examples of Essay 1 reflect the process of self-examination that you have undertaken to write them. They give us a vivid and genuine image of who you are—and they also convey how you became the person you are. They do not focus merely on what you’ve done or accomplished. Instead, they share with us the values, experiences, and lessons that have shaped your perspectives. They are written from the heart and address not only a person, situation, or event, but also how that person, situation, or event has influenced your life.

What was perhaps even more perplexing than the nature of the question itself, was that his response was not to exceed 750 words. (For comparison’s sake, the word count for the instructions alone total 107.) He found the limitations reminiscent of Twitter’s 140 character cap—only in this case, there was no bit.ly available to condense a thoughtful or nuanced response into a meaningful short-form proxy that would satisfy the requirements.

We live in an era where personal communications are becoming less meaningful and increasingly truncated—friending someone on Facebook after years of lost contact requires a single click to either “Confirm” or “Send Request,” auto-generating a stock email to the recipient. Shouldn’t we have to work harder than this to stay in touch? The act of writing a letter or email is valuable to both writer and recipient because it requires curiosity, commitment, reflection, and often a bit of self-consciousness.

That’s not to say that I don’t see the inherent value in how technology is enabling our ability to share and access information, via links, tags, Tweets, what have you. I just ask that as with all good design, we consider the form most appropriate to both the content contained therein and the context in which it is viewed. Stanford’s question around an applicant’s personal values begs for more than the length of this blog entry, and truthfully, I feel incredibly fortunate to have chosen a profession where my acceptance to schools and jobs has been largely evaluated on the basis of a portfolio.

Writing is an incredibly daunting and difficult exercise for me; throughout the years, I’ve relied predominantly on my visual—not my verbal—vocabulary as a means to inquiry and expression. And while I wouldn’t classify myself as a minimalist, my tendencies as a designer are to develop a rationale for every gesture, thereby avoiding or eliminating that which isn’t deemed essential. However, I don’t apply these same economics to language. When I do write, I tend to overwrite—as if more clarification, more detail, more words can somehow work less hard, so as to more evenly distribute the burden of communicating that which I’m attempting to convey.

Hence the title of this blog.

As a young child, I was first inspired to learn to read when my older sister, Miro, herself an early reader, suddenly and inexplicably abandoned my company in exchange for Nancy Drew’s. I was eager to understand what was so compelling about this girl with the pert blonde curls and her Old Clocks, Hidden Staircases, and Mysterious Letters. And thus began my childhood entrée as a bibliophile—and as an adult, a lover of books about books and reading about reading.

Maryanne Wolf is a professor in child development and the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. She and her colleagues study the neurological origins of language and reading, the developmental implications of dyslexia, and the design of new interventions and their effects on behaviors in the brain and in the classroom.

Within the first chapter of Proust and the Squid, Wolf describes the act of reading as: “a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much by the unpredictable indirections of a reader’s inferences and thoughts, as by the direct message to the eye from the text.”

To illustrate this, she compares a short excerpt from Proust, in which he strings together a number of evocative glimpses of a summer day, to Monet’s impressionist painting of a sunrise. Both novelist and painter use fragments to create composites more vivid than flawless reproductions; readers and viewers are engaged by actively contributing their own experiences and insights to the synthesis of the whole, and through this process, experience both text and painting in more direct, palpable, and authentic ways.

Wolf expresses concern as to whether we’ll be able to retain this constructive dimension of reading as we shift from more traditional print-based presentations (in which pacing and narrative are tightly controlled) to our new Google-based reality, in which we are overwhelmed with dense amounts of information instantaneously presented on screen. She questions whether there will be sufficient time or motivation to process information inferentially, analytically, or critically—and what this may mean for children who are now faced with multi-tasking and metabolizing ever-increasing amounts of information.

What’s perhaps even more troubling is just how uneven the playing field can be for young children without access to vibrant language environments. How often a child is held and read to is a strong predictor of later reading. Wolf cites a study that found that the average middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than his or her underprivileged, “linguistically-impoverished” counterpart by age five.

“Children who begin kindergarten having heard and used thousands of words, whose meanings are already understood, classified and stored away in their young brains, have the advantage […] Children who never have a story read to them, who never hear words that rhyme, who never imagine fighting with dragons or marrying a prince, have the odds overwhelmingly against them.”

In our apartment, you’ll find stacks of books, magazines, and catalogs in every room. Some are perennial favorites—read, re-read, and referenced on a regular basis—while others have yet to be cracked since arriving home from Amazon or the local bookstore months, sometimes years, ago. We subscribe to a half-dozen magazines, but average at least four weeks behind on the weeklies, particularly those as dense as The New Yorker. We cancelled our subscription to Time Out, simply because the frustration that resulted from reading about the show we missed or the exhibit that just closed became unbearable.

(Mis)Readings attempts to document that which I’ve actually read. Page for page, every word ingested from books and magazines is replicated in its original typeface and layout. Colors and images have been eliminated. Headlines and drop caps loom large against vast expanses of white; credits and small point legalese rarely appears. What results is a visual record of my own predisposition toward content—that which is omitted is, perhaps, equally, if not more, significant as that which appears on the page.

Ever since the early days of Friendster, I’ve had to apologetically turn down invitation after invitation to join a variety of social networks. I’ve smiled politely and demurred when people have inquired as to whether I blogged. There was something terrifying about the prospect of living my life out in a public forum, of having my professional and personal worlds collide, of Being Found. And for the most part, I’ve managed to fly under the radar, cloaked by other Mimi Chuns out there in the world, a few of whom appear to also be designers. There’s a catacomb’s worth of skeletons in my closet—too many people I’ve lost touch with by way of disagreements, negligence, or simply the passage of time. Anonymity has always been the elusive ideal.

Throughout the years, as various forms of social media have continued to proliferate around me, my perspective expanded to include the theory:

There’s Life. And then there’s blogging, tweeting, chatting, and updating your status about Life. They are not one and the same.

Finding the time to focus is quickly becoming a luxury, and truthfully, I savor every minute I have to myself. I recently stumbled across a surprising statistic: on average, we encounter distractions every 11 minutes, and that once we veer off course, it takes approximately 25 minutes to recover and return to our original task. A recent conversation with a friend revealed that her boyfriend’s perception of what can be accomplished in an hour factors in the time it takes for him to review and respond to emails, IMs, and Facebook rumblings in real time.

But at the same time, I’ve always been the type to finish a book even if I hated it by the third paragraph, simply because I can’t justify my hatred until I’ve done my due diligence and read every word. In some instances, I’ve reluctantly buried my head in said book, only to emerge frustrated, wondering how I could possibly recover all that wasted time. And in other instances, I’ve been surprised—sometimes one paragraph more is all it takes to for me to realize, Hey, maybe this isn’t so bad.

As added incentive, I increasingly face my own hypocrisy on a daily basis at work, where we’re frequently asked to consider how social media can and should impact user experiences across a range of industries. I’ve conducted covert (and admittedly superficial) investigations of social networking services simply to gain a baseline understanding of how they function and what their broader implications are for how people are connecting with one another and with the world at large.

Which brings us to today. I’ve decided that, for the month of April, I’m going to withhold judgment by throwing myself in the deep end—by voraciously blogging, joining Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, and LinkedIn. At the end of the month, I plan to evaluate if and how Life (and by Life, I mean the one that occurs offline) has changed and whether it’s for the better or worse. I may discover after 30 days that I’ve created a long-winded, digital homage to On Kawara, forever frozen in time, or I may decide that this endeavor has expanded and enriched my life in heretofore unforeseen ways. The truth shall reveal itself.

Consider my social media cherry popped.