What We Learned from the Art & Technology Experiment

By Jess Van Nostrand and Susie Lee
Posted on November 8th

“The work I did is the work I know, and the work I do is the work I don’t know.” - Philip Glass, 2012

Throughout the summer of 2012, The Project Room focused on “Solutions.” For this series, TPR Founder Jess Van Nostrand and artist Susie J Lee collaborated on a three-part experiment that brought together artists and technologists for some meeting, talking and making. The three parts were titled as follows: Speed Dating (Event #1), Dinner & A Movie (Event #2), and Gettin’ It On (Event #3).

Here they field questions from Off Paper Editor Jenifer Ward, who also participated in the experiment.

Jenifer: How did the two of you get started with this project?

Jess: I take my collaboration relationships very seriously. There is a mental strain in working within and around another person’s brain, and I save that experience for very special circumstances in which I know I will greatly enjoy nearly every minute of time spent with that person and their brain. Susie was that person for me.

Susie and I found that we both wanted to find a productive and inspiring way to bring artists and technologists together.  We spent countless hours forging a formal structure that was not just another social mixer. We carved a structure that was considered, balanced, and activated through the time spent. It would be based on the development of a romantic relationship, from a blind date through, well, you know.

My job as the Founder/Director/bathroom cleaner of The Project Room is to identify themes that possess relevance for an audience, and to guide the programming as it responds to that theme. Susie also has a big-picture way of thinking, but as an artist, which means she is a maker of things. We complement each other well in what we know, what we are curious about, and who we are able to force to participate in an experiment like this. We spent time fretting about hypotheticals and distracting details like the starting time of an event, but we checked our fretting by remembering the experimental nature of the entire undertaking; as long as people were engaged, all would be fine.

Jenifer: Why now?

Susie: As a new media artist, I have a complicated and deeply ambivalent relationship with new media. My cell phone is from 2001. I don’t facebook. I couldn’t code to save my life (but I think I was tainted by my first C++ programming instructor who came in wearing a lab coat. I was like, “Uh….seriously? Those aren’t REAL viruses, you know….”) And yet I find an addictive cycle of returning to new media by asking the question: What are the ways that technology can touch humanity and bring us closer together? My collaborative practice makes things inherently messy, unpredictable and human. I have had fantastic collaborations with technologists because when we work together the conversations aren’t cyborg mind-melds but more like, “What the hell are you talking about??” Yet, it’s not a start of an argument, but a fascination that the one person is accessing a totally different language, visualization, order of operations and value system from other. Technologists and artists look at the same problem space through completely different filters.

There is a high percentage of technologists in this region. A few of those are interested in cultural endeavors and are curious about what others think in the same problem space. There are also artists (and I’d venture to say the percentage is higher) that are mystified and slightly suspicious of technologists’ thoughts and operations. Jess and I wanted to tap into that energy and curiosity to merge intelligent and motivated artists and technologists together in a room.  

Jenifer: Did any of the results of the experiment surprise you?

Jess: Speed Dating was like a big hot noisy party, and then Dinner & A Movie was more work for everyone, I think. It was interesting—and surprising— how uncomfortable we all seemed to be with having an inconclusive event that was open to the public. I think there were a few times when someone said, “What are our deliverables here? What do you want us to do?” If we were at a real dinner party, no one would have asked that, but in a public event, we are trained to conclude something, or present something tangible. I was wondering if anyone would come back for the third event after that one! But, then, the third and final event brought the ideas together into a presentation format that was meant to demonstrate where we might go as a group if we worked together. So, ideally, those who participated in all three events saw what different ways of thinking around the same topic can look like.

Susie: I was quite floored at the serious application of effort that happened at Getting’ It On. You get a sense why people are successful at their careers—they bust a move when the pressure’s on. What it showed me was that—even though people are busy— we might very well see a new sense of community with relationships that continue beyond this particular program. New people were introduced to TPR. Participants visited each other’s studios, blogged about what they experienced, and have stayed in touch since. So perhaps like any good dating platform, we formed threads of possibilities.

Notes from a Participant: “Dinner & A Movie”

On July 11 2012, TPR presented the second installment in the summer Art & Technology series as part of the Solutions topic. Titled “Dinner & A Movie,” the event asked two groups of artists and technologists to think, discuss, and debate their point of views around the topic “Debris & Value.” Tsunami debris, hoarding, unused ideas, classism, and all kinds of subjects were brought forth in front of an audience. The conversation was lively and much was revealed about how these creative makers approach issues.

Below are one some notes from the evening–a stream-of-consciousness “capture” of the conversation that unfolded:

Debris from French, 1708, related to bricolage and sabotage, sabo from sandal or footwear embroiled in protest, rubbish, to break—”are we defining debris or doing debris?” a filmmaker asks

hanging out on the periphery, fate not yet determined, remainders from catastrophe, toxic, man-made world, plastics, “love to eat awful,” group two’s facilitator begins

psychological debris

moving every year

are you minimalist or hoarder?

right angle or curved wall?

materiality of cyberspace

hardware built surrounding this space

wire forest with sunflowers and vines as people

“it’s okay to be a vine, must we always privilege sunflowers?” the screen retorts

merging inverses:

- class/food

- debris/value

- fetish/art

- artifact/virtual

- entropic/purposeful

- path of destruction/traces of creation

equations:

- what ended a life > what made up a life = forensics

- sculpture + time = debris

- space/debris = value

- “I saw you” ~ “I found this” = meaning

- performance junk < clean lines/pedestal + duster = residue

three closing thoughts:

–      debris as hateful phrases left in the mind…

–      Haida ceremony of destroying copper masks…

–      plastic bags with dog shit found in the archaeological dig…

The Art & Technology Participants are:

Pete Bjordahl: Founder and CEO, Parallel Public Works

Ezra Cooper: Software Engineer, Google

Hsu-Ken Ooi: Founder, Decide.com

Charlie Matlack: CEO & Co-Founder at PotaVida; PhD Candidate at UW

Elisabeth Robson: Computer Scientist

Ethan Schoonover: Technology consultant, web designer

Korby Sears: Senior Producer, Discovery Bay Games; Principal Composer, Tejas Tunes

Sooyoung Shin: Software Engineer

Redwood Stephens: Mechanical Engineering Department Head, Synapse

Dave Zucker: Mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, designer, tinkerer

Byron Au Yong: Composer

SJ Chiro: Filmmaker

Lesley Hazleton: Writer

Jean Hicks: Milliner, visual artist

Bill Horist: Improvisational musician, Composer

Jeffry Mitchell: Ceramicist/Visual artist

Amy O’Neal: Dancer, Choreographer

John Osebold: Composer, performer

Stokley Towles: Performer

Claude Zervas: Sculptor/Visual artist

Matthew Baldwin: Writer

Brangien Davis: Arts & Culture Editor, Seattle Magazine 

Jen Graves: Art Critic, The Stranger 

Nancy Guppy: Producer and Host, Seattle Channel

Harmony Hasbrook: Designer and Writer, Parallel Public Works

C. Davida Ingram: Writer, artist, cultural worker

Charles Mudede: Social critic and filmmaker

Sasha Pasulka: Vice President of Product & Marketing, Salad Labs

Joey Veltkamp: Artist and Art Writer

Jenifer Ward: Associate Provost, Cornish College of the Arts; Editor, TPR’s Off Paper

Why Off Paper?

Gertrude Stein: “What is the answer?”

Alice B. Toklas [silent]

Gertrude Stein: “In that case, what is the question?”

Dear Reader:

There was a time, long long ago, when I thought I might enjoy life as a writer. I began as a child by creating homemade newsletters for my family to read (which is odd since they had been, in most cases, there for whatever I was writing about). I dabbled in composing bad poetry in high school and then fought my way through college and graduate school critical writing exercises, only to find myself hungry to touch art and talk to artists rather than write about it.

I ended up living in Amsterdam for a year, and my best friend, who was an actually good writer working on her MFA in creative writing, started connecting me with writing opportunities for various publications to keep me busy between bartending shifts. This was very rewarding because I had wanted very badly to be a Broadway star when I was a child and seeing my name in print felt like a decent consolation prize to seeing my name in lights.

Anyway, things changed when I started experimenting with curating, and I have come to love writing as a necessary part of being a good curator but not my true calling.

I’m sharing all of this as a way to state my deep respect for writing and writers, and to explain why it became important to include a literary component of The Project Room. More than that, however, I wanted to continue the conversation that would take place in the physical space. The Big Question, “Why Do We Make Things?” has universal relevance, and someone who does not spend time in The Project Room should still be able to access the issues, discussions, and events that form around this question.

As we move forward and explore the Big Question deeper, you can expect writing from a wide range of contributors with different points of view. Some content will respond to the Big Question directly, some of it will be taken from conversations that occurred in The Project Room, and some will be both theoretical and personal, my favorite combination in writing.

Off Paper is lucky to have a new Editor, Jenifer Ward, who starts things off with just such an essay in “In the Making.” Jenifer is an incredible thinker and prolific doer, another one of my favorite combinations.
Welcome to Off Paper!

xo

Jess

Speed Dating between Artists & Technologists: The Twitter Results

On June 27, 2012, ten artists and ten technologists gathered in TPR for a good old fashioned round of Speed Dating. To capture the action for an audience and provide data for this experiment, ten clever ”chaperones” monitored the six-minute dates and tweeted their observations in real time. The goal of the evening was to begin a conversation about problem-solving across two highly creative fields. This was the first event in TPR’s summer topic, Solutions.

Below are some snippets of simultaneous conversations from the evening, highlighting key observations that will provide a framework for the follow-up event, Dinner and a Movie, which takes place on July 11. View all the tweets here.

Why "Solutions"?

Before I explain the reasons behind the current topic, Solutions, I’d like to review some of what I learned during our previous topic, Beginnings. [Each topic of focus in TPR is inspired by what occurred in previous programs, so articulating the connections between them helps me define what’s coming next and—more interestingly—why.]

I learned from Beginnings that many makers do, in fact, have an “aha moment” that sparks a new idea, and that this aha moment is a real thing that occurs in the brain and can be explained, as of very recently, by scientists. I also learned that it’s helpful to be ignorant about your idea when you begin working on it, and that using your personal beginnings as subject matter is actually not a straightforward way of finding the truth about your family.

Some highlights: Musician and filmmaker David Mitsuo Nixon presented his new film-in-progress, Bladfold, about his enigmatic and infamous father, Bradford Nixon. His research into his family’s past revealed complex issues around what defines the “truth,” as it also did for author Alison Bechdel, who visited TPR for a conversation about her new graphic novel Are You My Mother? Kevin and Jennifer McCoy created mock art tours by actors of works by Northwest Masters, which allowed a refreshingly new way to look at the region’s art history. It was also very, very funny. I also learned that no matter the field, people who make things are often inspired by a problem or a challenge to which they have found no satisfying response. Some may even create a problem that can be researched, but it leads to the same place: creativity is often an act of problem solving.

The Start Up roundtable discussion that took place in March inspired the idea, but I was interested in the topic before then, even before I made myself a job as an independent curator sometime around 2003.*

So I ran the idea of seeking solutions as a motivator by a few other makers, including author of Imagine, Jonah Lehrer. Jonah had this to say about why he wrote a book about creativity:

“I’m just drawn to mysteries, to things I can’t begin to understand. So for me it began with moments of insight. We all have them all the time and they are so befuddling. And I knew I wanted to write a book on creativity because it seemed like a vague enough subject where I could tell lots of good stories, which is the other kind of subject I’m drawn to. But I kept bumping into creative people and asking them questions, and they couldn’t explain their epiphanies any better than anyone else. It’s just as mysterious to them. And that’s why I thought the science could be interesting.” Read more about our conversation here.

With solutions on the mind, Decide Co-Founder Hsu-Ken Ooi, visual artist Susie Lee, and I have invited ten artists and ten technologists to participate in a mock “speed-dating” event, during which they will identify some problems to tackle. To add more complexity to the conversation, ten “Chaperones” will facilitate the “dates” and tweet in real time so we can all follow along. The event is June 27, and the Twitter name is projectroomSEA. More info about that is coming soon.

And I’ll present other perspectives, including those of composer Garrett Fisher and filmmaker Ryan K. Adams, who shared the next installment of the making of Magda G in a film script reading June 3.  Read about Garrett’s approach to problem-solving here. Printmaker Charles Spitzack will continue making new work in response to all TPR’s topics—including Solutions—and we’ll continue to hear from other makers, both in and outside of the arts. And save the date for July 14, when TPR celebrates its first birthday!

What Solutions is really about is motivation: What motivates us? What gets us so fired up that we decide to make something about it? How often is that thing a problem of some kind? In other words, Why Do We Make Things?

Solutions proves that there is still much fertile ground to cover within this big question.

*My experience with problem solving can be traced back deep into my past, to when my new gym teacher in sixth grade kept forgetting the students’ names well into the school year. This inspired me to ask my dad to bring me sticky nametags from his office so I could organize my classmates into wearing them in class. My dad told me at this time that this was called creative problem solving.

A Conversation with Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel is a graphic novelist and author of the new book Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). She visited TPR for a conversation about the process behind her work. Joining her were TPR Founder Jess Van Nostrand, Off Paper Editor and Associate Provost of Cornish College of the Arts Jenifer Ward, TPR Volunteer and artist Tessa Hulls, artist Sarah Bergmann, and TPR volunteer Fritzie Reisner. This is an edited transcription of that conversation, which begins with Alison’s arrival from a delayed flight from LA in the midst of her national book tour.

ALISON: I feel like my molecules are disassembled. I’ve been in a different city since May 1st. So I’ll either be really lucid today or really incoherent.

JESS: We’ll take either version. That’s fine. Well, congratulations on the success of the book so far. It’s been fun to read different people’s takes on it. I was reading this morning the Seattle Times and the Stranger. Both published today, I think, about you being in town, and it was so noticeably different, the styles…,They were both very positive, but it seems that because your book touches on universal issues, for lack of a better word—this mother-daughter relationship which I imagine so many people can relate to—do you find that people are responding in vastly different ways?

ALISON: It’s all still really new, so I don’t have a broad sample of responses to gauge from. People seem—the people who tell me it touched them or moved them, it seems kind of similar, like, “Oh, this is my story.”

JESS: Do you have people close to you who read it during the editing process?

ALISON: Not really. My editor and my agent. A couple friends would read it at various points, but it was very hard for anyone to read it, because when I’m working on it, it’s very unfinished. There are no pictures. The way I work is without doing a lot of drawing. I can show you—

[Alison clicks through slides documenting her process on her computer.]

TESSA: Jess brought in the New Yorker profile on you and it was interesting reading about your process in there, where it seems like your work is almost more printmaking than illustration in terms of the number of layers you put into it, and having to be so methodical in thinking ahead.

ALISON: I never thought about it as printmaking. That’s interesting.  People always ask which comes first, the pictures or the words, and I can’t answer that, because they’re simultaneous—even though they might not seem that way.

FRITZIE: Do you think in terms of the narrative and then go populate the details of the individual panes? Or—

ALISON: This is how I get the narrative, is by mucking along like this. I’ll stop and—well, actually I started with a really crazy outline, like a giant spreadsheet. I kind of keep referring to that. It’s like the columns were different chapters and the rows were just different ideas or quotations or episodes from my life that I felt might fit into that chapter, so it [the spreadsheet] was a way to keep track of that larger structure. But that would change, too, depending on what happened here [points at screen]and in the writing… but I took pictures of everything. I took about 4,000 pictures for this book.

SARAH: But the drawings get progressively more defined…

ALISON: All that production stuff happens at the end of the process.

JESS: Does the color have significance? Because Tessa and I were noticing that Fun Home [your previous book] has a bluish color and Are You My Mother? is reddish.

ALISON: Well I just wanted them to be different, mainly, and there aren’t a whole lot of options when it comes to two-color printing in a way that’s naturalistic. Purple wouldn’t really work. Yellow wouldn’t work. Something greenish and something reddish were kind of my only options.

FRITZIE: I’ve only read the books and I haven’t read any of the reviews about you, just the two books…

ALISON: You’re our control.

FRITZIE: Did you, when you were writing the book about your father—was it sometime while you were doing that that you decided that next you’d be writing about your mother?

ALISON: No. I had no intention or idea that I’d be following that with a book about my mother. And in fact, my work on this book that turned out to be about my mother was at first going to be something very different. It was going to be a book about relationships, sort of Relationship. But over the years I realized it just wasn’t making sense. It was just vey abstract and turgid and personal. I realized I was writing and kind of avoiding the subject of my mother. My mother was a part of that relationship book, but I realized she was more of the main story.

JENIFER: How long until you realized that?

ALISON: Four years in, when my agent read a draft and said, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

JESS: And that’s in here, that’s in the book, which is really great. And the book is so much about process—and you reference Virginia Woolf a lot—and I was wondering if, from the artwork side, there is a strong influence in your work as well. You talk so much about the literary side and writers who you study…

ALISON: Well yeah, I’ve always read comics. Mad Magazine was a big influence, Edward Gorey’s work.  R. Crumb,, Harvey Pekar, Norman Rockwell.

JESS: Well I think it’s so amazing how, with the facial expressions, you convey so much in an expression. If you look at it, it almost doesn’t look like that complex of a face, but then you realize how much you’re getting out of it…

FRITZIE: I wondered how whatever kind of journaling you do now compares in the sorts of things you capture and what you put down to what you wrote as a child.

ALISON: Well my journaling has kind of faded away. I remember once reading Keith Haring’s journal, and it was so interesting. Just really rich, amazing, dense stuff, and then it stops—because his life got so busy and crazy and he couldn’t keep a journal. And I feel like to some extent that’s happening to me, but I do keep a daily work log. It started out with where I am with my work, what I am going to do today, what will I start tomorrow. But that has sort of turned into my journal. Which makes it dysfunctional as a work log and a journal. It’s like I’m having a fight with my girlfriend but it’s in the middle of my notes from work.

JESS: One of the things that came up during our series [in The Project Room] on Beginnings was the idea of struggle, the struggle that you undergo while you’re making something, and you have this new idea but you’re really just at the beginning. In other words, you have to go through this struggle. And there are some really interesting, neat moments about this here [Jess holds a copy of Are You My Mother?], and I was wondering if you agree that struggle is inherent to the creative process, if you think you have to go through it to get to the other end.

ALISON: That is a big question. I remember reading that book, The Artist’s Way, in the 90’s and thinking, “Oh wow, maybe it doesn’t have to be painful.” And I started doing the exercises in that book, the daily writing exercises, and part of me scoffs at that “Paint by Numbers” approach to creativity. But I have to say that really was the beginning of doing Fun Home. It was from doing those morning pages that I really built up enough steam to start writing this memoir about my dad that had loomed over me for many, many years.

JESS: Do you think it freed you up?

ALISON: It freed me up, but it didn’t make the creativity painless like she suggested it might be.

JESS: That’s a little misleading right there.

ALISON: Creativity for my mother was painful. I remember when she would be in plays. She did summer stock acting and it would always be this completely all-consuming project for her. And as it got closer and closer to the opening, she would get more and more anxious and more and more upset, and it was like, “Why are you doing this?” but clearly she really loved it. And I feel like somehow I’ve osmosed that same pattern of… I don’t know if it’s necessary to suffer. So far for me it has been necessary to suffer, and I wish that it weren’t.

JESS: Well, I remember that moment in the book, and you ask her in the book why she does this and she says, “Because I have to.” It seems like that was a memorable moment—do you feel that same way? That you just have to do it?

ALISON: Yeah, I do. She told me an interesting story recently. Actually, she’s sort of cut me off from any more family stories because she knows I’ll put them in a book. But for that New Yorker interview, the Judith Thurman one, she talked to my mother, emailed my mother. And just incidentally, my mother told me something that she’d told Judith Thurman, which was that her father, my grandfather, would often—he worked on the railroad—but he was also an opera singer. He sang opera in the local opera house. And he was apparently really encouraging to people who he could hear had a good voice, and he would say, “God gave you this voice, you should do something with it.” Like it was their duty to use their creative talents. And I never heard that in my life, but I think my mother transmitted that to me somehow.

JESS: Your books touch on the idea of telling the truth. Is that a motivator for you, or is there a challenge or something that’s blocking your way that makes you start to work on a book? Does it come from a question or issue or problem?

ALISON: Well, the book about my father did. I felt like no one really knew the truth about my father. And I did feel a necessity of telling it. But I didn’t have that same compulsion with this book about my mother. And I really thought I was telling the truth in the book about my dad, I thought there was such a thing as truth, and I was very earnestly going to relate it. But since finishing it, since it’s been out in the world, I’ve realized that was naïve. There are lots of different truths, and this was just my version.

JESS: And you have a brother, correct?

ALISON: I have two brothers.

JESS: That’s really interesting, too, because there’s an artist—a musician—here named David Nixon who we’ve been featuring, and he’s working on a film that’s about his dad, who rose to the highest levels of leadership in a local Buddhist sect which was very cultish, even according to its members who are still alive. So he’s making a piece about what it as like to have this famous guy as a dad.

It just seems like really thorny territory to try to figure out what the truth might be, but you might find something much more interesting, if you set that aside and focus on other parts of it. That’s been his story.

ALISON: I kind of like that my mother has cut me off from more factual information because it lets me get to imagine things. It frees me up a lot creatively.

JESS: Does it sometimes feel like a burden? That you need to be factually accurate?

ALISON: I feel like I’m excited about facts and trying to make the random facts that I know, or the experiences I’ve had, into a story. And I’m kind of obsessed with keeping track of things. I feel so distressed that over these last ten days I’ve been so busy that I honestly haven’t been able to write down where I am. I just read an interview with Jeanette Winterson in which she says that if she can’t read everyday, she starts to feel ill. I feel like, for me, it’s if I can’t write even some basic, diaristic information every day, I start to feel ill or not right. But I am kind of obsessive about keeping track of stuff. I’m so glad you’re writing everything down [gestures to Fritzie]. It’s very reassuring.

TESSA: Kind of working off that idea of whether or not there’s the objective truth of one narrative, I was curious about how the experience of writing Are You My Mother? changed the way you look at the narrative you made for Fun Home. Do you feel like you came to a different understanding of the story of your father through the process of exploring your mother?

ALISON: I did. I feel like I know a lot less about my father than I thought I did. I feel like I don’t really understand my parent’s relationship. And I stayed away from some big, obvious, obligatory questions that I didn’t even go near in my book. Like what was it like for my mother to have asked someone for a divorce and then have him commit suicide? I can’t possibly ask her that, or certainly talk about it in public. And I feel like that’s a huge part of her story, and I don’t go anywhere near it in real life or in my book. So it was kind of like writing the book around an empty core, which was an interesting formal exercise to do.

JESS: What was the empty core?

ALISON: Just that thing I couldn’t say. Several things I couldn’t say. Things that I knew would be distressing for her. But to come up with a story nonetheless was a good challenge.

JESS: Were there things you made significant changes to along the way? Just getting back to the idea of process, I mean, I know you really changed what the whole book was about at one point. Are there other aspects that got removed or vice versa?

ALISON: There is so much that got removed… I want to show you my crazy chart that I started with….

[Alison shows the chart she uses to construct narrative.]

My initial idea for the endpapers of this book was to have two concurrent timelines, one of my mother’s life and one of mine. But it just got too complicated.

FRITZIE: When you first thought you were going to write this book about relationships, what made you want to do that?

ALISON: Well, I knew that I’d shot my wad with this one great story about my dad, and I knew I didn’t have any other stories like that. I had lots of small stories, so I thought… There’s a lot of pressure to write another book because Fun Home did really well. So pressure from my publisher and agent, but also I had to make money to sell another book. So I rushed into a proposal for something, and I thought I’d write about relationships. I was interested in the problem of the Self in relation to the Other in a kind of philosophical sense.

So I wrote a proposal saying I was going to write this book and it would be called Love Life and would have chapters that progressed along the arc of a traditional love story—you meet someone, you touch someone for the first time, you go through these progressively more intimate stages until you’re divorcing them. And that would be my story, but it would be made up with lots of other little stories from my relationships and stuff by other writers that interested me and fit into these categories. And then I realized it was just this Procrustean bed that I was trying to fit something else into and it wasn’t working.

JENIFER: So as you’re accumulating so many storylets under these themes, at what point do you go from “I’m accumulating” to “now I’m going to craft.” Is there a trigger? Is it different for every project?

ALISON: I don’t remember how I actually got started. Or even how the original version began. I don’t know, it was so long ago. It wasn’t so much a trigger or a bolt of insight as much as just being, “Ok, now it’s time to sit down and write and just do that.”

JENIFER: My first teaching job was at a college where there was an independent study thesis for every student. And I remember this one student who would come in every week with a stack of books and the stack just got bigger and bigger. And I would say, “When are you going to start writing?” And he would say, “Oh but I found this great book, it’s got great stuff in it.” And the next week he’d come back and the stack would be bigger… And finally I just said, “Dude, at some point you have to quit taking in and you’re going to have to start putting out.” [laughter] Not in that way. That would be inappropriate. Those would be some boundary issues. But to move from the place of taking in to putting it back out was excruciating for him.

ALISON: That sounds very familiar. My creative process is very accretive to the point that it’s so dense that I can’t even have another thought, and that’s the point at which I know I have to get rid of something. But that doesn’t happen until kind of late.

TESSA: And that comes up in your work. One of the things I was the most struck by in Are You My Mother? was how, with your own journals, you got yourself to a point of paralysis where you couldn’t write because you were trying so hard to be objectively true. And so your mom actually came in and helped you write, and that’s just such an interesting layer, and then at the end of the book you talk about how she showed you the way out and in so many ways gave you your creative process. And that was just really touching, that she was able to help you out of the paralysis of gathering—

ALISON: Yeah, that’s very analogous. My creative process has not changed since I was a kid.

JESS: That makes me want to ask you more about when you were young. Did you have a clear experience in which you thought that this might be the kind of work for you? Were you always a big reader? Was there a moment at which you thought you found your—well maybe calling is too strong of a word, I don’t know how you see it…

ALISON: I feel like I always knew I wanted to draw. At some point I learned that there was such a thing as a cartoonist, and then I wanted to be a cartoonist.

JESS: How did you learn that?

ALISON: Probably from reading the New Yorker, which we always had lying around.

JESS: That’s impressive childhood reading.

ALISON: Well, I would just read the cartoons, I wasn’t reading the articles. Even today I just skip toTalk of the Town where the cartoons start.

SARAH: I’m curious why you do the washes in watercolor and not Photoshop.

ALISON: I tried that. I was initially going to do them in Photoshop, but I didn’t like the way it looked, and I didn’t want to spend that much time on the computer. I’d much rather use a real brush and paper and have that organic experience than be hunched over and looking at the screen.

SARAH: And how do you do that? Do you use a light box?

ALISON: Yeah.

JESS: And is there a part of that process you enjoy more than other parts? Do you look forward to a certain part?

ALISON: I look forward to the inking, when I’ve got all the hard parts—sketching and research—done and I just have my nice clean pencil that I get to ink. It’s just… pleasant. And I don’t have to use my brain, really. I can listen to TV or a book or something.

TESSA: With two parents who were both such advocates and practitioners of close reading, how do you feel knowing that there are people doing that with your books now? I mean, even us having your two books here, and clearly we’ve gone through and poked and compared… What’s your comfort level with that?

ALISON: I feel like in this sad, pathetic way, I invite it—like I want people’s attention, and I’m somehow desperate for people to see me. I don’t always read all the academic papers that are written about my work, but I like that people are doing that. It makes me feel sort of held, in a way, to have people analyzing me. Like in an analytic sense, a holding experience.

JESS: I was talking yesterday to some women who part of an oral history project [These Streets] about women who were very active in the Seattle music scene in the 90’s, which is known as the grunge era. And a big part of the way in which it is remembered is as a male dominated scene, but in fact there were a lot of really active women musicians who just haven’t been included in the books that are now coming out as this 20th anniversary thing. And one of them said that she actually got a little depressed when she found out that there wasn’t a Wikipedia page for her. Is there a legitimacy that you feel when you have a Wikipedia page? Or is it just knowing that people know you’re there? Does the work exist in the same way whether or not you’re written about in history?

ALISON: Maybe those people put up their own Wikipedia pages.

JESS: Wikipedia is probably not a good example.

ALISON: But that is a good example, because you do have to metaphorically put up your own Wikipedia page. You can’t count on other people doing that for you.

JESS: And there is an audience whether you want there to be or not. There is the greater world out there that could or could not respond to what you do. So how much does that matter?

ALISON: Well, for many, many years I had a very small audience. I had this very subcultural gay and lesbian following who read my work, and that was great. But when I started getting more recognition with Fun Home, when that came out, I feel like it… I haven’t really talked about this, so I can’t express it as clearly as I would like, but when you get support from the outside world, it’s a challenge. It pushes you to do more, it pushes you to go further. It’s like a chemical reaction or something. You’re given more opportunities that you can take advantage of. And if you can make the most of those, then you get more opportunities. So it’s like this continually escalating challenge. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it would be nice to think that it doesn’t matter what the outside world thinks of your work, but it does, and it’s an interaction. You get fed from other people’s responses and reactions, and the more of those reactions, the more you are fed and guided.

TESSA: Do you find it difficult to be as honest and critical as you might want to be, knowing that there’s a built in audience for anything you might write?

ALISON: Yeah, it was excruciating trying to write this book. When I wrote that book [Fun Home], no one had any idea I was even doing it. I was totally in this blissful solitude, this bubble of doing exactly what I wanted to do. I didn’t even sell it for a long time; I was just working on it in this pure way. And this book [Are You My Mother?] I had to sell right away—I got a big advance, I signed a contract. People were expecting it, readers were expecting it, and that was really… Well, in some ways really awful, but also really wonderful because I had to do it.

JENIFER: Do you sort out in your own head those two kinds of feeding? So one kind of being fed is the response from your readers and the scholarly academic papers and those kinds of things, and the other is the literal feeding that comes from an advance or money from your publisher. Do those align in your head, or do you compartmentalize them?

ALISON: Well, for me they have been pretty much aligned. But I have so many friends who work really hard at their writing and don’t get published by a big press, don’t get a decent advance. So I know it’s just a fluke in my case.

JESS: We’ve talked about motivation a little bit, but I always like to throw out the big question that is the theme at The Project Room, which is why do we make things? Could you respond to that?

ALISON: I’ve been thinking about this. I think we make things because we’re trying to make up for something. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that my creative drive is compensatory on some level. I’m trying to get back to some pristine state, trying to get other people’s attention. Something I missed. I know I’m really pathologizing creativity, but I do think that creativity is pathological to a certain extent. Why else would you do something so painful?

[laughter]

TESSA: But that’s also the example you were given in both your parents.

ALISON: Yeah, so what do I know?

TESSA: It’s just curious, thinking, if you had been born into a different family, A: would you ever have become a cartoonist; and B: would you have a different understanding of what creative process has to be?

ALISON: I can’t even entertain hypotheticals like that. If I were born into an entirely different family, I would probably be a very happy CPA somewhere. But maybe that’s a cynical view of creativity. Maybe it can be fun; maybe everyone can do it.

I’ll be whining at home stuck with something feeling completely overwhelmed with self loathing and completely hopeless that I’ll ever finish anything, and my girlfriend will say, “you’ll finish it, you always do.” And I want to say, “What do you think—how do you think—this happens? I don’t just do it!” But that’s what it looks like from the outside. And I DO do it.

FRITZIE: So she was right.

ALISON: I know that I will do it, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

FRITZIE: In the book about your mom, there’s a lot of reference to the psychological literature. I wondered whether you, like now, when you’re not writing these books and other things are on your mind, do you read psychology stuff for pleasure? Or do you have questions that you’re pondering and then you look for references in psychology to inform your thoughts?

ALISON: I think it’s more that I’m looking for specific answers—I’m not just ranging around for pleasure. I’m just starting to read the work of this guy Murray Bowen who did something called Family Systems Therapy. I want to write yet another family memoir, but about the whole family and about how families work. I would not pick up—it’s this huge textbook—his book for pleasure, but I am very interested to find out what he says. And he did his early research with parents with a schizophrenic child, and from what I can tell so far, that is his general model of the family—there’s a schizophrenic center to every family. Don’t quote me, I don’t know enough yet, but I find that very compelling.

JENIFER: I actually read some of his stuff when trying to figure out how academic institutions work, administratively. Because people always referred to him, as in, “Oh, well, if you had studied family systems theory, you’d know why we’re so dysfunctional.”

ALISON: Yeah, what makes a family dysfunctional, and what makes a family functional? I’ve been so cynical about family. As a young feminist it was always “Yeah, fuck the family, fuck the state.” But now I see that families can be a really, good thing, and I want to find out what makes them work when they do.

JESS: Is that something you’re thinking about now as a future project?

ALISON: Yeah. I have to talk to my family about it, though.

A Conversation with Author Jonah Lehrer

An update to this post:
Jonah Lehrer resigned last week from his job at The New Yorker after admitting that he had fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan in “Imagine.” The publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has stopped printing the book. This is sad news for Lehrer fans and for those of us who referred to this heralded book frequently in our work. The Project Room’s mission is to present inclusive programming that demonstrates the relevance of creativity in everyday life, and “Imagine” had been an inspiring resource during TPR’s first year as it defined and presented its early programming within this mission. It seems worth pointing out that a book touting the wonders of human creativity from a scientific perspective lost its credibility due to an imbalance between the creative (imaginative) and the scientific (fact-based) elements. We will post any updates about this issue as they develop.- JVN, 8/8/12

Science Writer and author of the new book Imagine, Jonah Lehrer visited The Project Room on April 9, 2012 for a conversation with TPR Founder Jess Van Nostrand and Seattle Magazine’s Arts & Culture Editor Brangien Davis. This is an edited transcription of that meeting. The discussion begins around the 1979 book The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, which Brangien has brought with her.

BRANGIEN: I suspect my mother— through this and other clues—was always trying to get me to loosen up and get more into creativity. So even though this is totally about brain science and what they had been figuring out in the ‘60s (a little advanced for a ten year-old to be reading)… I started digging into it again as a grownup, and I can actually get it.

JONAH: Drawing is one of those activities—studies have shown—that seems to loosen people up. It teaches you what improv is all about: getting outside your own head and turning off that sensor, that voice that’s always telling you not to do something.

There are these wonderful studies people have done that work with people who have suffered damage to one of their hemispheres. So if you asked a patient to draw—who has damage to the right hemisphere—to draw a house, they will draw all the doors and windows perfectly, but without a frame. If you ask a person to draw a house who has damage to the left hemisphere, they will get the whole right but all the windows will be in the wrong places—the details will be ass-backwards. There is of course the association we get from the hippies: the right hemisphere is the artist inside the head, the left hemisphere the accountant. And that’s definitely an oversimplification. But in general, the two hemispheres do process information differently.

The Freedom of Constraint

JESS: One thing I hear from artists a lot in my work is that they prefer some parameters when they’re making something new; that they don’t like complete freedom. And this comes up again and again, especially because we work thematically here (at The Project Room), which gives us something to go off of. Do you find that that’s the case in all fields, or is this specific to art making?

JONAH: No, you see it again and again in all fields. If you’re designing a gadget, you’ve got the constraints of technology. But [it’s] even in domains of art where you assume it’s better to be completely free, like with poets. Why wouldn’t poets just want to make free verse? It seems so much easier. Why would they want to stump themselves with sonnets and sestinas and haikus and all these forms?

I think it gets back to the value of constraints. You have to force yourself to think in terms of remote associations that make it easier for us to get to that place where we are actually coming up with something original and not just going with our first free association. A study that just came out looked at the value of giving people these kinds of constraints—like a flickering computer screen—and people were better at solving a problem when they were given a constraint to deal with.

JESS: Even though the problem was unrelated?

JONAH: Yes, just something that put them in the mindset of thinking outside of the box. A constraint gets you away from going with your initial idea and forces you to keep on searching.

JESS: There was a section [in your book] where you talk about how creativity comes from a problem, or a challenge of some kind. I find that when I survey different makers about this, I get different kinds of responses. Artists don’t necessarily see themselves as problem solvers—they see themselves as responders. Whereas an entrepreneur, for example, sees him or herself as trying to make something better, and therefore being a problem solver. Have you found that same kind of distinction?

A Problem By Any Other Name

JONAH: It’s definitely a language distinction we have. I’m not sure how meaningful the distinction is. When I’m talking to artists they are solving problems too—they sometimes have technical problems to solve, so sometimes it’s about stepping back because something doesn’t feel right, and asking why it isn’t working; so they are problem-solving and that’s not the language they rely on to describe that process.

Where brain science is helpful is in being a category-buster, so it takes the categories that we naturally cleave ourselves into (so there are artists who have artistic creativity and scientists who have scientific creativity, and all the rest) and from the perspective of the brain, they all seem like pretty much the same thing. We’ve got these muscles we rely on to help us invent new stuff. Problem–solving doesn’t jive with our romantic sense of the artistic process. It seems too mundane and too technical…

JESS: …or too definitive.

JONAH: Yes, because it makes it seem like there is a solution. Some of my favorite writing about the creative process, that I made myself read before writing this book, is Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries. She often uses the phrase “problem-solving” when she writes that the novel isn’t working and she’s trying to make it work. It can come across as technical, too “insider-baseball” (she is a writer obsessed with writing), but I find that’s true in a lot of journals and diaries; it’s people talking about the nitty gritty, and you see what the everyday life of an artist is, which is a lot about problem-solving.

If you’re working towards an answer, you often have a sense of getting closer, which is totally befuddling to me: how do you know that? But we are able to do that, and my sense is that artists often rely on this feeing of knowing. It’s part of their process as in, “these edits are making it better,” or “I’m getting closer to what I want.”

BRANGIEN: I definitely have experienced that in teaching writing. You can teach writing as much as possible, but for some people you just have to tell them that the edits you made make it “sound better.” Even if what they had was grammatically correct.

JONAH: If we could articulate it, it wouldn’t have taken so long to make it in the first place. We’d all be better at this thing called creativity.

BRANGIEN: Right.

Expertise or Intuition?

JESS: I find that the more I trust my instincts, the sharper they get. And maybe some of this is confidence…

JONAH: …And that’s the payoff of expertise. We think of experts as having explicit facts they can rely upon, but when we have looked at experts in the wild we have found that they are mainly intuitive. There has been a big shift in scientific thinking about intuition. For a while we thought they were just these primal passions that lead us to take out sub prime mortgages and eat too much chocolate cake and do stupid shit. But it turns out they are actually where our experience gets vetted…and the reason experts log all those hours of experience is not so they can have more facts to quote; it’s so that you can have these instincts that have been honed by your past failures, your mistakes and all those years of training, so that you can think without having to explain why it’s so.

Struggle and Grit

JESS: Let’s talk about the idea of “struggle” and how important it is to making art. And how it should be hard, and it should be painful. In yesterday’s [April 8, 2012] New York Times Magazine, Jack White is interviewed as saying, “It’s sort of like I can’t be proud of it unless I know we overcame some kind of struggle,” in reference to using only analog methods for recording. He also calls using computer programs to record and edit music, “Cheating.” It’s like he is saying that technology has robbed people of the ability to struggle. Can we say that? There are certainly lots of people who use technology during their struggle because it’s part of their craft.

JONAH: Technology comes with its own constraints and struggles. Even if you’re using nifty tools, it’s still going to involve a struggle and plenty of frustration.

I’m writing an article now for The New Yorker about this new character trait being called “grit.” Levels of grit are the biggest predictors of success…the way people work up their grit is by failing.

My younger sister is a modern dancer. And I remember saying to her early on, “Just so you know, this is like the hardest possible career you could have chosen. You’ll make no money, you’ll have to work SO hard.” And she never thought about the opportunity cost—she was aware that she was spending her twenties doing this—she was like “Just because of what I need to do, because I have this single-minded goal.” I was always fascinated by that. That’s just the way she thinks.

Ignorance is Bliss

JESS: The idea that ignorance is really important when you’re about to take a big risk comes up a lot. We had a roundtable discussion here with a group of entrepreneurs from different fields, talking about what would be the most important qualities that you would need before you start something new and take a big risk, and everybody agreed on ignorance and persistence as the two biggest things.

JONAH: That’s grit, especially the persistence part. The ignorance part is especially important in risk taking, in part because you’re not thinking about what else you could be doing, about the possibility of failure. But it’s also because if we were rational creatures, who would ever start a business? Who would ever start a restaurant? Because 80% of them fail within five years. We would just have McDonalds. But thank God people are risk seeking.

JESS: So, what was the challenge, or the problem, that made you set out to write this book?

Here is a Pleasure That Won’t Get Old

JONAH: I’m just drawn to mysteries, to things I can’t begin to understand. So for me it began with moments of insight. We all have them all the time and they are so befuddling. And I knew I wanted to write a book on creativity because it seemed like a vague enough subject where I could tell lots of good stories, which is the other kind of subject I’m drawn to. But I kept bumping into creative people and asking them questions, and they couldn’t explain their epiphanies any better than anyone else. It’s just as mysterious to them. And that’s why I thought the science could be interesting. But the book I want to write about next, which comes from this same vague questioning, is about love. It’s about love of ideas, love of a pursuit, love of a talent, love of God, love of friends. I think what we mean when we say we love something, is “here is a pleasure that won’t get old.” I was talking with this animator at Pixar who spent twenty years just figuring out how to draw a character’s hair.

JESS: That‘s passion for you.

JONAH: It turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem, and it gave his work tremendous meaning over these twenty years. So when you find people who are really good at what they do, it’s because they’re in love with the idea—they’re in love with the questions. It’s why they keep on putting in the work when other people look at them and think they’re crazy.

JESS: I think it’s important to de-glamorize the part when you’re just working on your thing. So after you have your big idea, that’s plan A. But usually what you end up with is Plan C or D because there are all these changes that typically occur along the way. But there is still this romantic idea of this artist who in their studio in this beautiful place making things happen…

JONAH: …smoking weed all day long…

The UP Side of Depression

JESS: Our friend Dan Webb—a sculptor here in Seattle who carves wood—calls his process a “constant butt-clenching experience,” because he can’t necessarily go back and edit. He’s basically thinking, while he carves, “I hope I don’t F-up this piece of wood.”

JONAH: And it’s even worse than most people think. Because not only is it not romantic, but all the evidence suggest that it will make you sad. Extended bouts of focus make people depressed, and that’s actually a good thing, because when you’re mildly depressed, you’re more attentive to those details you’re honing in on.

But the editing phase is horrible; it is a “butt-clenching experience.” It’s amazing what creative people put up with. One of the lessons I took away from my book was, “Wow, they just really must want to do this ‘cause it sucks.”

BRANGIEN: I think it speaks to how powerful that epiphany moment really is. When you have the “eureka” then it feels so important and unusual that you are motivated, as in, “I gotta get back to that feeling.”

JONAH: You’re like an addicted rat. I was talking to my wife about this because I was complaining about book tours and how I hate getting reviews, and I hate Googling myself, and she says. “So wait—you’re miserable now and the book is done, and you’re miserable during the writing—why do you do this? Which part do you enjoy?” I think it is the euphoria of when it just clicks. What no one tells you is that it’s like thirty seconds of the process, but it’s such a high.

JESS: And you decide that it’s worth it.

JONAH: It’s not a conscious calculation and it makes no sense. If you added up all the pain and weigh it against the pleasure…but if it were rational, it would be easier to explain to other people.

Why Do We Make Things?

JESS: So I have to throw out the question that I ask everybody since this is The Project Room: Could you answer the question: Why Do We Make Things?

JONAH: I think we make things because we need to. It’s such a profound question…this, to me, gets at the core mystery of creativity that science has only begun to touch, which is what the human brain can do is that we look around the world, and sometimes we see something that makes us so inspired that we want to replicate it in a painting, or we want to write a poem about it. Sometimes we see a problem, like a flaw, and both those observations hurl us into this state of creativity where we want to fix it, where we want to respond, to make something, to apply. It’s a deep part of human nature. You can’t study it in a brain scanner. The closest we get is by talking about curiosity.

Curiosity is something I’m fascinated by, and there is no scientific research on it. How do you study it? The process starts with us saying, “I want to learn more about that. I’m curious about that.” I think we make stuff because we can’t help but be any other way. I don’t think science has even begun to understand this. But I think it remains the deepest, most wonderful, most mysterious part of ourselves.

Jess and Jonah in front of The Klavihorn

The Start-Up: A Roundtable Discussion

As part of The Project Room’s theme of Beginnings, several enterprising makers in Seattle sat down recently with TPR Founder Jess Van Nostrand and Off Paper Editor Jenifer Ward to talk about the beginnings of their respective ventures. The event was called The Start-Up.

Hsu-Ken Ooi is Co-founder of Decide, a company that helps consumers track electronics prices. Sarah Novotnyfounded Blue Gecko, a remote database administration company, and is Chief Information Officer for Meteor Entertainment, a startup in transmedia publication. Artist Sarah Bergmann started a project called Pollinator Pathway, a mile long garden project that crosses a third of the city of Seattle. Zephyr Paquette recently opened Skelly and the Bean, a 100% community supported restaurant. Susie Evans is co-founder of Office Nomads, a coworking space on Capitol Hill. Tim Detweiler is the Executive Director of the Museum of Northwest Art, and previously directed the James and Janie Washington Foundation. This is an edited transcription of that conversation.

The initial seed

JESS: One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this theme “Beginnings” was this fascination I have with how the early, initial seed of an idea gets started, and how it may actually be a very different process for a lot of people. Where does that seed start for each of you? Is it actually a memorable moment when you got an idea? Is there actually a moment in a major project you’ve done—probably what you’ve introduced yourself with today—in which you’ve really thought this is an idea you’re going to go with, and it was a Moment. You’re nodding, Sarah N. Would you like to start?

SARAH N: My response is that I tend to respond to things. So I don’t think of these things as fully formed ideas springing out of my head, Athena-like. It’s more that I see a problem space and I want to fix something and make it better for potential customers or people in general. I tend to get these ideas in responses, as opposed to thinking, “wow,  what am I going to make today?” So I tend to find something that I think is already broken and I want to help fix it.

Problem-solving

JESS: So it’s coming from a place of trying to solve a problem.

SARAH N: It is, and that’s very much my background, which is much more engineering science and problem focus, which is responsive, as opposed to generative. And I distinguish between those because, to me, pure science is generative, but engineering is more responsive.

HSU-KEN: So I can share the story of how our company got our idea. I started the company with my brother and two of his friends and we spent the first 18 months with no pay, brother’s basement, all that kind of stuff. Our process for coming up with ideas was a lot of trial and error, essentially. Our first project, we spent a lot of time trying to think if people would be very motivated by this. And that was just assumptions built on assumptions built on assumptions, right? And that went nowhere. Because you didn’t build out the initial assumptions, and then you built on top of that. So our first project, we spent nine months building this thing, and it came out and no one cared.

So for our next project, we decided to build one project every week. We limit ourselves to one week. We come up with the idea and then build it. You want to pare down the amount of investment we put into it, because it needs to be the minimum product that is to solve some very specific problem. If you try to solve too many problems, the customer gets confused.

So we did that for a while, and that’s where decide.com is right now, which is similar to faircast.com, which was a company that was bought by Microsoft, and they predict airline prices. Like, if you want to fly from Seattle to San Francisco, you should wait because next week fares will go down.

So the way that the idea started was that one of my cofounders—his girlfriend—kept going back to the same Nordstrom product page.  Every day she’d go to the same dress page, and so one day he goes, “Why do you keep going to that page?” And she said, “Well I’m waiting for the price to go down.” “Well ok, that’s an easy thing for me to build.” And so in a weekend—he hadn’t even told any of us—he built this thing where you could give it a URL and it would go back to that page and check the price, tell you when the price changes. And when the price changes, it’ll email it to you. So you didn’t have to do that.

It’s a really easy thing, any developer can write that. So we put that out to a few friends and they started adding stuff. And every day we have to go and collect this price, so one day we decided, “Ok, we have all these prices, whey don’t we graph them. How does this dress price change from day to day and time to time and all that kind of stuff?”

So what we noticed is that there’s a lot more volatility. So for Amazon, for example, their prices change a lot more often than Walmart. They’re much more sophisticated. Amazon changes their prices depending on the day of the week, the time of the day, and all this kind of stuff. Essentially because they’ve gotten so sophisticated at knowing when people buy stuff—like when people get off work, they typically go look at this, and early in the morning, all that kind of stuff.

So essentially, we looked at that and noticed there was a lot more volatility and people were getting taken advantage of a bit more, and so we asked ourselves if there was something we could do to help these people.

So farecast.com was a company started by a UW professor who we had actually taken classes from, so we kind of went to him with our data and said, “Hey, take a look at this, what do you think?” And that led us down this whole path of trying to predict those prices. Ideas for us are a lot of trial and error. They start off as small, simple things and you see where they lead. We just found it was too hard to predict, if we started with big ideas right off the bat, and we found that it’s easier to start with small ideas and see where they go.

On motivations 

JESS: And it still came from solving a problem. Will you speak to that, Sarah B?

SARAH B: I can try. I don’t really totally know what motivates me, other than that I got interested in something and the more I looked at it, the more I realized there was a bigger story behind that. To backtrack on that, I was initially interested in honeybees and then they were collapsing with colony collapse disorder and I wanted to do something in response to that and I wanted to do something bigger than my own backyard. And so I started thinking about what I could do within the city context, and wanted to do something of a large enough scale that it could be meaningful. The more I looked at the problem, I realized it wasn’t a problem of honeybees, and that supporting native pollinators was actually way more interesting and useful to supporting the honeybee issue. Because the honeybee is not from the United States, it’s really a part of the Big Ag system. So for me, the more I was reading about it, the more it seemed only natural to do something in response to it. So I guess it, too, solves a problem, but it’s more a problem that I kind of invented. It is certainly a problem that needs help, but the project that I’m working on is not actually trying to solve that problem: I have no illusions that what I am doing is solving the world pollination crisis. It’s more an educational—for me—investigation into what this problem actually is.

SARAH N: But could you frame your problem as people not knowing about this problem and so you want to raise awareness?

SARAH B: Sure, but I’m more interested in finding out and sharing that information. I guess that’s raising awareness. But it’s pretty self-motivated for me. I think because of my training as an artist.

SARAH N: Which leads to a conversation we were having beforehand, which is that artists don’t do this to meet a market need. Whereas business people often do this to meet a market need.

ZEPHYR: I think I’m doing both of those. It’s part of the focus of what I’m doing, actually. Because mine came from, well—banks don’t like restaurants, banks don’t like me. So that was a problem space. So how do I get enough money to open a restaurant, because that’s a lot of money. And then once you’re going, then I’m looking at the needs of how food issues are becoming such a big thing and I want my customers and clientele to be treated normally and not differently because their bodies react to what the world is doing to them. So part of our design is—no, our service model is—that you know what this person is like when they come in. Members have a swipe card that holds all the information that they want to put on it.

As soon as they come in, their card is there and it’s like, “Oh hey so and so is in. They’re GF (gluten-free), they’re vegan, they can’t have sulfites.” And I go, “Oh ok, no problem we’re just going to make them something, that’s no problem.”

It’s dealing with the service end of things and then having the business side because they can come into my place and be treated like a regular person. But then on an artistic end of things, I still want to be able to make real good food. And so far that’s happening.

Serving the community, serving the self

SUSIE:  I feel like there’s an interesting balance there between doing things to improve the lives of others and then things that are a little more self-serving. It’s a pretty common dual theme I see all the time. And it’s the same with Office Nomads.

I definitely have a moment that I remember, walking to my old job and thinking, “People would be happier and a lot less bitchy if they could just walk to work every day. More people would be happier if they didn’t have to get in their car every day, and I would like that to happen more, so how can I start building a neighborhood-based workspace so that people who can choose to work from anywhere could, instead of driving somewhere or sitting at home commenting on blogs all day, go in and have a chat—“

So I think that it was wanting to serve this need, recognizing that there is a need or a space that is intentional and dynamic in a way that is important for wanting to get work done. But for me I also wanted a better workspace. I wanted to commute by walk to work, I wanted to meet interesting people, cool people every day. I had a self-serving need. I wanted to make that space for me, but also make it for them. Does that make sense?

SARAH N: It makes perfect sense. It’s one of the things that founding a company did for me. I went in with a list of goals that I wanted, to improve my goals in this way and this way and this way. And so I got these things for me… it’s sort of your point about the banks. I didn’t have the resumé to let me in to learn those skills or play with the people that had those skills, and so I was going to do it myself.

TIM: I come at it from a slightly different place, because I’ve worked at all these museums, so I’m the guy who tries to make stuff happen in the museum—so it’s not always my idea. But when I took the job at the James and Janie Washington Foundation, it was just the artist’s idea ten, twenty years before. He brought a bunch of people from the community together to put it together and then they couldn’t figure out what to do. And so they brought me in as the first and only full time employee, as the director, and we didn’t have any money for anyone else, so it was basically just me and this house full of stuff. And this house, just over the in Central District, is just filled to the roof in every room, and his studio was the same way. And it was completely dysfunctional, there was nothing that could be done there.

I’m a fairly practical person, so I got started just getting University of Washington students in and volunteers and having them go through it carefully. But I knew that there was no way we could finish this huge archive and collections project and then start it, because we only had this little bit of money in the bank. I mean, it was a lot for one person to save their whole life looking towards this project, but there wasn’t much direction.

So by going through the collection, by going through these archives, I started getting to know this person, because I had never met him before. And he’s phenomenal, his story is remarkable. He’s very involved in civil rights in the Central District, in the Northwest, lived this remarkable life. His father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, he moved up here from the South. And all this great information started to build this big, big story, and the most important thing was to clear out enough space as soon as possible to get artists involved.

Because one of the vague ideas was to have an artist-in-residence space. So we brought the artist in as soon as we could, and we brought him in way before we should have, just because it seemed like the only way to get things started. I felt like as soon as the artist got in and got involved, things would change. And it literally was like a weird key into this door; the energy level went from mausoleum to living, breathing organism. It’s a place made for artists. He had created this space, built a studio over 45 years, and it just needed an artist in there to bring it to life. And as soon as that happened, everything went in a positive direction.

I was just the person trying to make it work. I thought of myself as a mechanic. I’d worked in all those big museums over the years—Museum of Flight, Washington State History Museum. Larger institutions that had budgets and money and people and staff. I’d always wanted to work for a smaller institution, where the things I had learned could kind of bring things in, but I was not prepared for this particular scale. But I worked very hard and many people worked very hard, and it took on a life of its own.

Is this a calling?

JENIFER: You know, one of the interesting things is that none of you talked about it in lofty terms like this, but you’ve all described your process in terms that are the definition of “calling.” There’s a theologian named Frederick Buechner who talks about calling as where your passion—your gift—meets the world’s need. Or the market’s need in this case, depending on what it is. So even though you didn’t go there, would you say that you’ve felt “called” in some way to do whatever it is you’re doing?

(all agree)

ZEPHYR: Oh yeah, absolutely. People ask me, “How did you do this, and how long has this taken you and when did you start?” And I say, “Well let me see. I was writing menus for my brother when I was 8 years old and then making him breakfast. Then I worked in pizza joints and then I did the stuff, and just growing and growing and growing… “ I’ve been doing this… 20 years? 40 years? 2 years? And then some kid gave me $10 and told me I should start a restaurant.

(all exclaim: “Ten bucks?”)

ZEPHYR: Yeah, my best friend gave me $10 two years ago, and he was 7 years old. When I got home, I found it in my bag and my sweetheart said, “Yeah, Pasqual said he had something for your restaurant.” So I called his dad and said, “I think your son gave me ten bucks.” And he said, “Yeah, we were just talking about it and he said he thinks you should open a restaurant.” And I said, “Well I can give it back.” And he said, “I don’t think you can.”

SARAH N: I think instead you have to open a restaurant.

ZEPHYR: He said, “You need to open a restaurant. He thinks you should, a lot of people think you should. So… Why don’t you use that.” And I still have that same $10 in that savings account, and it’s the first money that I put in and I named the place after him. And that’s how it started for this kid. And that’s two months salary for him at that point.

What does that look like to everyone else? And how can I get everyone else to come up with what would two months’ salary be? And that’s how we developed the whole membership status that opened the place.

When Plan A becomes Plan Z

JESS: So one of the things that some of you have talked about a little bit is something that I think is more common than people realize. Which is that when you’re looking at the finished version of something, you’re looking at plan B or plan C or plan Z. And this is something I see in the visual arts. If you see a completed piece in a museum, you may not know that wasn’t the artist’s first version or first intention. So that’s a question I wanted to ask all of you. Is that an important part of your process—having the experience of starting at Plan A and having it end up somewhere else? Or have you ever executed Plan A and it’s been right on the money how you imagined it?

ZEPHYR: Oh, this went way off. This was not how I thought it was going to be, but it turned into exactly what I wanted.

JESS: So maybe better?

ZEPHYR: Oh yeah, way better. And it’s still doing stuff. It’s still growing in the way it’s supposed to, but not how everything was drawn up to begin with. Even in the color schemes and stuff. It’s different. But it’s perfect.

HSU-KEN: So first we spent two years essentially building stuff that didn’t work. So I don’t know which plan this is. But I think that in startup culture people say that you want to fail fast. Whenever people ask me about starting stuff, I tell them to just start. And they always say they don’t have a good idea, but I tell them to just start, because whatever idea you start with is not going to be the idea you end up with, and you just need to get into the process and start working through things.

ZEPHYR: And momentum happens.

SARAH N: And this is like Steven King’s comment about writing: the first thing that writers really need to do is write. If you haven’t started, if you haven’t coded, if you haven’t found customers, if you haven’t done development to move forward what you’re trying to do, you’re not going to find out the places to fail or the challenges in it.

I think we went through—at Blue Gecko—four business models in the first twelve months. The pricing was changing, what we were doing was changing, whether or not it was going to be just work on other people’s hardware or were we going to do things for people on our own hardware, and all these things changed constantly. And honestly, over the twelve years we’ve been running this place, it continues to evolve. Even as we have a nice, solid core product, we’re finding other things like: oh, a customer want us to do this. Well, does this fit with our model? Do we want to do this or not want to? So it’s constantly evolving.

HSU-KEN: Actually, “business model” isn’t something we talked about when we started this project because it’s almost a waste of time—if no one uses this thing, it doesn’t matter what your business model is. So we started worrying about business model after people started using it.

SARAH N: See, my business was a service model, because I needed to understand what we were getting back, because we weren’t building IP (Intellectual Property).

When is the beginning over?

JESS: So my husband Mike had a question he wanted me to pose to the group. He wanted to know: when does the beginning end? When are you no longer in the beginning? Zephyr you’re talking about how it’s growing and it’s evolving and you’re always learning, so is there a defined “I am no longer at the start of this thing”?

ZEPHYR: I’m still counting days. I lost a dear chef at a restaurant in Ballard and I was talking to a therapist and she said it was like having a kid that’s not yours that is all of a sudden gone, and you have to go through some sort of grieving. It’s all pregnancy. It’s maternal and related, the incubator series even. All the kids. They’re all kids to me, and I’m still counting days. Right after it’s born, you’re counting months, they’re never a year and a half and it’s always eighteen months. You’re always counting what the days are, and I’m considering what the next project is going to be, because I have a timeline on that for when it’s going to be available. So I’m starting to think of the beginning of that, but I’m not done with the beginning of this.

JESS: So it’s like overlapping beginnings.

SUSIE:  I realized I was not in the beginning phase anymore when I could talk about what I was doing.  I mean when I could explain it without sounding like a total jackass or going on for twenty minutes.

SARAH N: When you opened Office Nomads, you were building a space that didn’t exist. So the concept of coworking didn’t exist. So once coworking became a term, it was no longer a beginning because you no longer had to explain what coworking meant.

SUSIE:  It was a lot of education. Even now I can say “Do you know what coworking is?” but that doesn’t block my ability to get people to understand.

SARAH N: I’m of two minds on this. When the language changes, you are no longer at the beginning. So much like you guys with coworking, I had my first five years at Blue Gecko explaining what remote DBA (Remote Database Administration) was and how it could possibly happen. And we were challenged again and again with people saying, “There’s no way you could do that for us.” And we would say, “No, we really can.” And after about five years we said “We do remote DBA,” and they said, “OK, great.” It had became monetized, and now it’s about price. Less a startup at this point.

But my second opinion is that if it’s yours, it’s always the beginning, because you’re always tuning it, you’re always changing it. You’re always trying to make it better, it’s always an evolution. So if it’s yours, it’s always the beginning.

I cut my teeth at Amazon[.com] in 1997. And one of the things that Jeff Bezos said every day at Amazon was that it’s day one, it’s day one, it’s still day one. And that went on for years. I don’t know if they still say that today.

But I know that by the time I left, three and a half years into my tenure there, five years into the company, he was still saying it’s day one.  And as people were leaving, one of the alumni groups that formed around it registered the domain name “day two.” Which was pretty fun because we got really tired of “It’s still day one.” We wanted to say, “Dude, your name is everywhere, you don’t have to do it quite that way anymore.” But that’s in part why he’s so successful.

HSU-KEN: I think the overlapping beginnings is something that’s really resonated with me. I remember when we started working on projects and I thought, “Ok, this is kind of new beginnings,” and then I quit my job and that was a new beginning, and then we got our first round of funding and that was a new beginning, and then we got an office and I went to work everyday and that was new. And people join in the journey at various points and they say, “Ok, this is new, we’re just starting stuff,” and I say, “Well, I’ve been doing this—“

ZEPHYR: It gets almost to a disappointing point. Like, goddamit it, when do I get to have my first of something that’s actually a big deal? Like opening day is this—we actually had two opening days, and then a grand opening—

SARAH B: You’re spreading that beginning out.

JESS: So Sarah B:, what are some benchmarks for you in this project, because you said—seven years?—you’ve been working on this?

SARAH B: Four. Phew! Seven would be too many.

JESS: So have there been benchmarks for you along the way?

SARAH B: Yeah. It’s funny. I’m having a bit of a hard time responding to these questions, because what I’m doing is fairly different than what everyone else is doing in a way. Because it’s not a business, it’s not a company. And I think I’ve had more benchmarks than I can count. I had no experience whatsoever in doing any of the things that I’ve been doing. I wasn’t a gardener. I wasn’t an urban planner. I knew nothing about pollinators. And yet I imagined something that would include as many people as possible that would educate me along the way.

So I really wanted to work with scientists, I really wanted to work with botanists, I wanted to work with graphic designers. So I’ve been able to work with all those people in a way, which has been delightful, but each time I do it’s a new benchmark. I have no idea what I’m doing, and then they educate me and I can change my project.

For instance right now I’m working with some University of Washington etymologists, and they’re going to start monitoring my project. And they’re also going to be educating me about what to plant in these projects. And they were congratulating me on starting before I knew what I was doing. But inherently the whole project is going to shift to accommodate the life cycle of these insects. And it’s complicated, because sometimes they use one plant for something, and another plant for something else. If they’re not both there, they won’t come. And that’s something I didn’t know when I started. And so that’s huge for me—that’s four years in, I’m finally learning enough to work with at this stage that I can potentially start planning that in with the garden designer. So there are things like that, and then working with the homeowners and getting them on board is a whole other benchmark.

JESS: Can you say what that part of it is?

SARAH B: They don’t care about this project at all, really. So it’s kind of funny… I mean, sure some of them do. Some of them are utterly delighted. So I basically go and I talk each homeowner in to taking a planting strip instead of grass. And there are various stages with that. They’re either very indifferent or very excited and they want to garden it until the cows come home, or they leave it and then we have to get our volunteers to take care of it… So that’s what that is. Is that what you meant?

JESS: Yeah, just so everyone knew what the context was.

SARAH B: I guess I could have explained more…

JESS: I think we’re all sort of learning as we go here.

SARAH N: I think it’s interesting that you say that the etymologists were offering you congratulations for starting something before you knew what you were doing.

SARAH B: Right.

Must-haves for starting something and maintaining momentum

SARAH N: I think if anyone realized what it took to start something like this, they’d never do it. They’d never start, they’d be too afraid. So not knowing, I think, is really inherent—

SARAH B: It’s been SO helpful.

SARAH N: My utter ignorance on all sorts of things “business” actually helped me believe that I could do this thing. If I had any idea about the complexities of B&O (Business and Occupation) taxes, I’d have never wanted to start. But I think that ignorance and that drive are two things that you kind of need. You have to be able to accept that you’re blind in some spaces, and sometimes even know that they’re there, but be able to work around them or be able to accept help or take other people in order to bring on the expertise you don’t have.

SARAH B: I don’t think I would have been doing this project. I’ve worked with such amazing people. It just wouldn’t have been possible without that. And I’d like to say that enthusiasm goes a long way. I’m at least highly enthusiastic about what I’m doing.

JESS: That leads into one of my questions: what are the key elements that keep you going, from deciding that you’re going to go with this idea to actually producing it, working on it, reaching the launch, or whatever your benchmark or goal is? There’s this huge growth and development process that happens and we have lots of opportunities to quit. Things that I’ve heard: ignorance, drive, enthusiasm… What are the other things that are really critical?

ZEPHYR: Super support from the community.

SARAH N: Collaboration in every vector, whether it’s community or your own personal home, an environment of support, whether it’s team members or cofounders, knowing and being able to find the cohort that can support you in this potential boondoggle, and being able then to draw support from them—I know a lot of entrepreneurs who will find themselves wrapped up and they don’t know this thing and that’s why I say you have to be able to accept help.

To compete or not to compete…

JENIFER: Is there something unique to startup culture that leads to the fact that that not one of you has said anything like the word “competition”? The drive to compete?

SARAH B: There’s not a lot of competition in what I do.

ZEPHYR: I’m trying to start a place that doesn’t have to deal with competition. One of the things that’s unique about my restaurant is that it’s a community supported restaurant, but it’s also a community restaurant, so I invite other chefs in on the nights that I am closed to have the place for an evening.

HSU-KEN: I think for us, competition is not a strong enough motivation for all the stuff that we’re having to deal with. For us, motivation comes in two forms. For one, we do it for the team and the cofounders. These are the guys on your team, and they stuck around and stuff, so you do it for them. It’s very hard to start companies by yourselves, and there are times you have a really bad day and have to pick each other up. And the second part is, when you’re building a product, competition is the wrong thing to focus on. You need to focus on the users, what you’re bringing to them, and let those guys do it however they think is the best way to do it. I think focusing on the competition is not a strong enough motivator to get you through the tough stuff.

SUSIE: I agree. I also think that going back to motivations, on whatever it is that gets you through, there’s an interesting balance between being really open about everything, being open to new ideas and creativity and open to input. And we were talking about the myriad of ideas that get thrown at you when you’re starting—you know what you should do, you know what you could do, have you ever thought about… There’s a balance between being open to all those ideas and being stubborn, on the other hand, and really sticking to what you are and what your goals are and what your values are, and I think that’s a constant juggle that those two elements side by side are absolutely critical to being able to push through no matter what.

TIM: With the James Washington Foundation, I really had my head down in the world for like two years with students coming in, and it was all inside the building. And as soon as we brought an artist in and had the change of opening the space to the community—and that was the city and the neighborhood and the art community and the African American community. And that made all the difference. Inviting the community in. And I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it because it was a crazy, crazy mess and it was totally insane, but having people getting in there early when we really weren’t ready, weren’t ready at all. You’d never open a business like that, it would just be insane.

Every artist that came through, they were living in the space and working in it for a month at a time. And then their communities would come in, and so one after another, the artists brought their friends and their collectors, and then to make it as friendly as possible. Because museums, arts organizations, can be very unfriendly—people can feel intimidated to walk into a museum, and we talk about it all the time. But this was a house. It was somebody’s house, somebody’s story. It was a part of the neighborhood and it went back to the 40’s. And just to get that story out.

And one of my favorite things was these summer openings, where artists would just show what they were working on. It didn’t have to be finished, it didn’t have to be anything, but they brought their friends and we brought art people and it just kept on growing. And we brought in the friend of one of the artists to spin records on the lawn. And Mr. Washington had these incredible 1940’s jazz and big band and Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin and he was so careful to clean everything—so it was different than most museums were where you can’t touch things, but we really felt that things had to be used, had to be felt and used again. Not just be put in a case. So that was a nice symbol of the whole thing working, when we could use the stuff that Mr. and Mrs. Washington left behind. Because a record on a wall doesn’t mean anything. If it’s not playing, it doesn’t live. So that became a symbol for the place and that’s what motivated me to take it one more year.

Start before you’re ready.

SARAH N: It’s interesting bringing up bringing in the public before you’re ready, because I think that’s something that’s becoming more common. I heard someone describe where we are now as a “post perfect society” where we tweet about how we wrecked our car on the way to work. You wouldn’t tell your peers or someone you were trying to impress that, but you’re tweeting about it. So we’re seeing more and more companies putting out products with “Beta” on it. “Hey, here’s something we’ve been working on, play with it. Let us know what you think.” And communities are becoming more comfortable with being a more active and integrated part of improving a product or a community or whatever a company puts in front of them.

ZEPHYR: We entirely did that. It was an open door policy for the entire building of it. Members would come in and I could point at every table and chair and board, every nail and chip of paint and tell you who did it. And people would become members and then they’d also come in for work parties and help build the place.

SUSIE: People support what they helped to create. That’s how it has to work. If you feel like you’ve been a part of something, you’re going to support it for a long time. We had pretty much the opposite experience to you opening that space that was so cluttered.  We were 5,000 feet of dead, empty office territory. But we each had other jobs at the time, so we would take turns watching the space, and it was often just one of us in the space for hours at a time and it was just empty and terrifying and we were afraid to go the bathroom in case someone walked in at just that time.

TIM: My Board was not very happy about that. If I could have closed the place down for five years and totally, in the typical museum way, got it all taken care of and put away and labeled and catalogued—but there was no way to even do it. So in a way I was motivated by the circumstances. And I was terrified of that, actually. People would come in and they would be afraid for me. They would be like, “Why would anyone take this job?” But every so often someone would come and say, “Oh I can see…” And I clung to those because they could see the vision and the importance of it.

SARAH N: You mention your Board not being happy about it. Can I draw a very stereotypical conclusion that they were much older?

TIM: They were. And they were great, and one of the other things about that particular place, which is not always true, certainly not with museums that were founded 150 years ago. They were all picked by James Washington Jr., so the founder had picked them. So they were kind of terrified that they would make the wrong move, and I would have to go in and say we have to make a move. A move. We have to start small.

It was also called the James and Janie Washington Foundation. And “Foundation” sounded big, with columns and stuff. This was like a little house in the Central District. This is not a Foundation—this is a grass roots movement. It’s nothing right now. It’s an old house with stuff in it. But if we get people in and start getting people involved—and I think we could have even started that earlier, should have. But when it started happening, I could see how it was starting to become a success. Mostly because of the efforts and interests of other people.

And I started to feel like Mr. Washington’s nephew. I was literally going through his stuff. When we finally made it to the washing room, I didn’t even know there was a dryer there. His underwear and socks were still there from the last time. Anyways, that’s kind of where we started. And it never really looked like much, even when I left five and a half years later. If you came in at the end of it, you’d think this place is really messy and really unorganized. And you really should have seen it five years ago. And it’s because people started coming in early that people really knew how far we had come, how much progress we had made.

HSU-KEN: You were just talking about wishing you had started earlier. I think that every project I ever started on, I wish I had put it out earlier. Because you could work on a project for like three more months, but getting it out there and working on it three months after you get it out there—you just get so much more value out of it.

The founder of LinkedIn, Reed Hoffman, said something that always stuck with me. “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version you put out, you waited too long.” You should just get over your embarrassment. You’re just going to get so much better so much quicker.

TIM: Well that’s not the way my parents and that era and whole generation thought. When you opened a restaurant, for example, you had to have everything figured out.

ZEPHYR: Oh yeah, you get judged on everything. Every little thing. I hope that I see it more than everyone else, but they’re sitting at the tables yelping already.

JESS: Do you think that’s a generational thing?

TIM: I think it’s a new thing. People now write books and put chapters out on the web as they’re going? That’s insane! No one would have ever done that. Ever. And it does make the work better because you get back more comments and interest and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that breeds.

Yelpification 

JENIFER: But it’s hugely anxiety producing. In the academy for example, in higher education, this open forum, open source, open access publishing by chapter, everyone to critique, not going through publishers, not going through traditional vetting processes… It’s a game changer and everyone knows it.

SARAH N: There’s a book I’m reading right now called Status Anxiety, which actually says, the thesis is pretty much since we were no longer ordained by God to be nobility or serfs, we’ve been screwed and it’s been all about anxiety since then. Because you can be better, you can grow into something, you can build something, you can write it, you could be that famous author, so why aren’t you? Pretty much when you’re a serf and what you’ve got to do is work, you didn’t have to worry about whether or not you could ever become nobility, because you just couldn’t.

JENIFER: It’s not only that you could be better, but that you’re exhorted to be better by Yelp, with constant feedback all the time.

SARAH N: But that’s what’s the most interesting, both positive and negative, about the constant feedback of the web. And the modern age being so much faster and so much more communicative. Because you can have collaboration where you might not have wanted any, and you can have commentary and published commentary on things you didn’t really think someone should talk about yet. And so it makes it a much more transparent building of any organization or company or concept at this point, I think.

SUSIE:  But it is more casual. That seems to be the theme there. It doesn’t have to be white linen cloths and just the right everything when you get started. I think that when it comes down to it—and I heard this piece on NPR a little while ago that was talking about the trend in the restaurant industry for more casual dining environments where food is clearly the focus—making the food look fancy is not the focus, the food just being really high quality is the focus. That doesn’t mean you have to wear a suit and tie when you walk in, but it does mean you can have a wonderful dining experience going through all these different places. And that’s a trend you notice in terms of products and things like coworking. Our experience, too, is that people aren’t looking for perfection, they’re just looking for the quality of the product or experience to be really high, but without the fanfare behind it.

SARAH B: I think you could look at the answer here being they’ve never been quite as perfect as they thought they were or wanted them to be. So even with the 1950’s whitewash on everything, we’re now saying no—that doesn’t have to be that way, or we don’t even have to delude ourselves that it IS that way. Instead it’s “Here’s where we are, let’s see if we can make it better.”

JENIFER: It’s the whole Wizard of Oz thing. The curtain’s been pulled back. There’s no point in pretending—

TIM: Well museums are really struggling with this.  I hear it in the background conversation all the time. When you walk into a museum exhibit, even if they’re pulling the ladders and all the paint into the elevator as they’re speaking out in front, when you walk in, it looks done. When I would tell friends—you know, I grew up with farmers and mechanics, and a museum job was pretty far off. And they would ask, “What do you do at the museum? Are you a security guard? Are you the person who takes tickets?” Because they had no idea that there was anything even happening there. So during one of our exhibits I took a timelapse video. And it felt a little self indulgent, but I wanted people to see all the activity. You could see people running around. Well, we weren’t running, but it looked like we were running—setting up ladders and doing the lighting and setting up stuff. And people were amazed at how much work goes into it. Because when you go it, it looks done, it looks like it could have been finished 100 years ago by elves or whatever.

JENIFER: Did everyone see the SuttonBeresCuller show at Cornish? What they did was sort of brilliant. The exhibit was work in progress, so every day it was different. They’re building something and people come in and one day it looks like this and the other day it looks like this, and they only had the materials they had, so at the end they were dismantling it and tacking it back onto the front. And people did not know what to do. They would come in and say, “Well, I came for the closing show, but it’s gone.” And it was like, “Riiiiiiight, it’s in progress.” And they would say, “Well this is a gallery, isn’t it?”

TIM: Yeah, that does not fit into the ideas that people have of a gallery.

Pride of ownership

SUSIE:  It’s interesting in terms of how you break down what you’re building. Jacob (Office Nomads co-founder Jacob Sayles) and I are always talking about these little watershed moments, these lightbulb moments where you realize that you created something and that you’re then responsible for it. Walking up the stairs into our space, we noticed a dirty Band-Aid and your experience of that normally is to go, “Ew, gross, someone should pick that up.” But in this case you pause and realize, “Oh, wait. That’s me. Actually I have to pick that up.” You’re used to that in your own apartment, your own home, your own little world, but when your own little world changes and it creates a space, then I think you can draw that conclusion when you’re walking through your website, though your product site… And when I look at other businesses, I think I notice the little things that they’ve put a lot of work into, the things that another person just out consuming might not notice. It’s been an interesting change in perception.

JESS: So it’s the sense of ownership.

SUSIE:  Or responsibility. I definitely notice things. I love walking by Hot Mama’s Pizza in the morning and watching them get ready. It’s my favorite thing to just say hi to them in the morning, and they say hi to me and I notice all the little things they do. Because I see them doing it every morning. It’s a different way of looking at this whole experience that I would have never had. Before I would have just walked by and thought, “Oh, they’re not open yet.”

Startups in the Northwest: humility as liability?

JESS: So Tim, you and I had talked a little but about this Northwest history of makers and people, so I wanted to get your opinion on that again today with the Northwest spirit of being entrepreneurial and starting things.  And you had expressed an opinion about how much we really know about certain founders and starters, and whether or not we might be a particularly modest community—

TIM: OK, well I’m on this soapbox, because I’m the director of the Museum of Northwest Art, so a lot of times I’m talking about how we’re not recognizing our own artists. Jimi Hendrix has a crappy bronze statue on Broadway. And that’s it. We don’t own our own artists, our own people—

Zephyr: Jimi Hendrix Park. It’s coming up.

TIM: Well, thank God. But it’s still coming up, and that’s the problem. I know some of the people who are involved with this. And I’m like, “Please do this. Please have a giant broken guitar as the entrance to the park, because we need something. There needs to be some recognition.” Our artists, it’s especially true, even going back to Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, the artists who we feel are our big four, are because of one article in 1954 in Life Magazine. We’re still dwelling on that, because it was outside recognition. But all those artists basically laughed and were pissed off and ended up living somewhere else because they didn’t feel like they were getting any support. And we have a lot of support for young artists in Seattle. It’s easier to talk to museum directors and gallery people compared to bigger cities, but once you get to a certain point, it just cuts off, and I’ve seen so many artists have to leave because there’s just no support beyond a certain point. And there are big collectors that are buying stuff, but they’re going to New York. Not that you can’t buy stuff from other places, but…

I’m from the East Coast, I’m from Pennsylvania. And there, if you had one half-assed patriot that grew up in this house in your small town, then that was the best thing in the world! There would be a sign, there would be a museum. And here, I’d love to work with a sociologist or a psychologist and try to figure out what is the matter with our Northwest psyche so I can try to fix it. We should all go to counseling. We should appreciate the people that we have here. Because there are spectacular people. And I know too many artists who have gone away to New York or back to LA or Boston or whatever and then they become huge. And that’s a brain drain. That’s a creative drain we just haven’t taken advantage of. Or haven’t appreciated.

SARAH N: We have a similar problem in the technology startup community. We are considered—so there’s Silicon Valley, there’s Silicon Alley, there’s Silicon Forest—which is Portland. And we’re the far end of the Virgin America flight from the valley. We don’t have an identifiable culture. There’s a bunch of people in the community working on that, but it is assumed that if you get funded, you move your company to the Valley. We are not respected as our own community of startup-ers here. So it’s an interesting problem and I’m curious about your identifying it as having to do with the modesty or acculturation of this area.

JENIFER: I spent 12 years in Minnesota before I came here, and now I’m going to make a gross generalization, but I think it’s in part about the immigrant communities and the native communities that were in both those places, that were Scandinavian, which are sort of culturally reticent kind of folks. And then you bump those up against native cultures who are also self-effacing. You come up with a weird combination of people who…

SARAH N: Government by consensus and apologetic success.

SARAH B: I have to agree with you on that; I’m both a native and Dutch.

But I do want to speak to the art community. I’ve started a couple of things. I started a gallery a couple of years ago in response to the fact that I wasn’t getting enough work. I wanted to be able to work in galleries but there were only about three galleries in town that I wanted to work for and I volunteered for them because I just couldn’t get the work. And I ended up starting my own gallery because I didn’t know what else to do.

And I feel like that is what I have done over and over again in Seattle. And I’ve lived a fair amount—I lived in San Francisco and New York, where I found it much easier to do projects.

SUSIE:  Going back to one thing we talked about earlier with how no one has mentioned competition, I think it’s an interesting topic to blend with what we’re talking about now, with this sort of Northwest humility and big emphasis on collaboration, which is definitely a huge part of what we’re about at Office Nomads. I remember I just watched that Pearl Jam 20—their documentary? They have this brief moment where they’re talking about when they were just starting up and all the grunge bands were playing with each other and switching band members, and a friend of theirs had come in from New York and was like, “You talk to them? You actually help each other? This is crazy.” So it was very much the New York scene is “We rip each other’s posters down and pee on them.” And it was this little moment for me that this isn’t just something that’s happening now, it’s something that’s been happening for a long time and there’s this desire to work together and collaborate and I don’t know if this is something that is Northwest.

SUSIE: I’m fascinated with how this butts up against the fact that we can’t take enough credit—

ZEPHYR: Yeah, is it part of our self-effacement to say that we’re going to collaborate?

JESS: Tim, I wanted to ask you about Bill Boeing because you put together an exhibit at the Museum of Flight.

TIM Yeah, I used to be a curator—well, I put exhibits together, not really a curator. I did the work of a curator without the pay. So I was given this project which seemed interesting—I’m not really an airplane person, it’s more about people for me—to look at the early Boeing story, and not look at it as a company, but as who were the people. So I figured I’d open a few books and I would start reading and after three or four months would have it all worked out. Well, there aren’t any books. There’s not a single book. And Bill Boeing was very, very private. They didn’t roll out the planes in the beginning with any big fanfare. It was just his business. When the newspaper reporters would ask about it, he would just say, “This is just my thing, my hobby.” But they did have huge plans. They made up this whole company on paper in 1960 and started fulfilling it.

Just talking a little bit about those early days, everyone was building airplanes, but the thing that really made or broke an airline company in those days was whether the founder had made it and test flown it had died in a giant fiery crash. He did fly his own planes, but he brought in really talented people right away. Roy McMakin and I were talking about the difference between art and commerce—Starbucks and things like that—and his point was that artists who get too big get dismissed in some ways. And you can only have a few of them in this community, like one of each. But industry, that’s really where you start to get recognition, entrepreneurial spirit and things like that.

But our artists? Like Chuck Close, he grew up in Everett, he went to University of Washington, he left here late in his life. And nobody knows this, which is bizarre. And he brought Alden Mason with him to New York City to show his work, and it was one of the biggest things to ever happen to Alden Mason. And he talks about that time as such an important time, but we don’t claim that. We don’t claim that. It’s ridiculous.

Everyone’s like, oh…. That’s so sad.

ZEPHYR: It’s funny. I’m trying to maintain humility when I’m so proud of what I’ve built. But I really want someone national to come and talk to me. I want everybody to know that this is a possible thing, that I created a different model. So I think it is important to get that out there. But I’m also trying to be like, “It’s ok, I did a cool thing.”

TIM: Well, if you can do both, that’s the best. Because you have that humility to have that collaboration to have people come in early on and all that stuff, but then you’re proud of what you all did together.

ZEPHYR: In the chef community, no one wants to get their feathers ruffled, everyone wants to be the greatest, we’re all just trying to see how far we can piss in the kitchen.  But we’re all just learning and doing the same basic stuff.

SARAH N: It’s one thing to say I want this thing to be recognized because it’s a good thing—

ZEPHYR: Yeah I’m not looking for myself to be praised. I want to showcase the people that I’ve brought in, showcase the product that I’ve created. And hey, you know, my name looks good in the papers, so that’s cool, too.

HSU-KEN: I have maybe a different take on it. I grew up in the Northwest. I grew up in Portland and came up here to go to school, and I have a cousin who has his own startup down in San Francisco. And he and I always talk about what it’s like here and what it’s like there and stuff. And you guys are talking about recognition. For a long time we talked about having the company down there, but it’s not so much for the recognition part, the thing that’s odd to me is that here, when socially people ask you what you do and you say you work at a startup, it’s like they don’t meet a lot of people like that so they don’t know…

But when I go down there and we’re hanging out with [my cousin’s] friends, and they’re all “Oh, what do you do? Oh that’s cool, that guy started this company and that guy started this company.” And that’s just normal, and there’s something about that that I like. And I feel like more stuff happens down there just because everyone knows someone who has done it, so it doesn’t seem like this insurmountable thing. Like I’ve never met anyone who started a company, how do you even do that?

And I think for him there’s a lot of companies in Silicon Valley that are really successful—sell for a lot of money, change the world, all that sort of stuff. And I think a lot of times those companies come out of San Francisco because they’re only one or two degrees of separation away from that guy at Google or something like that, someone who just did something big. So you don’t feel that far away from that, and you feel like you can go for bigger stuff.

SARAH N: It feels possible.

HSU-KEN: it feels possible. His buddy—he texted me the other day and said that when YouTube was started, they wanted him to be one of the original investors in it. And he turned it down, didn’t want to go in for all that stuff. But for him, those were just guys in his social group. They did this amazing thing. That could have been him, that was so close to him. And that motivates him. He stays later at night because he feels he’s so close.

Whereas here in Seattle, you don’t hear about it as much, even though we have some of those guys. I mean, the largest software company in the planet is here. We’ve got Amazon, we’ve got things like that. But for whatever reason, you just don’t feel like… You don’t feel like Bill Gates is in my sphere. I’m not that close to that. But having the proximity to some of that success or ambition makes it seem more attainable.

SARAH N: :It always causes more anxiety because you’re not achieving it.

HSU-KEN: But I think that’s a key personality thing—with some people it causes them stress, but then the really good entrepreneurs, it motivates them.

(all agree)

Finding one’s tribe

SUSIE: That’s been one of the coolest parts about coworking, it’s that you’re just around people who are doing neat things all the time. And whether it’s their thing or another thing that someone else is working on. That’s one thing I really love about it—it feels like a mini version of what you experience in Silicon Valley. It’s like, “Oh wow, I had no idea—“

HSU-KEN: I’m not the only guy that doing that.

SUSIE: “You do deep sea explorations. How did I not know that?”

Back to the Big Question

JESS: Is there anyone not sitting at the table that wants to ask a question? I want to make sure there’s an opportunity for that. And while you’re all thinking, I want to remind you of our theme, which is why do we make things. I’d love to hear if anyone wants to directly respond to that question.

HSU-KEN: I think that for the making things part, for me personally, it’s less about the product. For me it was—the reason we started the company was because people spend so much time at their jobs. And this is where we started, we were all working at companies, we were spending ten hours a day at our jobs, which is more time than we were spending with our families and all that kind of stuff. So it’s like, “Gosh, we better damn well like what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with.”

And for us, we worked for these companies and we didn’t agree with how they did business or the people we worked for or all this kind of stuff. So it just seemed to us that the only way to make it the way we wanted it to be was to start our own company. Which was naïve, you don’t do that kind of stuff and whatnot… But that was primarily the reason.

For us. we wanted to be able to build something that was useful, just so we could have this company where people liked coming to work and did cool stuff and the company ran in the way we felt it should.

The reason we make stuff is more about we want to make this company that people want to work at and less about the thing the company makes. And I think the good side effect is that if you have a really great company—behind most great products there’s a really great company, where people really like going to work there. So I think if you focus on the people that work for you and they’re really happy and doing great work, then the product really benefits from that.

TIM: I was just going to say I really miss making things, because I came up through the museum. I mean I literally started as a security guard and worked my way up through the exhibits department, then made exhibits, the whole project manager and kind of worked my way up. Like the newsboy in the news room in a big company.

But it used to be like every day putting an exhibit together, you’re painting walls, you’re building mounts for artifacts, you’re handling stuff, moving stuff around. And now it’s a weird thing when you go from that thing you really do love to the administrative position, where you’re trying to make things happen. So you’re putting everything in place so those things can get done and there’s still great joy in that.

I’m an artist, too, and I love to make my own art, but at the Foundation I was making a place where other people could make that art. And there’s a great satisfaction in that, but you have to let some of that other making stuff—well for me, in my particular situation—go, and just focus on the good things that are coming out of you doing your job. And there’s no time for me to make anything anymore.

So we make maybe one piece of artwork now a year that goes to an auction, like Pratt Fine Arts Center or Pilchuck or whatever, and that’s a little satisfying, but… That’s a weird thing where you get to that point where stuff that you loved about your startup becomes other people’s work and you’re just telling them, “This is how we’re going to structure that.” And you have to grow to love that, too, but it’s hard sometimes.

JESS: There’s been a lot of talk about community interaction and collaborating and that sort of thing. And in my work here at The Project Room, I’ve surveyed a lot of people about why do we make things, and an answer I’ve gotten more than once is because people want to find their community. People are looking to find where their people are, and making things is how they get there.

(all agree)

SARAH N: Well the tools you use to make something help choose the cohort as well. So for me, startups are an obvious fit, because when I actually started at Amazon years back, I left grad school to join them. And the idea, and what solidified it for me, was books and computers—really what more do I need? So you have a super smart cohort of people who are really excited about doing something with these tools. And so you’re building a community that has a common basis, and I think that is for me, at least, why I make things. Making the thing is secondary to the making, and the making is about finding the community.

ZEPHYR: This is probably a little corny, but I think I’m not trying to make a thing, I’m trying to make a difference. I’m trying to put out a different model and a different product. I mean, there are a lot of great restaurants around the city, but this one was built completely differently. I don’t think I did one thing normal.

JESS: But there was something driving you to do that.

ZEPHYR: There was definitely something, yeah. This culmination from everything that’s been in my life and every single space that I’ve been in so far. Yeah. Just trying to build something that’s different and in a different way. Because the original model doesn’t work for everyone.

HSU-KEN: I think first the community part for us—there are like 30 people at the company now, which is just mind-blowing to me. We kind of created our own community. You hire like-minded people and you set up this culture, so we kind of created our own community. So in terms of finding my community, it’s been the best way for me to meet people. I think with startups you’ll find a lot that you do a lot of things outside the startup because you spend so much time together. Like we all went and played basketball…

SARAH B: I land in the same camp. I basically invented something I was thinking about in order to be able to do it. I had to clarify the problem and then find all the ways to make it physical in the world. But I would say that personally, as an artist, my motivation is really just trying to understand my world. That really is the fundamental for me. That gets me started.

For me, the reason I started the pollinator pathway was thinking about systems, was thinking about farming systems, thinking about the rise of cities and 50% of the human population is now living in urban areas. And thinking about that just in terms of a land pattern issue or occurrence was really interesting to me, and I wanted to do something that would allow me to think about that or understand the ways we’ve taken over the planet. And do something very small in response to that, but that could pivot around that question or consideration.

And there’ve been very few opportunities in my life where I get to think about these bigger systems, and so I had to invent something that allows me to think about that every day. And it’s not much more than that, other than that I get to make something out of that. You know, I can’t do that in a job. So I basically invented a job for myself where I could think about that.

JESS: As did everybody at the table!

SARAH B: Right, as I’m not able to make money out of it. I don’t have that outside motivation. I mean, I am grant funded, so it also provides funding. It’s not without money. But I am really interested in hearing all of you guys, because there’s this success built into what you’re doing. You can either fail or succeed, and I don’t have that. I really just invent or don’t invent. I mean, I could call myself successful when I finally finish this project with all 60 gardens in place, sure. I don’t actually intend to do that. I intend to drop this project before this. I don’t want to keep doing this. I want an organization to take over and take care of it. I really just wanted to create the idea and that’s enough for me, so that’s my end point. But it’s really interesting to hear all of you, because there’s a future in what you’re doing that’s not in mine.

SARAH N: Well, I think it’s not uncommon for startup founders to have the future plan wherein they have the magical exit that they sell it to someone or they don’t have to complete or don’t even intend to. I mean, many founders intend to maintain an organization and potentially grow it, but there has been a reward model set up that flipping a company to a bigger company is a better success, or is a Silicon Valley driven definition of success at the very least.

So that’s something I’ve been struggling with for twelve years of running Blue Gecko—I actually got pretty tired of it after a while. And I stopped working there day to day a year, year and a half ago. And now we’re debating, do we continue to keep it, do we sell it, do we do something different? So. There’s this big question of do you want to? The people who start things don’t tend to want to maintain them.

(all agree)

JESS: Well, I think it’s about time to wrap up. Thanks everybody so much, this is very informative and inspiring and I’m just delighted you’re all here. This has been really, really wonderful. Thank you, everybody, thank you, thank you.

SARAH N: Your table is a rectangle. It’s not a round.

This event took place in The Project Room on October 3, 2011. To read more about it, click here.

Saying Goodbye to Failure/Hello to the next Big Question

By Jess Van Nostrand
Posted on February 27th

“… The split second when I know what is right, but choose not to heed that truth: that is failure. ”
–Barbara Earl Thomas

“Fear is a good thing for me.”
—Carrie Akre

“When important things happened in my life, I was very uncomfortable.”
–Tom Kundig*

I am often asked how I select the Big Questions and the related topics for each TPR programming series. It sounds like I’m joking when I respond, “These are the things that keep me up at night.” Sadly, this is true. Happily, I have a place to work through these things. Using The Project Room as my therapist to identify and address what I can’t understand, I have created topics that stimulate me (in either a positive or negative way), and which I hope carry some meaning for others as well. This should be good news for my husband who does not always want the job of Jess’ therapist, but he is still very much needed- sorry dear! I realize this is a very self-centered way of explaining what drives the organization but, like everything at TPR, it’s a partly intellectual/partly personal endeavor.

In the case of the Failure series, I was thinking through all of the interesting things that were said during the previous Solutions topic. My thinking went something like this: In order to seek a solution, you need a problem. And, in order to tackle an especially complicated problem, you need to take a risk of some kind. “Risk” didn’t get me very excited, probably because I find it a very safe word creatively, one that we can all feel good about making use of regardless of the outcome. It feels good to say to someone else, “Wow, that was really risky” as in “Glad I’m not you!” So, I was not losing sleep over that. But what got my nerves in a jumble was the idea of what lives on the other side of that risk: failure. How close we live to it, how we don’t like talking about it, and maybe- just maybe- how essential it is to making something and to simply being a person.

Bringing it back to ME again, I wonder where the future of TPR lies and how it can sustain itself- what’s my definition of failure for this organization? That cost me at least a few night’s decent sleep right there. So, in keeping with my format, I decided to dedicate some time to Failure and see what others think.

In order to inform the conversations— and bring some inspiration to this potentially dreary topic—I created the series “Successful People Talking About Failure.” I didn’t want to kick anyone who might already be down, so to speak (“Sorry your career tanked and no one knows who you are- would you like to be featured in a series called “failure?”) These lively presentations featured a diverse group of people sharing their different points of view, and ended with many people telling me they wanted it to continue because it was the TPR topic they most connected with personally. The humor in this is not lost on me: the people have requested more failure! I agree- it was great fun and needs to make a comeback, so look for an encore presentation in the future…

You can read more about what occurred in Off Paper Editor Tessa Hulls’ perceptive response, A Failed Essay on Failure.

It has been nearly two years since we began the main theme “Why Do We Make Things?” I had originally created the Big Question structure to allow for a theme to be explored in depth, something I found lacking in my curatorial practice. As I learned, however, “nearly two years” is not long enough for something this interesting. This is why there are scholars who have devoted their careers to the work of one person, or one body of work, for example. Overall, I was surprised by how much substantial programming grew out of this theme and have come to understand that, if you have a good idea, you can make it last a loooong time.

But it is time to get into a new theme, so here we go. For the next eighteen months, The Project Room will ask the question, How Are We Remembered?

In this new theme, you will be invited to participate in conversations and other happenings around the idea of legacy and what it means to leave your mark in this world. There will be some experimentation with new event formats along with lots of roundtable conversations and other happenings online and on-site. I am also proud to announce the forthcoming launch of The TPR Book Circle, which employs an unusual book-club format. Expect lots of special guests and great reads around the current theme! More about that is also coming soon…

Thanks to everyone who joined the conversation during the first Big Question and made it a diverse, informative, and really fun programming experiment!

Xoxoxo

Jess

*These quotes are from three of the presenters from the Successful People Talking About Failure series. To read more about this program, go here.

Thoughts on New Ideas

By Jess Van Nostrand
Posted on February 8th

Before I explain my interest in the theme of “Beginnings,” I would like to make it known that The Project Room is all about me. It has been created (by me) to respond to my Curiosity About Things* in partnership with what I think are the most exciting creative people in Seattle and beyond. Therefore, everything that takes place in the space and on the website feeds this curiosity and helps move me closer to my goal of becoming a Person of Increased Understanding of the World. Creating research-based programming (or programming my research, if you want to look at it from that direction) shows the inner workings of The Project Room itself. This makes me uncomfortable and gives me the impression that I must be learning something.

Anyway, new ideas are scary and wonderful at the same time, because they don’t yet have support behind them but possess endless possibilities. There have been many times when I have thought of an idea for an exhibition, for example, and gotten sort of tingly imagining how fun it would be to curate it. Sometimes the ideas became something, and other times they remained in notebooks, never to be produced (yet, anyway!). “So,” I thought to myself a few months ago, “what if I devoted some time to reflecting on that tingly feeling? How does that phase of creativity work for different makers of things? Where do the ideas come from? How does one know a good idea from a bad one?” Beginnings came to be the next series in The Project Room, one in which we can share and discuss new ideas while following the progress of specific projects.

It takes a brave and confident maker to present their new ideas in progress—something I have mentioned in previous writings—and it continues to be thrilling when a participating artist uses what occurred in the space or what was said in a public discussion as a way to improve upon an idea. This means I’m not the only one researching and learning things; this means that, perhaps, it isn’t all about me. Hmmmm.

*I have been reading Winnie-the-Pooh to my four year-old daughter, and enjoy borrowing A.A. Milne’s use of capitals as a form of emphasis, as in “Owl hasn’t exactly got a Brain, but he Knows Things.”

Hacking the Physical World

The following is a conversation that took place in The Project Room in August, 2011 between Dale Dougherty, Jess Van Nostrand, Sarah Novotny, and Mandy Greer

How Maker Faire is Like The Project Room

Jess: I’m excited to talk with you because I think we have some things in common. To start, I’m guessing that Maker Faire is like The Project Room in the way it supports taking your ideas out of your head and your own little workspace and getting them out there; in fact, I don’t claim to know the answers to The Big Question I’m asking, or even know what’s going to happen here exactly.

Dale: Yes—I think what excites me most about Maker Faire is this kind of fleshing things out into the community that you wouldn’t otherwise know about. And each of those people becomes a resource to other people—not just the attendees but also the artist themselves, the “makers.” Someone may find that someone does something that they’re interested in, and it could be a guy they know who might live nearby who they didn’t even know does something like that. It doesn’t really have a home in the community, it doesn’t really fit into the art world, it doesn’t belong in science centers; it can, but you have to think about it that way.  So [Maker Faire] is a good home for a lot of that. The makers are sort of renegade, on the outer fringe.

Sarah: There’s often a tension between the terms “artist” generically and “fine artist,” and I think that these people bring their own artistry to what they’re doing. There is this co-opting of the word “artist” to mean something else.

Mandy: I think about the difference in making for the pure pleasure of making art, whereas “art” becomes so connected to commerce.

How Dale’s Job is Like and Not Like Jess’ Job, or Is Dale a Curator?

Dale: You [Jess] said you wanted to pose a question and you’re not really sure of the answer. The art world tends to work from having the answers, you know?

Jess: OK, just to play the other side of the curator thing: curators, historically speaking, have an idea that we’re standing up for. Traditionally, that’s the thesis statement, and that’s the “answer.” So, you have something you really want to say, and you’re saying it through art. You’re using art as your evidence to prove your thesis. I really respect that format, so I don’t want to give up on that entirely because I still have something that I’m saying through this. So The Project Room not a complete open/unguided platform.

Dale: Couldn’t you say that the evidence speaks for itself?

Jess: That doesn’t totally work, because—to use art as an example—art can be looked at from so many different ways, so when you present it, you get so many different readings, it would be like having too much different evidence. So you say, “I’m looking at it from this perspective in order to ask you to think about something.”

Dale: But there are those who say you should trust the experience rather than the words around the experience. So, if you go to a Maker Faire, there is a kind of philosophy around making, but you tend not to put it out there. We trust that by making, you being to realize these things, connect with some of these ideas and shared values within a community of people, but not because we’re proselytizing ideas—because we’re encouraging them to participate. And when you go to Maker Faire, by talking and seeing people do lots of stuff, you create that narrative about what’s happening there.

Jess: But it still gets put together [by someone] with an idea.

Dale: It does. I wouldn’t disagree with what you are saying because making is an idea and that sort of draws in certain people, so I think you could put it in your category. I think the difference is that, when I find myself talking to art people, they are much more controlling and hung up on what fits their definition—maybe it’s the execution level. Science museums are a better example. For example, how do they know that freaky thing over in the corner isn’t science?

But I think that one of the things I’m learning is that I’m not there to make people do anything; they’re already doing it. I’m just there to showcase it and provide a venue for it. I certainly have a certain vision to all of this but I try not to box people into it.

Dale:  Sometimes people come to me and say “we’re putting out a challenge to get makers to make X and Y,” and I sort of bristle with that. Or, “we can have a theme of this and get makers to do it.” Some editors give out blue ribbons and I shake my head at it. Some people say “what does it mean that I got a blue ribbon?” and I’ll say, “it means that you got a blue ribbon.”[laughter]

There is a lot of cool stuff going on out there. If you just open the process and to go out and look for it, it becomes not so much about looking for art as it is about being inclusive. It’s just like community development, yet there are many things that are challenge-based. The real beauty we have is in collaboration. We don’t want barriers to collaboration.

Maker Faire: an Updated County Fair With Robots

One group I love is Theatre Bizarre in Detroit. It’s absolutely wonderful. It’s grown up on the edge of Detroit across from the State Fair grounds, which are now closed, and they took over some abandoned homes and began putting on what started as a Halloween theme park. It started involving a lot more people, and its evolved into this fascinating world of performers. It’s in that same spirit, getting a group of people together to start building up this world.

Sarah: It’s about fantasy meeting reality.

Dale: Yeah, exactly. And again, you could just look at it as entertaining, and if you know these people, you would think of what they’re doing as counter cultural, but they are really just good people that are trying to create stuff. And you’re mixing that with tech culture, so people who are sometimes thought of as fringe, personality-wise, are doing something very much mainstream [in their day job] in terms of “hey, we could go to a technical conference and be big celebrities there.” This provides a different kind of community for them. If we made Maker Faire a technical conference, it would look a lot different. I kind of saw an opportunity for something more family oriented, more like a fair. We can do lots with them in that environment.

Jess: Is that sort of thing the seed that started everything?

Dale: Well, the initial seed was that these were interesting people, they enjoy each other, they enjoy talking to each other. And there’s art fairs, county fairs, world’s fair, Renaissance Faires—if you think of the word “fair” you can come up with just about anything. The agriculture/county fair is pretty dead—it’s a formula that’s just been repeated so much without any updates. We were trying to update what the county fair would be to reflect the kinds of things people were actually doing. We are not raising pigs for the most part, we are making toys and robots and things like that.

Mandy: People used to come from their farms to the county fair to see innovation.

Dale: Exactly. Similarly, we were thinking about showing things that don’t get seen very often. The idea with the farm was that it was a chance to bring your product to exhibit. I think it’s about seeing something people haven’t seen before, and the old traditional county fair now is just going through the motions.

On Process

Jess: You mentioned earlier that Maker Faire is more than exhibiting; it’s about improving your ideas because there’s all this interaction with other people. That’s important to what we’re doing here and why we’re operating transparently; there’s this idea that maybe improvement can happen if you open it up. So I feel very exposed as the founder because I’m making my process transparent at the start of a new arts space, and the idea of showing something unfinished is very uncomfortable to a lot of people, including me. As a curator, I’m expected to show a polished exhibition. So I’m curious as to how that plays into what you’re doing.

Dale: One of the things that we are trying to do more on the Make side is to show that process matters. I think even from an education point of view, it’s about teaching the process rather than the end product.

Think about something you make as a kid—or even as an adult—you make something and then get to play with it, and it sets you back to making. That’s a really good balance. So if it’s 90 percent build and 10 percent play that’s not a good thing, but if they are kind of even, or even a little bit more play, that’s a good thing. An example is when we have a group of kids making bristle boxes, which is a toothbrush with a silicone battery vibrator. They make one, they put it in a maze to see how it works, they try the others to see how they work, and then they make some changes…so they are kind of running back and forth. That iteration within an exhibition is fun to see.

Sarah: Because making can be play…

Jess: …And you see the thing better because you know all the parts of it. Sometimes when visiting a museum exhibition with a friend, I find myself reminding them that what they’re seeing was probably Plan B or C, and that you’re rarely seeing the artist’s first version.

Dale: That reminds me that the other thing that’s important to me is that we aren’t just bringing in the object; we are bringing in the people. We share a story about the object, but without formalizing that story too much. The questions to that story are, “how did you get the idea? Where did you get the materials?” Anybody can ask those questions from a non-expert level and engage with that person. Then that person lights up because they know all those answers and they care about them, and as a storytelling exercise, it’s really very effective. And the stories that you tell about what you make become very important.

It’s not [only] about executing something technically, but also being able to talk about it. I think where we struggle as humans is with blank slate ideas. If we ask, “do you know what you want to make?” you probably don’t. But if you walk though Maker Faire, you’re kind of lit up with ideas because you’re standing there looking at something and almost taking it apart in your mind.

I saw this little kid at Maker Faire once, and I went over and asked him what his favorite one was. He was like “the dunk tank thing with a basketball hoop.” He had gone behind it to see how it works, and I like that.

Jess: What is your background and how do you define your role in all this?

Dale: I was an English major. As a kid, I loved to learn but I didn’t really like school. Today we are a standards-based society with standards-based education. It’s so wrong. It’s this awful way of thinking, trying to elevate certain people to elite status and relegating everyone else to mediocrity. Yet, everybody can do stuff. They can all discover and think for themselves and do whatever it is, technology, art, whatever. It’s about being able to feel engaged.

So much of what kids need is connections to real community, real people, to be with stuff. School seems so artificial—it’s like an island you hope to get off of, like “how do I get out of here so I can get back to where everyone else is?”

All of this stuff existed before I started publishing, but I gave it a focus and the word “maker” emerged as something that we wanted to use because it could be a neutral term. You could be a crafter, a welder, but you would also be a maker, and I was really interested in how we could connect people across that.

Sarah: A conversation across disciplines.

Dale: And again that doesn’t happen in school. They force them to be the opposite.

Your Job vs. Your Making

Sarah: There are so many people who do their job and then do the fun stuff separately. And if you can find a way to meld those, then everyone’s happier.

Dale: There are people who purposefully don’t meld them. But many do—they want the thing they love to take over more of their life.

Jess: I’m experiencing that right now. I made the choice to do that, but it’s certainly not for everybody because it doesn’t ever turn off [points to brain] and my kids spend a ton of time here—it’s going to be part of their childhood. So Mike [Jess’ husband] and I had this understanding that we’re about to raise our kids with this thing because it’s so immersive. And we were like, “that’s ok, that’s good.”

Mandy: I think about my parents and how I didn’t know anything, growing up, about what they did.

Jess: Perhaps it’s feminist thing, but I like that my daughter understands how her mom is working and a mom. So rather than me telling her, “you can be anything you want,” she’s actually spending time here seeing that.

Dale: I’m interested in the idea of the journeyman. The apprenticeship was a model about a master dominating you and then exploiting your work. But a journeyman went to a lot of different places and worked with of a lot of different people who had different styles, the idea being that a particular region had its own style of doing things. So being exposed to other things was a way to develop what you prefer.

In the old model of working, you would stay with one company helping with small parts of the larger product, and it might be 20 or 30 years before you felt like you had made a significant contribution to the company. But with Silicon Valley and new companies, there’s the possibility of making a significant contribution right away. It’s almost like it’s the lack of baggage that succeeds there.

On the Unraveling of Institutions and the Building of Communities

Dale: I think we’re in this era of unraveling institutions. I don’t have much patience for them or faith in them.

One of the problems with institutions is that they’re not on the ground. And there are people who are on the ground doing really incredible, interesting things. Take urban agriculture: it was seen as, “well, that doesn’t make sense, they’ll never supply enough food to make an economic impact.” Well, there was this guy in Detroit who said, “I woke up one day—I’d lost my job—and I looked out at this empty lot across from me, and I thought, ‘you know, I’m gonna go clean that up.’ And once I cleaned it up, I realized that if I put a garden there, people wouldn’t throw trash.” And it was the first step towards starting a community garden.

It became a community building exercise, and then they got a community center, a bike shop where kids could get bikes and helmets, and there were no institutions behind it. That’s the kind of stuff you want to see. But if you start with the ideas at the top and then try to make a community happen, it just won’t work. And with the crochet parties here, it’s the same thing, where people come with their own thing to do or make or share.

Jess: And it’s the idea sharing that’s never a bad thing. And that’s what I get excited, about because it allows for people to make their ideas stronger.

Dale: And what happens to that lonely kid in high school who has ideas that no one else is interested in? Well, that kid is not alone, because he’s connected to so many groups beyond his own school now. And, believe it or not, tech people actually like to share tools and ideas.

Mandy: I’ve been doing crochet parties for a while now as part of my installations. It started out of necessity, because I needed help, and then I started doing them in public, where I talked twenty or thirty different times about what I’m doing [as people arrived]. And people always have had strong connections to make each time I would explain it, like “oh! That reminds me of a story, or things I’ve read, etc.”

Dale: Actually it makes me think, when you say that, that we are thinking about ways that more people can participate in the process. I work with a lot of teachers, and I think that basically the best way to teach teachers about making is to just consider them makers. Not using a lot of words about it but just letting them teach. So, we set up a table and have them sit down with everyone and talk to each other, sometimes about the work and sometimes about something else. It’s a very non-threatening conversation that almost anyone can enter. There’s a large project with kids in Berkeley right now where they’re trying to get kids to cook, and it’s the same kind of thing, seeing kids talk while they are baking and cooking. It’s comfortable, and the school context doesn’t provide that.

Mandy: There is something too about making that provides a place for something quiet to happen.

Dale: And I think being able to create that space for yourself is important, whether it’s alone or with a group. Particularly for kids, but even as adults as you get so distracted because there are so many things going on, it’s that feeling that you get when you are really immersed in something in that moment.

Hacking the Physical World

Jess: So, how do these experiences relate to Make Magazine?

Dale: Seeing people do things is like hacking the physical word rather then hacking software. I always wanted to do a magazine, and this is very visually oriented content, rather than something that is just totally text. In terms of a magazine, there are a lot of DIY magazines for cooking, gardening, woodworking. But you read these magazines because you do it, you practice it; you don’t generally buy a food magazine unless you cook. But, I thought: you know, there is a generation of people that are really enthusiasts of technology, but all the content in those publications is about what to buy, not about what to do with it. I wanted to shift it from what to buy to what to do. So a lot of stuff [in the magazine] tends to be project oriented. I looked at the Popular Mechanics magazines of the 40’s and 50’s, and I saw a voice there that was hacker oriented as in, “hey, you don’t think you can build a garage in a weekend? Well, I just went out and did it and here’s how!”

It was an invitation to see stuff. And I wanted to create that invitation and I wanted to create those details. I wanted not just, “look at something cool,” I wanted “here is how you do it.” It’s somewhere that you can share your work and people can follow it. Even just mentally, because when you start to do your own projects—even if it’s not exactly what’s in the magazine—it’s a piece of this, it’s a piece of that, so you learned the technique, you picked up an idea. I think what was kind of missing was the practice of making and how to build that up over time by doing things, failing, and trying it again. What I’d like to see is something a little more educational. This is how we learn, by trying to do things, not by reading out of a book.

Jess: Have you ever done anything with failed attempts?

Dale: We do, it’s always a theme that’s out there. Science often doesn’t talk about the failures, but I think that is an important side of it. You could research something your entire life, but if you don’t participate in it, you’ll never get there. Nothing’s perfect, nothing’s complete, but to engage is important.