maria gil ulldemolins

It’s Tuesday again! That means I’m at ¿Y por qué no? once more.

Weekly post for ¿Y por qué no?, again!

When I was a kid I used to hear about the Generation X and feel envious of them because they had such a defined identity, they had a name, they were a group (I guess this was before everything was called a community). Eventually, I grew up and so did everyone else around me, and someone decided we were not going anywhere and therefore we would need to get a name too, and Generation Y was proposed. Slowly, we turned into something rather more epic: the Millenials (officially those born from 1982 to 2000, although I feel, and I’m not alone, that those of us born in the 80s and the rest are different). And here we are, the Millenials, the year after we took to the streets.

I had the dubious luck to be the voice of Spanish youth unemployment (thanks goodness I am no more) in an article by The Economist. Predictabily, I was asked how did the 15-m change anything. And, to me, the most important effect of the 15-m movement was the confidence boost it gave us all. Yes, the 15-m was very plural, but from what I could tell, it was mostly 20-somethings. And we needed to know that we could own history. And, in a way, it made total sense that we would lead such revolution, because we are a historical Molotov cocktail.

We’ve witnessed two global collapses:

• firstly, when we realized the world order was not immune to change and that the safety we had given for granted because of where we had been lucky enough to be born was finite: the fall of the twin towers and the consequent war on terror.
• secondly, when we came of age and decided to take the future we thought we rightfully owned: we graduated bang on into the crisis, making us doubt of everything we ever thought we could do with our lives. We were about to get on our own two feet when the world collapsed underneath us.

But, on top of this we’ve also lived through two great obvious communication changes:

• The internet! Those of us born in the 80s had the privilege to live both a analogical life and a digital life, being able to appreciate the change the second implied.
• Low cost flights: what the internet did for us virtually, the cheap airlines did for us physically, at least in Europe.

Needless to say, if you add this to the fact that we are the most racially/culturally mixed generation up to now and, on top of this, the best educated one, you get quite a mix. And polls say that we are the most liberal minded people out there, too (which is totally logical).

It seems clear that we have inherited a world that was designed for a totally different bunch and attitude: we want flexible work times, we want to collaborate, we want to share information and culture, we work in jobs that did not even exist a few years ago. It is evident that we do not fit in the current system, but it’s less obvious that it might less of a matter of learning to adapt and more of a matter of building a new one that we agree with, perfectly suited to our expectations and possibilities.

The high we felt in the 2011 protests was greatly due to realizing we had some power, a possibility we had yet to acknowledge. And all that’s happened ever since it’s been based on a discourse that avoids mentioning this. It is said that we had no real alternatives to propose, but I think that’s due to a few factors:

• It all happened rather suddenly and we tried to organize everything very horizontally, which did not work quickly enough.
• I have the feeling that there was a lack of confidence in ourselves. We need to tell ourselves that not only we can change things but we must, and that there is not anyone else that can do this better than ourselves. Yes, we have been brought up to believe in ourselves as individuals, but not as a collective (for instance, we came close to witnessing the power of a crowd when we tried to protest against the Iraq war, but what we took from that is that no-one cared).

I keep on thinking that there is a time factor in what we might become. We are mourning. We are mourning the lives we never had. And we are going through the stages: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And then starting over. I find it difficult from here to decide where we are at wight now, but I know that the first concentration I attended was organized by a group called “Youth without a future”. That was April 2011. And we were all rather depressed: about to end the school year, no perspectives of even a summer job, national elections coming slowly at us in Spain (they were in November).

Maybe 2012 is the era of Aquarius, or maybe it’s our era. We only need to tell ourselves, as a collective, that not only we have to change and build a fresh new environment/system, but that we are lucky to be able to do so, and that it is a great responsibility we are ready to take and make ourselves proud.

pic: a bunch of millenials in La Hora Fetén

Please allow me to behave hysterically for a moment.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

He is back!

Thanks for your understanding.

(Mr. M.’s comment on the trailer was: “Hipster”. I think he said it with admiration.)

PS: I predict big stationary envy.

PPS: I really like the music in the trailer:

The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Part1 (by hkams)

Today I realized I’ve got 170 followers in Pinterest. Granted, some people out there have hundreds of thousands. But, still, for something I don’t nurture per se, it’s quite a lot. But I’m not here to pat myself on the back. No, ma’am.

I’ve known and used pinterest for a while (damn, I was a beta user, I’m that metal). And I keep on having two feelings:

1. it’s awesome 
2. something went wrong with it along the way

And here’s where I get into dangerous mud. Let’s begin the nice part, shall we? It works. As simple as that. It does what it does brilliantly. Also, it’s totally genius when it comes to keeping the sources of your pins (Tumblr, you suck at this). Asthetically it’s bang on and it’s super user and community friendly. Yay.

Now, how do I put this? When I started using it, I did not expect it to be the way it is now. And I do not know if their founders imagined it either. For some reason, it’s very, very… glittery? pinky? Most users are women, granted. Now, plenty of women out there are more than happy to avoid pink and glitter and unicorns and lingerie ads. But for some reason, lots of pinners focus precisely on all of these (with a few brilliant exceptions).

The internet is a free land, and I pin both sheer awesome inspiration (I’ve got a board for research on hair in art and another one for smells and art; one dedicated to how women are portrayed); and, at the same time, more WI-like boards (vegan cooking, stuff for the wedding, interiors). I do that because, as I’ve said, Pinterest works for keeping my virtual sh*t together and I happen to eat and like sofas. Guilty. But I’ve had problems with fellow pinners demanding my non-WI boards to be taken down.

Because, you see, some of the art I was researching was… offensive. Gasp! No way! Oh dear. I would have never got into Contemporary Art if I didn’t think it would be totally toddler friendly and politically correct (no, I have no children.

So here we have a community that has strongly anti-gay opinions, posts naked dudes and naked ladies as “thinspiration” or “eye candy” and cannot possibly take that I want to post images of a performance (which, for your information had no gore at all).

The worst part is that Pinterest does take down these images. I’ve been tempted to remove my membership many times but damn, the site works. But every now or then my pins get deleted.

Now, I do not know who the 170 people who follow my boards are. And probably they like my interiors better than my contemporary art researches. But hey, pin and let pin.

And if anybody know an alternative Pinterest-land where all pinners are Ok with the diversity of the internet, please do point it my way. Thanks.

It’s time for my weekly post over at ¿Y por qué no?

Mr. M. and I are watching The Wire (we’ve just started the 3rd season, so please! No spoilers! Thanks!). I am going to skip the whole “It’s the best TV series ever- It’s so overrated I want to cry” debate and go straight to what I wanted to say: I love seeing how the team works to solve the cases.

I have been going nuts all over Google trying to find an image of the boards where they explore the case and the suspects and their relationships. No such luck. The closest I’ve come to is the image here. The thing that strikes me the most is how very similar this picture is to the ones I take in my Design thinking and innovation workshops. I basically came to say that what McNulty and his mates are up to is precisely that, Design Thinking.

Let’s analyse the parallelisms:

• It’s Visual: in both cases, the priority is to make sense visually of what you are dealing with, and therefore walls become essential tools for expansion.
• It’s Physical: have you noticed the name tags they pin on their boards? They are big. They have a materiality. And then they use strings and tapes to physically link one piece of information to another. I think that is key to making a Design thinking workshop successful. You can touch what you think and prototype your ideas.
• It’s Collaborative: the work is done in teams with different professionals involved. Actually, in the series, they regularly team up with suspects to figure out more. Now, collaborating with consumers it’s not quite the same thing, but you get what I mean.
• Feedback is essential: Design Thinking is not a step-by-step process, but rather a space to navigate. In this way, you can always go back to something you’ve looked into and re-feed that information into what you are doing. And what you learn from your mates and the case gets processed right back.
• One needs to Research: People often imagine creative geniuses having a sort of inspirational fit that leads to them vomiting a fabulous piece of art or design. I am not a genius but I can tell you that it takes a lot more than that. One needs tor research and investigate again, and again and then some more. Like police people.

So there, what did you think of that? There are some more points I could add, like the fact that Design thinking is hard work and so is case resolving, but since I’ve never been shot during a workshop, I’ll leave that aside. Also, as a designer I can shower and sleep and it doesn’t lead to marital problems. There’s only so many McNulty’s in this world.

so true.

New article for ¿Y por qué no? ready!