BCNDesign

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since the heady days of Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Lately, the general trend in cutting-edge consumer culture business thinking has been that the new generations of consumers are a savvy bunch, tricky to reach and brainwash, highly articulate in the art of navigating safely the stormy seas of corporate branding without getting their gear wet.

Rob Walker begs to differ. He has been writing the ‘Consumed’ column for the New York Times magazine for the last few years, a clever and perceptive take on 21st century consumer culture. His work has been described as a mixture of cultural anthropology and business journalism. His latest book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy And Who We Are, explores the industry’s response to try and reach the post-No Logo crowd, a subtler, more insidious technique that Walker calls ‘Murketing’: murky marketing. So if you’d like to get updated on what’s been going on since viral marketing was the latest thing (1997!), this is probably worth reading. In any case, Walker’s book is set to become the latest pop-psychology business bestseller – we’re so beyond The Tipping Point.

You can read the Introduction here, courtesy of Random House.

It’s clear to me that Barcelona has a lot to be proud of.

I have a slight, undefinable (and very charming, I’m told) accent when speaking English, so when I was living in London people often asked me where I came from originally. ‘Barcelona’, I would say. To which everyone unfailingly replied: ‘Barcelona! Such a beautiful, exciting city! The food! The  weather! The architecture! The design! What the hell are you doing here in London?’

‘Pah!’ you will say (if you’re from Barcelona). ‘That’s the dreaded, evil “Barcelona Brand” effect. It’s crap. Big empty words. It’s ruining our city, and our lives.’

Perhaps so. But while the locals complain, the foreigners admire, and envy. They both have good reasons for their reactions.

What  brought me to this slight digression, was coming across a news release at Core77 about the announcement by BCD (Barcelona Centre de Disseny) of a new strategic design cluster in Barcelona. BCD’s press release, notes Core77’s Mark Vanderbeeken, is ‘unfortunately clumsily written and clumsily translated.’

We can have dozens of big strategic design initiatives, to promote ‘business excellence and innovation with international projection’ as this one claims to do. But unless their press releases are written in flowing and grammatically correct English, their international projection will suffer.

It’s a good thing when a city dares to have a big vision. Barcelona’s may have been clouded by commercial interests, but still its perception abroad is that of a vibrant cultural node, with an amazing amount of clever, ambitious projects underway, a city looking at the future and working hard to make it happen.

All I want to say is, I wish that a highly visible, top-level Catalan design institution like the BCD could make the effort to produce perfect English copy for its international press releases. Not doing so only serves to project a total lack of professionalism. If we want to be taken seriously, we need to behave like grown-up, serious players. And that means making the effort.

The devil is in the detail, and the future too.

Pradell by Andreu Balius, 2000.

Luc Devroye is a Professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a very cool dude too, by the sound of it. Of the many appealing links on his website, which I’ve yet to explore fully, the ones I can’t wait to click on are ‘Abolish conference papers’, ‘No blind refereeing’,  ‘Bring on the drugs’ (possibly to help with refereeing blindly) and a poem called Sarkokaka.

But more to the point, he has published a pretty comprehensive directory of type design in Catalunya that he calls ‘The Catalan Font Scene’. He also has a Basque Scene page, and a Spanish Scene one. Prof Devroye adds a note explaining that he has ‘split the Spanish contributions politically (in)correctly into three parts, the Spanish page, a Catalan page and a Basque page’. Clearly, living in Canada makes one sensitive to that kind of stuff.

Anyway, the website offers font directories for many countries and languages, along with bibliograhical suggestions and an open invitation for type designers to join him for a drink at his place in Montreal. Did I say he was a dude?

Pixelscatalans.cat takes up Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage idea and turns it into a concerted exercise in nationalist propaganda. ‘A promotion of Catalunya’, states their manifesto. They aim to provide international projection for Catalan production and graphics, to push up the search engine ranking of Catalan websites, to ‘make the country’: ‘Fer pais’. Only my second post on BCND, and already the frustration of coming face to face with localist pettiness is raising its head. Will it become too much to bear (again!)?

The original Million Dollar Homepage was set up by Alex Tew, a cash-strapped student about to start his first year at university in Nottingham.

The index page of the site consists of a 1000×1000 pixel grid (one million pixels), on which image-based links were sold for US $1 per pixel, in minimum ten by ten blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which they were linked, and a slogan displayed when hovering the cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for the creator. (Wikipedia)

The result: a young millionnaire who had to drop out of uni to keep on top of the site’s success. Most importantly, though, Tew’s open-ended agenda created something really special, a graphic, interactive snapshot of internet history – now on sale as a limited edition print.

Tew’s million pixel grid is vibrant, brash and loud, immensely varied in tone and content. In it one can find skater gear and online gambling, language lessons, business reviews, personal messages, high street retailers and domain hosting, dodgy job offers, e-publications and baby gifts, quick miracle diets and Jesus. It’s a perfect representation of cyberspace. While mostly Anglo-based, clickthroughs will land you in France, Italy or Hungary.

And what about pixelscatalans? All I can hope is that it’s not a perfect representation of Catalunya. What it shows is a fairly desolate landscape, still pretty empty three years after it went online. The pixels are mostly of corporate and institutional brands, some local, some global. At the very least, the pixel-sellers at Catalanpixels could have stood by their catalanist principles and denied access to international corporations.

What it is a perfect representation of, unfortunately, is the dead weight of identity politics on all fields of endeavour in Catalunya, the idea that we have more than enough with what we have ‘at home’ to create a vibrant cultural landscape, that the aim is not to open up to external influences but to preserve and project what we are (and what is that??) to the world.

Personally, I couldn’t care less what the world thinks as long as what is going on near me is entertaining and stimulating enough. If it is, the world will take notice. And being lazy by nature, I’d rather have the world come here so we can party.

Having lived and worked in London for almost a decade and a half, I’m now moving my operational base to my hometown of Barcelona, from which I will shuttle regularly to Berlin and London to take care of business and stuff.  I’m excited and looking forward to re-discovering my city, re-engaging with it both personally and professionally. I must also confess to a certain degree of trepidation – one can never really ‘come back’. The Barcelona I left behind is gone for good. I’ve kept track of things and people while I’ve been living in the UK, and writing a book on design in Barcelona has certainly helped, but I’m sure there are many surprises waiting for me here. At least, I hope there are.

There seems to be a link between ways of thinking and geographical locations, something curiously unrelated to cultural backgrounds or professional communities or even national territories. Over the years, I’ve noticed a slight shift in my thought processes whenever I travelled back and forth between London and Barcelona. A re-accomodation of sorts, to my immediate human environment of course, but also to the different weather patterns, light changes, sounds and urban landscapes. This blog is meant to be a content provider, but it’s also a personal experiment – a log-book of sorts, charting my passage back ‘home’.

BCND then, is a blog vaguely related to my book La Barcelona del diseño, recently published by Santa & Cole to great critical acclaim (please excuse the self-publicity, but if not here, where? If not now, when?).

It’s an open forum for discussion, debates and any other contribution around the city of Barcelona and its links to design, both now and in the relatively recent past.

Beyond Barcelona itself, this blog is open to thoughts, news and conversations about design in general, urban culture, architecture, images and things.

A generous agenda, as you can see.