David Koren

More Texting, Less Driving

When I was at the ARC-Interiors conference in late September in Miami, speaking on "A Sense of Purpose: The New Reality for Architecture Firms and How Principals will Need to Adapt" I had lunch at the conference after I spoke at a table with a bunch of nice conference attendees and exhibitors. Before long, the conversation turned to current events, and we touched on the controversy over texting while driving.

Without really thinking, in the middle of the conversation, I interjected, "The problem isn't texting... It's driving." I went with it: "I mean, texting doesn't kill people, driving does. The problem is that we drive too much, and driving is just too easy. We need to drive less, and when we do, it needs to be more difficult."

One of the others at the table asked, "Yeah, I need somebody to pick me up at my house and drive me to work."

I threw out, "We have that already. It's called a train."

Suddenly, I realized that I was in a group of people from all around the US, none of which lived in New York or one of the few other cities in the US where you can live a full and complete life without owning a car.

"Maybe we should spend less public money on roads, and more on trains. If the roads were more dangerous, you couldn't text while driving because you'd hit a pothole. Part of the problem here is that driving is too easy because our roads are too well-maintained. People have too much free time when they drive."

The entire controversy, and this conversation, points out to me that our dependence on the automobile, and all the evils that go with it (foreign oil, pollution, suburban sprawl, shopping malls, road rage, alienation, long commutes of wasted time) is a choice, a choice we can reverse. It doesn't have to be this way. And it shouldn't be this way.

I'm reminded of the James Howard Kunstler quote, that the suburbs "represent the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." The current controversy over texting while driving should be another wake-up call. The problem isn't texting, it's driving. Driving kills. We should be driving less, and texting more. People, get on the train. Get off the road. You're wasting resources, you're wasting time, and you're running the risk of killing somebody, or yourself. Why live this way?

Facebook: On the Internet, Everybody Knows You're a Dog

I just joined Facebook today. I've been holding off for a really long time (Has it been years? It certainly feels like it...) because Facebook has made me nervous from beginning. First, it came up from the kids... It was originally designed and first used by high school and college kids to gossip. That made me not entirely trust Facebook. How could I find a use for the social networking tool of teens? Then there's the fact that you can really only have one Facebook identity with any depth at all unless you truly have a multiple personality disorder. This effectively brings an end to the "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" era, and into a new era of transparency. On Facebook, your user name is not "MissSexyPants801." It's your real God-given (well, Mom- and Dad-given) name. And anyone, whether it's the government, a stalker, a loan shark, or a malevolent space alien, can find you, find out who your friends are, find out what you're into, when your birthday is, what events you're going to, etc.

So there's transparency on Facebook and there's (necessarily) a level of trust that emerges. I trust my friends, and I trust their friends. And my friends trust their friends' friends. And so on. I think this is, for the most part, a positive thing. But it roots us in who we are and our history. And I think it changes the way we grow up and evolve. A few times in my life, I have sort of rolled the dice, picked up and moved, or started fresh with a whole new group of friends and a whole new identity, to some extent. I can think of a few examples: Moving at the age of 8 to Pottstown from Phoenixville, moving to New York to go to NYU, moving to Ireland, going to Burning Man. That's four, I think. But Facebook crosses the beams. You are who you are who you are. Or, perhaps more accurately, you are who your friends are. If character used to be destiny, in 2009 your network is your destiny. Or something like that.

There is no dipping your toe in Facebook. This is a paradigm shift, and you can't just sort of be there. If you're there, you're there. By diving in, you make a commitment to put your name and face and friends and facts out there for anyone else who puts themselves out there to search and see and comment on. So now I'm in it, and what does it look like, 10 hours later and with 100 friends? Well, it's virtual reality, for real, with perhaps less sex. Who needs to go out and have events? All I need is an event invite. Who needs real friends? I've got Facebook friends. I write on your wall, you write on my wall, and we while away the hours. It reminds me of the last Matrix movie, when you get to the heart, meet the architect, see the man behind the curtain, and it all just looks like pure white light. Or Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World, when we can see our own dreams, what's inside our heads refined into images, and it's irrepressively addictive.

Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just a fundamental shift, and it requires a commitment from every participant, a commitment to participate. And I can see that this is the future. This is incredibly efficient, and equalizing. Hierarchy fades away, and I can friend anyone in an instant and they can friend me, and we reduce the entire world to one flat level playing field. It's amazing, it's liberating, and it's addictive. This is how we will organize ourselves in the future. This is how our government should work. And probably will.

But this all requires a level of optimism about people and our future that I find truly encouraging. The movement to Facebook, even in the face of continuing economic collapse shows that people will always find places where energy is abundant, and look to explore that. Our social and economic system is in the process of transforming itself completely. It is, and will continue to be, painful. But I think Facebook is part of what comes next, what society looks like after we've burned off all of our sins and excesses of the last 50 or so years.

Thoughts on Fame

It's Memorial Day, and I'm on vacation. No meetings this weekend, only a little bit of work here and there. I'm watching a video on New Order that I never saw before, and I'm trying to send an email to David Byrne.

What do these things have in common? Well, strangely, Bono is interviewed in the New Order video. And he stands out as such a pompous ass. I mean, New Order are a relatively humble group. They were a bunch of kids from Manchester, who still seem relatively shy and down to earth. They're likable and somewhat inscrutable because they just look like people. They just sort of say, this is who we are. But Bono's another story. By comparison, he seems totally full of himself, utterly self-satisfied, self-important, and smug. He's on the video saying something about Ian Curtis's sacred voice or something, and you kind of want to slap him.

So... What does this have to do with David Byrne? Well, David Byrne seems to be a fairly down-to-earth guy. He's an incredible artist who's worked in a variety of media, and I've had a lot of respect for him since the Talking Heads first started making sense to me when I was in my late 20's or so (I never really got them when I was a teenager and they were actively recording). Well, David Byrne is doing an installation in the Battery Maritime Building with Creative Time this summer. This coincides directly with the FIGMENT event and the Emergence exhibition that I'm working on on Governors Island (the Battery Maritime Building is where the ferries leave to go to Governors Island). So, I thought, well, why not reach out to David Byrne and say hello? Invite him to FIGMENT, Emergence, whatever.

But the thing is, you can't just send an email to David Byrne, silly. He's a star! He's got a great website and journal (blog). He writes his thoughts about things there (just like I'm doing here). But you can't actually respond to anything he's written. You can't post a comment. You can't (heaven forbid) actually email him. Because, presumably, the volume would be too great for David or whoever maintains his site to respond to.

Now, in a 20th Century, pre-Internet way of looking at the world, this makes sense. You want more David Byrne? Buy a CD, go to a concert, consume media like a good fan. But we're in a world now where we have TRUE many-to-many multi-polar conversations, and loose organizations and connections that support this. I'm reminded of the article in the back of Time Magzine when they named "you" the person of the year a year and a half ago: "Andy was Right." This article was the first time that I read the rephrasing of Warhol's famous quote "In the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes" as "In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people." On the Internet, everyone can find their own audience.

David Byrne, of course, is famous to way more than 15 people. And that's why I can't just send him an email. But I imagine that 15 people is about the right order-of-magnitude for how many people will read this particular blog post that I'm writing right now. And that's why you can email me, but you can't email David Byrne. Is this the new dividing line between the "famous" and the rest of us? Can I google you? If I google you, and you show up, can I find out how to contact you?

As an artist, how insulated are you from communication? How do you stay connected with people, with what's happening right now, if you can't be directly contacted? How does being insulated by intermediaries (agents, representatives, managers, lawyers) keep you from really connected with the world we're living in?

The promise of the Internet is that should we should all be able to connect with anyone. But that said, there always need to be filters, boundaries. I guess the question is... how do we each enable as much connection as possible, while still being able to filter through all of the inputs that are out there?

AIA Burning Man Event covered by E-Oculus

http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/?p=963

FIGMENT Festival gets press

I'm one of the organizers of a new arts festival on Governors Island this Sunday (July 8). The festival is featured in today's New York Times and AM New York:

Ferrying Creative Impulses Across New York Harbor - New York Times.
Governors Island to host underground arts festival - AM New York.

The website for FIGMENT is here: www.figmentnyc.org. Join our mailing list, so we can keep you up to date on what's going on with FIGMENT!

Culture and Space

I've been invited to speak at the ARC-Interiors Conference from September 27-30 in Miami. Here's the topic I just pitched to them:

Culture and Space
the relationship between the culture of an organization
and the design and evolution of its interior spaces

“Culture” is an important contemporary buzzword in business and in design. We all know intuitively that there is a direct, if subtle, relationship between the design of spaces and the culture of the organization that uses them. As designers, we create spaces with a view to enhance and extend our clients’ organizational cultures. The spaces we design are therefore both a reflection of culture, and an instrument to reinforce culture. Over time, spaces are altered by the people who use them to support how they interact with the space and to reflect their sense of their culture. Culture and space share an ongoing dialogue that begins with move-in. The difficulties that an organization has in successfully occupying and utilizing space can be thought of as a struggle to understand their own evolving culture and to reflect it in the design of its spaces. In this talk, the speaker will utilize recent examples of commercial and institutional interior design to discuss the relationship between the underlying culture of an organization and the design and ongoing evolution of its interior spaces.