The spirit of life

Over the last few weeks, I was spending increasingly more time on the TED website looking up talks on design issues. It was then that I came across a few projects, absolutely stunning in breadth, undertaking and purpose, so much so that I thought I’d put it up on the blog.

The first one’s called ‘We Feel Fine’, a joint project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. It plots the emotions of many people from all around the world through diagrammatic and statistical depictions. The design is beautifully simple and easy to understand and can give you a good idea of what’s happening in the lives of people around you. It rounds of the whole attempt by providing interesting and bizarre metrics. You can find the site here and the TED preview here. (Another interesting attempt that runs along the same lines is ‘I Want You To Want Me‘.)

The second one is an even more vast project both in terms of the kind of man power and technology that went into making it and what it hopes to achieve. It’s called the AlloSphere – a large hollow sphere that it is fit with a large host of microcontrollers connected to a supercomputer. What the AlloSphere does is that it generates various designs, constructions, materials and phenomena on an atomic scale which is then projected as a digital image onto the insides of the sphere. A bridge running along a diameter permits up to 20 people at a time to bear witness to breathtaking views that science devoid of creativity cannot hope to present to us at all. Like JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara, says: “imagine architects standing in the sphere and seeing microstructures and atoms arranged in space – what if they could come up with a new construction material?” [paraphrased]. Again, here‘s where you can find the TED preview.

The last one is a complete revolution in its own right and I think many people will agree when I say it’s the Gapminder by Hans Rosling. The statistics chapter in mathematics you chose to willingly forget while in school because it made you sleep in a snap – Rosling changes all of that by drawing old graphs in new ways. His sports-person commentary also adds to the pace of this lecture as he plots countries and ideas onto digital graph sheets. Find the TED talk here.

What these 3 ideas did was open me up to another idea that world is changing like no other. Like Thomas Friedman puts it, “the world is flat!” He couldn’t have been more right. This world is no longer curved around the edges and you and me are no longer strangers. With Jonathan Harris’ ‘We feel fine’, I’ll know what you’re feeling some 1000 miles away as soon as you know what I’m feeling. Kuchera-Morin’s AlloSphere will open up technology that you and me never thought we could have access to. And before you know it, Hans Rosling will have it up all on a giant graph and tell everyone what we did, what we could have done and how well we did it.

The world is no longer yours or mine, no longer subject to one war in one region amongst one group of people contending for one piece of information.  It has been globalized by just ideas. The world is ours, subject to our war that involves our people contending for the control over all information.

Tribute to Times New Roman

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving superheroine. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. She can’t fly, she can’t see through walls, she can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What she can do is she can make them happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about her, and you can feel her humility boring into you. She does not ask for much; come to think of it, she asks for nothing. Her rewards are her moments – the willful verification of her veracity, the surrender you must enact unto her. She speaks not much, and when she does, she does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. She compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, she denigrates the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times the newspaper was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with The Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular – the one you see on this page (the typographic difference between them is that Georgia has more prominent serifs).

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and her cousins, people began to regard the font itself as a symbol of the times past. TNR survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia. Media persons desperately digging for a story often locked horns with each other over the rights of the content and a newer angle no one had detected before, but the stories always came out through the mouth of TNR. There was something about her that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the Speaker of the wartorn parliament that is this world was always TNR, and rightly so. Stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with TNR. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of TNR answers the question without hesitation. TNR is both. If not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has made more things possible – a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of TNR (a relationship advertised by having TNR as the default font), has now introduced a new default – Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Dear TNR, I have not forgotten you.