The beginning of the end of sprawl

Posted by Vladimir Cole under sprawl

The WSJ covers, as many other papers did this week, the converging trends of higher gas prices, demographic shifts, increased interest in sustainable living, and increased value placed on the richness of urban living. In a nutshell:

“Baby boomers and millennials are the country’s two biggest generations, with some 82 million and 78 million people born during their respective eras. Both flocks are leaving their nests and finding that higher-density urban housing fits their lifestyles.”

It’s my hope that these shifts continue and accellerate.

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Densest part of Seattle: my hood

Posted by Vladimir Cole under sprawl

Didn’t know this: “In terms of the broader neighborhood, this corner [12th and Pike] of Capitol Hill is the only area in the northwest United States that achieves residential densities approaching east coast cities” (source).

Hey, cool, that’s where I live! No wonder I’m nailin’ the 98 walkscore. Unfortunately, though, the quote lacks meat because it doesn’t tell exactly how dense nor which east coast city we supposedly compare favorably to. Washington DC wouldn’t be a very favorable comparison. That place is pure sprawl.

Zipskinny says my hood’s density is 12,266. Unfortunately it can’t narrow it down any further. 98122 covers a very large swath of land, some of it very low density.

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Seattle - Bellevue - Redmond: the archipelago city

Posted by Vladimir Cole under sprawl

Bernard Tschumi says: “I live in Paris and New York, the great cities of the 19th and 20th century, respectively. But the 21st century will have a number of great cities. You’ll choose between cities of great population density and those that are like series of islands in the forest.” 

The Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma-Redmond area is like this. Where else?

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Whoa! WSJ urges anticonsumerism

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Minimalism, Object Diet

I never thought I’d read an endorsement of anticonsumerism in the WSJ, but the Journal’s Andrea Coombs writes, “It’s time to shake off the “consumer” mantle that politicians and economists are so happy to drape around our shoulders. Resist their calls for consumers to save the economy, and resist the advertisements enveloping us in the idea that we need more and more things.”

Nice!

Here are the better tips from the article:

  • spend less time feeling poor (avoid magazines and other media that feature advertisements selling junk you don’t need) [presumably, one shouldn’t stop reading the WSJ, even though reading about hedge fund managers pulling down $1B per year and being exposed to three ads touting products for the affluent might also contribute to that feeling of being poor]
  • stop viewing consumerism as a reward for good behavior
  • assess the eROI of your purchases (eROI = emotional return on investment) and shift spending to achieve higher eROI
  • spend less on “extravagances” (mentioned: cable TV, eating out)
  • exchange for-cost activities with low- or no-cost activities (host a movie night for friends instead of going out)

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Thank you, Grayson Peddie!

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Uncategorized

I’ve been vexed by an Outlook 2007 bug that prevents me from deleting certain RSS feeds. It’s a completely annoying bug with an incorrect error message, but thanks to good citizen Grayson Peddie, I found this fix. I couldn’t find another way to thank him  (the forums where he’s active require registration to see his “profile”), so here’s my thanks in public, on the world wide interweb. On the off chance he ever searches for himself, I want to tell him this: Grayson: you saved me a ton of vexation. Thank you! Thank you!

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Man to sell entire life on eBay

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Minimalism, Object Diet

Friends here in Seattle know that I’ve been offloading tons of crap that I’ve managed to saddle myself with over the years. I’ve been ditching games, movies, t-shirts, electronics, shoes, watches, phones, a bicycle, books — pretty much everything that will sell or that the local Value Village (thrift store) will take.

But I’ve not gone all the way. I like having a couch to sit and work on. I like having a table to eat at. I’ll probably always have these objects, though I might eventually succeed in combining the two (using the couch as dinner seating).

One Australian man has gone all the way. He’s selling all of his worldly posessions on eBay to gain closure on a failed marriage and a broader midlife crisis. Some might think he’s gone nuts and is a failure. I think he’s discovered a lot earlier than most that happiness isn’t encapsulated in the physical goods we acquire. Good luck, Ian!

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Zen monk style

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Minimalism

From Zenhabits.net, a great blog I’ve just started reading, comes this excellent paragraph:

“There is little in a Zen monk’s life that isn’t necessary. He doesn’t have a closet full of shoes, or the latest in trendy clothes. He doesn’t have a refrigerator and cabinets full of junk food. He doesn’t have the latest gadgets, cars, televisions, or iPod. He has basic clothing, basic shelter, basic utensils, basic tools, and the most basic food (they eat simple, vegetarian meals consisting usually of rice, miso soup, vegetables, and pickled vegetables). Now, I’m not saying you should live exactly like a Zen monk — I certainly don’t. But it does serve as a reminder that there is much in our lives that aren’t necessary, and it can be useful to give some thought about what we really need, and whether it is important to have all the stuff we have that’s not necessary.”

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Stupid product: a dedicated pickle jar fork

Posted by Vladimir Cole under stupid product

Blog unclutterer pokes fun at a different “unitasker” (device that just does just one thing) every Wednesday. They are poking fun at the objects, but they’re far too kind, writing, “It’s totally fine if you choose to own a Unitasker. There aren’t any Unclutterer Police coming to take it away from you or judge you over it. We’re just talking about stuff, things, objects — not people or their choices.”

I don’t think it’s fine. Sure, every one of us is entitled to live life as wastefully as we like. We can squander our income on ephemera, clutter our home, and make ourselves miserable. But it’s everyone else’s right to point, and if they like, judge.

And so I think it *is* worth making fun of the people who own or buy unitask objects. They’re cluttering by owning these objects, and they’re hurting their financial picture. Their unchecked consumerism is also hurting the environment, and that hurts all of us.

A point I make over and over here is that every single object I own needs to be thought of in terms of “total cost of ownership” or TCO. Putting aside the total cost to the environment to design, manufacture, distribute, and get the object into your home, TCO is the cost to actually own the object. 

  1. Cost to acquire the thing in the first place (including the opportunity cost of how that money could have been put to better use — say, by paying down high-interest debt)
  2. Cost to maintain (running it through the dishwasher, dusting it, oiling it, repairing it, replacing it, whatever)
  3. Cost to store the thing
  4. Cost to dispose of it (eventually)

It’s this third item that people rarely think about. Take a pickle picker-upper. How many items like it clutter a drawer? How many drawers do you have in your kitchen now? How many would you need with a decluttered lifestyle? (Yes, storage for tiny objects is a step function, but acquisition of crap like this is a lifestyle choice — you never own just one “unitasker.”) Even the smallest object requires storage space, and every square inch of storage space can be costed out like so:

1. cost for the storage (cabinetry, fancy closet hardware, whatever)
2. cost for the property in which your storage sits

Whether you rent or own, you can determine a cost per square foot. If your monthly housing costs are $3000 for 1000 square feet, then that’s $3 per SF per month for the duration of your stay in that space. Is an object that takes up a square foot really worth $3 x 12 ($48) per year, just to store? If you didn’t own it (and all of the other junk that you’ve accumulated) would you be able to step down to 800 square feet for an annual savings of $7,200?

Do this calculation with every new potential acquisition and with all current objects. Is that CD collection worth not just what you paid for it and the cost to store it? Only 31 standard CDs fit within a square foot. A CD collection of 200 discs costs $232 per year to store at a monthly housing cost of $3,000. Is it worth it?

Pickle picker upper (and the folks who buy them) be damned.

PS: Need to retreive a pickle from a jar? Just use a friggin’ fork.

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Stupid product: plug-in bathroom deodorizer from Method

Posted by Vladimir Cole under stupid product

Apartment Therapy’s full of it. On their “re-nest” blog — which claims to cover “the intersection of the ‘green’ movement and the ‘home decor’ movement”  – author “Stephanie” shills a plug-in air freshener. This is unintentional parody.

How does buying a plug-in, plasticy air freshener device accomplish any green goal? Sure, shit stinks. But buying a product that was manufactured in a developing nation and shipped around the world is the very definition of consumerism run amok. Heaven forfend that Americans have to wait for the air to clear before the next one of us steps up to flush 1.6 to 5 gallons of previously fresh water along with pulped remains of trees that were felled just so that we could wipe our asses in comfort. We’re lucky to have indoor plumbing and fresh water, and some of us are buying $10 gewgaws made of plastic and perfume.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Apartment Therapy reader “SFGail” was more polite in her diss of the post, writing, “Ok, I’m going to go out a little on a limb here. I really wish, that as the environmental part of AT, re-nest would focus more on sustainable building/home design, and less on frou frou products like this that aren’t really part of the solution to the environmental problem we all face.”

Straighten up, AT. Your writers have been turned into marketers of the sort of junk that’s clogging landfills, polluting waters, and making a mess of the world.

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Home as luggage

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Minimalism

Packing light can be so freeing. Nothing beats walking onto (and off of) a plane without having to bother with the hassle of checked luggage. If we were to pack our homes as carefully as we pack our luggage, would this affect how we choose to consume? Apartment Therapy’s Laure thinks so, and in doing so makes up for some of her fellow writers’ incessant pushing of consumer ephemera.  They need more like her over there.

The post reminded me of a coworker at Scholastic who had a set uniform (all black, all the time) and who believed that he should be able to pack up and move in a day on his own. For a long time everything he owned could fit into a duffel bag. This precluded acquisition of a TV set and other consumer basics. Pretty zen, but far too hardcore for most Americans, self included (for now).

If it’s true that “He who would travel happily must travel light,” is it also true that he who would live happily must live light (i.e., acquire fewer things)?

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Stupid product: letter openers

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Minimalism, Object Diet, stupid product

Apartment Therapy, an endless source of inspiration for “stupid product” posts, is shilling a decorative magnifier and letter opener set. Awful, worthless product.

  1. When was the last time you used a hand-held magnifying glass? Fishermen who tie their own flies and decorative seamstresses aside (they’ll use desk-mounted lenses anyway), most of us will opt for standard eyeglasses when we need assistance seeing things more clearly. The last time I used a magnifying glass was probably 25 years ago. I burned ants with it.
  2. Letter openers. Seriously. A specialized knife just to rip paper? Seriously? You’re not ripping an entire phone book in half with your bare hands. You’re opening a friggin’ letter. It’s not that difficult. It’s certainly not worth cluttering your home and destroying the environment.

Try these remedies instead: unsubscribe from mailing lists that send you letters that need to be opened; opt for electronic versions of mail where possible; use a butter knife on the rare envelope that you want to save (decorative invites, for instance) … and last, but certainly not least, open your goddamned letters with your friggin’ fingers, the best, most useful tools you’ll ever own.

Stupid, stupid product. Is it really worth the environmental damage and a portion of your mortgage / rent to own this?

Finally, what kind of “Therapy” is Apartment Therapy proposing here? How does it help any of us declutter and make better use of our space to own a couple of decorative, largely worthless objects?

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Stupid product: candle plates

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Minimalism, Object Diet, stupid product

Apartment Therapy is shilling “candle plates” — little glass plates that sit underneath candles and vases. While they do indeed look good, products like this are pure clutter that add no utility. The manufacturing, packaging, distribution, storage and maintenance of these products is also costly and bad for the environment. It’s a product that creates net negative utility for the world.

But Apartment Therapy’s Matt believes that they do serve a purpose. He writes, “Any water I might have missed while filling the vase gathers where the vase and the coaster meet.”

Buying a new piece of consumer kruft just because you’re too lazy to take a towel to the bottom of a flower vase? That’s why our environment is in trouble.

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Typed from the thick of rush-hour traffic

Posted by Vladimir Cole under sprawl

In addition to my update to the prior post, this one’s also typed while in traffic. I’m stopped. Still stopped. Still stopped. It’s raining… ooh some movement … ooh … moved 15 feet! Stopped again. Stopped some more. Now crawling and crawling some more. Moved 30 feet! Oh my goodness! Stopped again. It’s raining. The fellow in front of me has his blinker on but the lane to his right hasn’t budged enough for him to get over. How I wish it would… because then I could move forward! Still stopped. Still stopped. Still stopped behind this dude with his blinker on. Movement! Holy movement! I moved a good 10 car lengths just now. Oh my gosh! My exit is a mere quarter mile away! But it’s not really my exit. It’s just an exit from this particular stretch of bad traffic to another, altogether different, altogether the same stretch of bad traffic! Still stopped. Crept forward a foot. Still stopped. Still stopped. I realize now that I should have stored “still stopped” in the copy-paste buffer. Still stopped. The sun is shining cruelly down upon us even as the rain continues to patter the parking lot of cars on the 520. Crawling forward. Crawling some more. Stopped now again. The radio (c89.5) plays: “I can’t help it, can’t help myself. I can’t help it, got no self control, there’s nothing else to do.” Well, truer words never sung. I can’t do a damned thing right now, and this little mindless distraction is keeping me sane. More movement. More movement. Close enough now to my exit that I should consider shutting down. If I were to die behind the wheel right now, my car would creep forward at just the right speed. My death might not be discovered for MILES. That would probably creep the cop out that pulled me over. Would my surviving relatives have to pay the ticket? Or would the Redmond police forgive? Likely they’d add another infraction for driving while incapacitated. Ahh, we are creeping forward at an ever unslower pace. Movement is strong. I shall save and post now. LIVE FROM REDMOND!

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Thank you, Redmond

Posted by Vladimir Cole under sprawl
  • 25 minutes: commute time via the 545 bus from Seattle’s Capitol Hill to the Overlake Transit Center in Redmond (a distance of about 17 miles — this should be the longest part of the commute)
  • 22 minutes: commute time via Microsoft Shuttle service from Overlake transit center to Millennium D, a few miles away (if you’re not local, you wouldn’t know that this is a maddening crawl through stoplights and bland corporate office parks, but now you do know that)
  • Reason: Redmond’s pro-sprawl policy that limits building height (and Microsoft’s tacit support of Redmond’s pro-sprawl policies through its decision to locate and remain in Redmond); if this were Manhattan, the commute from corporate lobby to my office desk would be mostly vertical and would involve only a few idle moments in an elevator
  • Further aggravation: I spend 1 to 3 hours per day just puttering around Redmond (going from meeting to meeting in disparate, far-flung buildings). If I were working in a reasonably dense urban environment, I’d instead spend 5 to 10 minutes taking the elevator from floor to floor. It’s demoralizing to feel that you’ve arrived “at work” only to spend an extra 1 to 3 hours getting where you need to go.
  • Result: one pissed off employee, many thousands of wasted man-hours commuting around the Microsoft Redmond campus, many dollars wasted on gasoline, vehicles, and shuttle services designed to move people around in this wasteland of sprawl.
  • Suggested fix: move more people to Bellevue and Seattle, where zoning laws allow office space to be stacked.

Disclaimer: my experience is not representative of the overall Microsoft experience. It just so happens that my immediate team is currently (and temporarily) spread across three buildings that are a handful of stoplight-infested, SUV-choked miles away from each other. It also happens that Redmond is a very, very poorly planned city and that a good portion of my coworkers are lucky enough to work outside of it.

Update from the thick of rush hour traffic (yes, it’s so slow that I can type on a laptop while driving — safely): it should be noted that I love my job, love the products I work on, and really am excited to get to work every single day. That’s why it’s so damned frustrating to suffer this particular commute. I’m seriously considering getting a sleeper sofa for the office just so that I can avoid the commute a few days a week.

Happy Spring, everyone!

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Stupid product: NXT shower gel

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Minimalism, Object Diet, stupid product

Annie Leonard caught wind of a horrendously wasteful product: NXT shower gel and does a great job explaining why the packaging for this product is an environemental travesty. In short, every single bottle of the shower gel includes an LED light, 2 to 3 triple-A batteries and “a mini-computer” in the packaging. As Annie notes, “Batteries have such toxic components that many cities ban their disposal in the regular garbage and require them to be dropped at a household hazardous waste facility. We’re supposed to be designing toxics out of our production systems!”

Right on.

But I wish she had questioned the need for shower gel in general. As I wrote in a comment on the Story of Stuff blog: Is shower gel really even necessary? To make it, manufacturers take a compact product like soap, add water, and THEN ship it around the world. It makes no sense to ship water since it’s plentiful in a shower environment. Why is shower gel even a category that deserves consumer support? A good bar of soap does a fine job of lathering a loofah or a sponge. Shower gel itself is a wasteful product category that shouldn’t even exist.

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NYC is the greenest place to live in all of America; Redmond ain’t

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

I regularly run into folks here in Seattle and Redmond who believe that they’re living in some sort of God-touched environmentally friendly wonderland, who believe that because they drop their polystyrene into a recycle bin they’re saintly, who — in short — live in a reality distortion field.

The Puget Sound region is an environmental disaster. Cars are ubiquitous, mindless consumption a way of life, and (worst of all) people aren’t cognizant that the disaster is of their own making.

Well, I don’t have the time to bang out a full rant on this topic, but not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. For now, I’m going to link to David Owen’s excellent article, “NYC is the Greenest City in America.” Please read it.

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Putting the apartment on a diet

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

I don’t claim to be the first to apply the word “diet” to the home, but I do think I’m one of a small population of folks who’re obsessively attempting to trim the fat that accumulates in all of our lives over time. That’s why it cheers me to see the inveterate consumerist gluttons over at Apartment Therapy start to feature more posts about object dieting, like this one.

Apartment Therapy’s Laure cites one of the basic tenets (”This means when one thing comes in, at least one must go out”) but the practical advice ends there. Hey Laure, how about avoiding Target in the first place?

Well, it’s a glimmer of hope. Apartment Therapy will of course continue to feature “beautiful” displays of clutter.

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Apartment in a box

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Uncategorized

This is fantastic. It’d be really nice to be able to fit everything I own into such a tiny cube.

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Letter to the editors of Metropolitan Home (March 2008)

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

Dear Editors,  

As I read the March 2008 issue of your magazine, I was struck by the inconsistency between Donna Warner’s anti-clutter screed (bravo) and the remainder of the magazine. On the one hand, Donna lauds closet-cleaning as a “discipline with mind-clearing, potentially life-altering results” and speaks of the potential to lighten her “soul and [her] brain” through the discipline of clutter reduction. Meanwhile, in the very same editorial she talks about renting a storage cube, makes the pro-clutter assumption that closets are a way of life, and (of course) edits a magazine that features the following clutter-kruft:

  • Pages of SUV advertising (the better to haul clutter home!)
  • Advertising for storage solutions (buying closet solutions simply increases the density of objects one can store without  

Clutter-reduction (and green living) isn’t just an effort to clean out your closet now and then. It must involve re-examination of the entire ecosystem of clutter-inducing products. SUVs, external storage cubes, closet solutions, and magazines that thrive on helping marketers push consumption are contributors to the problem of overconsumption, not solutions to it.  

(Sent to metletters@hfmus.com and published here because they’re never going to publish it.)

 A longer list of Metropolitan Home’s hypocrisy, just for the web:

  • Page 27: around a Saarinen dining table, four black chairs, with legs. Saarinen designed the table specifically to “clear up the slum of legs in the U.S. home” and here it is being surrounded by 16 legs (where just four would have done). Granted, this is just aesthetic clutter, and not the sort to get riled up about. A chair is a single object whether it’s got one leg or four.

  • Page 28: a throw blanket draped over an ottoman. Consumption pervades these magazines. Nobody needs throw blankets on ottomans. Savvy object dieters would simply use a blanket that can be used on more than just an ottoman.

  • Page 30: “Why settle for an ordinary can opener when you can have the graphic toucan?” I’ll tell you why: (1) it’s already been manufactured and transported to my kitchen. (2) The can opener I’ve got right now works. I’m supposed to throw out what I’ve got and replace it with something that may or may not work as well (but certainly no better)? That’s the sort of needless consumption Metropolitan Home pushes.

  • Page 32: Acrylic house numbers, at $100 each. Because my house doesn’t already have a number? Doubtful. Purchasing these numbers will create scrap for no extra functional benefit.

  • Page 36: Metropolitan Home notes that “it takes about 22 gallons of oil to make one truck tire.” Great! So why encourage readers to replace their can openers? Doesn’t a truck have to literally burn rubber and oil in order to transport that new can opener to reader doors? How many can openers were sold as a result of this product placement? How many gallons of oil were burned transporting these newfangled can openers to reader doors? Metropolitan Home harms the environment, even though they pretend to care about how much oil goes into making a truck tire.

  • Page 50: A recipe for risotto. Ok, fine. Risotto is tasty. But Metropolitan Home says, “Making Risotto can be intimidating, but you can make it fast — and foolproof — if you use a pressure cooker.” Oh… now I get it. I’ve got to buy a pressure cooker (new object alert!) just to make a dish that even the least educated of Italian women have been making just fine in normal pots for centuries. Of course Metropolitan Home doesn’t miss a beat on the product placement, writing, “I recommend models from WMF, Kuh-Rikon and Fissler.” Risotto does not require special equipment. This is product sales literature masquerading as recipe.

  • Page 81: “This issue of Met Home is full of tips on how to achieve a sense of spatial abundance.” My tip: stop reading magazines that push SUVs, pressure cookers, special can openers, throw blankets, and other redundant, low-utility garbage.

  • Page 85: One of these so-called “small spaces” that is proferred as evidence of space mastery is full of bric-a-brac with absolutely no utility. Ther’es a porcelain dog, some sort of decorative cat-o-nine-tails, a fluffy, impractical rug, Chihuly glass (I do love the chandalier) and tons of gauzy drapes. This isn’t minimalist or utilitarian. It’s posh, expensive, and difficult to maintain.

  • Page 117: A brilliant eating surface with storage-under-glass… Very nice. The organization of the objects stored underneath is artful, the surface can makes a great dining table, and of course the objects themselves each have utility. However, many of the items are the sort of single-use kitchen implements that I despise. A garlic press, nutmeg grater, hurb chopper and lemon zester are shown. Worthless.

  • Page 144 (back page) takes the cake: “Sometimes, just one isn’t enough: these designing objects come in perfectly fitted multiples.” Good job. Why buy just one entirely useless* object when you can buy several at once?

 * Does art have utility? Yes. But art that has other function is better than art alone. Saarinen’s tables, for instance, are both beautiful to look at and eat at.

Of course it must be noted that I’m a hypocrite too. I did purchase the magazine, thereby generating a sale that will be factored into future demand forecasts. My behavior (in aggregate) is why tires and oil is burned transporting magazines like this to store shelves. I should have at least waited and purchased the rag used.

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Object junk food

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

Here’s a great example of the sort of worthless object that American consumers have been trained to purchase. As donuts are to a food diet, this crap is to an object diet.

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“Subscribing” to gadgets

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

New York Times’ Saul Hansell correctly identifies the sad fact that many of us are, in fact, now on gadget subscriptions, writing:

“To stay sane, any consumer needs to think of digital technology as a subscription rather than a product. In the old days, you could buy a typewriter, television or a camera, and it might well last decades. Computers have been different. Once you buy a PC, you are really signing up to upgrade it on a regular basis. Now digital consumer electronics are the same. Your camera, video disc player, and even your television are now likely to become obsolete in just a few years.”

But Hansell doesn’t see a problem with that. He’s actually suggesting that we shift our perceptions of gadget consumption so that such consumption becomes more palatable! By resigning ourselves to the fact that many of the gadgets we buy today will be outdated a year or two from now, we explain away our increased consumption. Hansell writes, “Accept this idea of consumer electronics as a subscription and you can defend profligate spending….”

Those of us on an object diet need to be wary of falling into sleazy mental accounting tactics designed to make more consumption OK. Instead, we should listen to our discomfort and realize, perhaps, that it’s OK to reign in our consumerist tendencies, even if it means not having the latest gadget.

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You know it’s bad when…

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Uncategorized

You know it’s bad when all of a sudden college friends who’ve been working in investment banks for nearly 10 years are flooding you with invites to connect on LinkedIn. These people have shunned the internet’s most popular sites for years, and now that they finally fear for their jobs, they’re *finally* getting around to tending to their networks.

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Function dysfunction

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

Writes Allison Arieff, “Obsolescence used to be a dirty word; now it’s something to be pursued. I-pods — the be-all, end-all design object — feature batteries with short shelf lives that are hard to replace, and so rarely are…”

Of course there’s a difference between malicious design (planned obsolescence that breaks working products so that customers have to purchase replacements) and simple new product innovation. Sometimes a better mousetrap does come along.

Unfortunately, Arieff appears to be confused by the distinction between malicious, planned obsolescence and new technology innovation. Innovation is messy. It’ll result in new features introduced (the QWERTY keyboard on phones) that conflict with old ways of doing business (the memnonic for phone numbers). Innovation may be wasteful in the short run, but in the long run it should yield greater efficiency and productivity while lowering ecological impact. One example: being able to search the web for an address while mobile (a unique opportunity that QWERTY in phones unlocks) has saved me miles, minutes, and gallons of gas that would have been spent wandering.

Arieff should have focused on the sort of obsolescence that does nothing to advance products but instead seems designed to create replacement demand.

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Midcentury modern living is like a doctor-imposed diet

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

In this WSJ story, reporter Terry Teachout takes Midcentury Modern architecture to task for being too difficult:

  • “the Farnsworth House is beloved of architects and art critics … but its transparent walls are cruelly unforgiving of the clutter of everyday life”
  • “That’s what’s wrong with the more extreme forms of modern architecture: Too often they tell you how to live, instead of helping you live the way you want.”

My take:

Perhaps we need to be told how to live by a class of people (architects, designers) who are “deeply considering” what it means to live, else the only people telling us how to live are marketers who sell us the products that clutter our lives and enslave us to mortgages that don’t so much cover housing but storage for all of the stuff we’ve purchased that we didn’t need.

In other words, mid-century modernism is an antidote to a consumerist lifestyle that fills our houses with consumer detritus that we never really needed in the first place.

The decluttered lifestyle imposed on us by modernist architects and the houses they build may be the housing equivalent of a doctor-mandated diet. In the same way that doctors tell us to cut back on (food) consumption, modernist architects encouraged us to cut back on object consumption by creating a space that had no room for such excess. Architects are looking after our own best interests when they prescribe living spaces that clash with rampant consumption.

Midcentury Modern houses are one way to fight back against a cluttered, branded, object-overloaded life.

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WSJ: The struggle to contain ourselves

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

In a largely uncritical WSJ story about the storage & organization industry ($6B in annual revenues to contain and/or organize crap that people shouldn’t have purchased in the first place!), there were a few highlights:

  •  ”contemporary Americans control the largest amount of private housing space per person in the history of urban civilization”
  • “From construction materials to excess furniture and toys, storage of material goods has become an overwhelming burden for most middle-class families, UCLA anthropology professor Jeanne Arnold says” [Damn right — but I’d have expected the WSJ to attempt to quantify the storage costs.]
  • ‘”We’ve been through an orgy of getting, and now there’s an orgy of storing,” says Perry Reynolds, vice president of marketing at the International Housewares Association in Rosemont, Ill.’ [How about an orgy of getting rid of?]
  • “[A] 58-year-old Episcopal priest in Buffalo, N.Y., used to throw all of her ornaments, lights and nativity scenes into cardboard boxes, hoping nothing broke. But now she plans to sort her ornaments by color, material and design and store them in sturdy plastic ornament containers with cardboard dividers. She has latched totes in Christmas colors for the lights. And the wrapping paper will go in a waterproof, crushproof tubular contraption made specifically for wrapping paper.” [Talk about false idols. Why store any of this junk at all? If she weren’t completely entangled in consumerism, she wouldn’t need the wrapping paper either!]
  • And finally, an anecdote about someone who is begginning to understand that there’s a problem with buying things to store things: ‘Shannon Silsby … was shopping at the Container Store and picked up a $19 Heavy-Duty Triple Storage Bin for balls and a “beautiful” box for her desk for overflow paper. But when she got to the checkout counter, Ms. Silsby removed both items. “I don’t need this,” she told herself. “I’m trying to simplify my life, and this is just adding more to it.”‘ Kudos to you, Shannon. How about trying a full object diet?

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Object diet principle: use transactional storage (aka: how I learned to stop packratting and love the thrift store)

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

Some years ago I heard a story on NPR (which I cannot find now) about “Transactional Memory.” The idea can be summed as follows: we all cede that our friends, relatives or coworkers are more knowledgeable about certain topics than we are. I know, for instance, that my doctor friend, a generalist, can be trusted to provide the final answer in a debate about emergency room procedures. I also know that my transit nut friend can be relied upon to provide me with the definitive answer for any Seattle transit question I might think to ask. Similarly, I’m the go-to guy for friends questions about pizza. I entrust the wine list at restaurants to my wife, and I let my tax accountant make the changes he thinks necessary to my tax forms.

I have not bothered to learn some things because I know that I can transact for that knowledge if and when I need it. That transactional memory is available to me when I need it. What’s more, I never had to try to learn it all. I’d be horribly unfocused and dilletanttish if I were to try to learn about everything I’m curious about. Focus is good.

So how about transactional storage? Right now, most of us insist on storing everything we might possibly need in a home setting in our homes. Do most of us really need to buy our own set of skis? Might rental skis work just as well? Do most of us really need to dedicate petabytes of storage to MP3s? Might a service like Pandora work just as well? And why is it really necessary to have closets full of clothing when we wear the same few items over and over.

What we should do instead, and what I’m suggesting is a principle of the object diet, is use transactional storage. The neighborhood thrift store has a ready supply of lightly-used shirts when I tire of the few I have. It’s also got plenty of stemware, for those times when I might need to temporarily bulk up on wine glasses for a party. When I finish using those things, I can donate them back to the thrift store and write off the value of the donation on my taxes.

It’s not just thrift that can serve as transactional storage. An always-on net connection replaces the need for a dictionary. Party rental stores have the tablecloths, place settings, and cutlery I need for my next party. Home Depot rents out belt sanders, chainsaws, and shopvacs. The library loans books, the mani/pedi salon replaces the need for manicure tools and 40 bottles of nail polish, and a maid service can replace the need for cleaning supplies, vacuum cleaners, ironing boards, and other accoutrements of house cleaning.

Using transactional storage will allow the object dieter to reclaim space. So long as he puts that newly reclaimed space to good use, he’s moving in the right direction with his object diet, and has taken another step towards minimalism. Sure, some of these things (manicurists, maids, oil changers, etc) are more expensive on a per-use basis, but are they really more expensive from a total cost of ownership perspective?

Maybe. Once the cost of the mortgage has been allocated to the cubic footage that that closetful of cleaning supplies takes up, it may not be frugal to do it all yourself. My condo cost me over $500 per square foot. If I could live with 100 fewer square feet (not an unreasonable reduction in space if I’ve been a good object dieter), that’s a significant savings, some of which I shouldn’t mind spending on transactional storage solutions.

Most storage “solutions” mask clutter by throwing it into makeshift closets. Transactional storage moves the expensive clutter out of the home and into a business where it can be purchased when and only when it’s required.

We already readily concede certain objects belong in someone else’s hands. We transact for gym equipment (going to a gym, rather than maintaining one at home), we go to bowling allies rather than build home lanes (this sounds obvious, but regulation bowling alleys are only 207.5 square feet in size; including garages, many homes dedicate more than 200 square feet to closets and other storage), and we rent time on planes rather than own our own.

Why shouldn’t we extend our use of transactional storage and own less? Good opportunities:

  • Zipcar or Flexcar instead of actual car ownership (huge savings potential)
  • Ski and other sports equipment rentals (kayaks, weights, surfboards)
  • Movies (just use Netflix or Blockbuster — why have shelves or closets stuffed with media?)
  • Other? (Please comment!)

Of course, it’s not possible for suburbanites to pop down to the local store whenever they need something. That’s yet another mark against suburban dwelling: it encourages packratting and object hoarding because there’s no strong infrastructure in support of transactional storage. The local library might be 15 or 20 miles away, and it might not hold the same hours. Suburban dwelling also mandates car ownership, nixing car-substitute services such as Flexcar. That doesn’t mean suburbanites can’t jettison some of the consumer cruft they store, but it makes it a lot more difficult.

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NYT: “A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves”

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

The New York Times covers the nation’s unhealthy clutter problem, extracting this great quote from an expert on the subject:

‘”Measures [to reduce clutter by purchasing storage solutions] “are based on the concept that this is a house problem,” said David F. Tolin, director of the anxiety disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Yale. “It isn’t a house problem,” he went on. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.”’

Buying plastic bins and organizers at the Container Store to deal with clutter problems is slathering on perfume to mask body odor, sweeping dirt under the rug, caking on foundation to mask pimples, and wearing control-top pantyhose. The problem is masked and sometimes excacerbated by these attempts to control it.

Storage solutions have their place, but the best way to reduce clutter is to get it out of the home. Period. Get rid of it!

Speaking of… right after I submit this post, I’m going to go pick out five objects from my wardrobe and put them in a bin near the door for drop off at Value Village (a large thrift store in my neighborhood).

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Object diet principle: multi-purpose objects trump single-purpose objects

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

If an object can serve multiple functions, it’s more useful than an object that serves just one. A knife, for instance, doesn’t just “cut.” It chops, dices, slices, minces, tenderizes, scores, peels, shreds, juliennes, pierces, perforates, splays, chiffonades, batonnets, debones, cubes, filets, brunoises, pries, smashes, slashes, slits, and slays.

The folks over at Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, and the like, however, would rather you buy a garlic press, an egg slicer, a cheese slicer, and several dozen other specialized objects that do just one thing (but do it better or faster than most amateur chefs could hope to do).

It’s not just kitchenwares have proliferated. The cosmetics counter is full of creams and distillations for every zone on the face. No longer content to use mere “face wash,” women purchase a variety of product. Some for the nose, some for the eyes, some for the brows, some for the cheeks, the lips, the ears. Then there are the preparations (the peels, the exfoliations), and the tinctures that are put on by day-part (morning wash, night-mask, daytime moisturizer) and by climate. Some of this is legitimate. Most of it, however, could be replaced with a wash cloth, a fine bar of soap, and disciplined hygiene.

The object dieter seeks to replace single-purpose objects with multi-purpose objects. A few good, sharp knives work very well for most cooking tasks. I’ve given up on shaving cream (an entire product category built around removing one of soap’s many functions!) and have instead been lathering with a bar of unscented glycerine soap. My shaves are just as close.

The object dieter also makes sacrifices. There are some dishes that I won’t be able to make, thanks to my refusal to invest in specialized machinery. I’ll just have to purchase these foods from a local establishments; sausage links, dimsum, fresh squeezed vegetable juices, and Hello Kitty-shaped ice cubes are just a few of the things I’ll never make at home.

This isn’t simply minimalism. Minimalism can be used to describe an object that does just one function. This ridiculous “citrus squeezer,” from Williams Sonoma for instance, is designed so that it won’t be able to squeeze oranges. By some definitions of minimalism, that’s a success. I think that’s dumb and unsustainable.

True minimalism requires that one try to minimalize the total number of objects in one’s possession. In doing so, the following negative side-effects of object ownership are avoided or minimalized:

  • manufacturing costs: as Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” rightly notes, the costs of consumption are legion. I won’t repeat Annie’s arguments. I’ll just refer to them.
  • consumption itself:  buying things costs money. That’s money that can purchase things that really matter: your kids’ education, early retirement, good healthcare, time with loved ones. The authors of Your Money or Your Life ask their readers to do an explicit conversion of dollars to time spent working for those dollars. Again, read the book; I won’t repeat those arguments either.
  • storage costs: kitchen cabinets don’t come cheap. If more cooks were to eschew gimmicky kitchen implements, they’d need fewer storage bins in the kitchen, and could avoid some of the cost of owning a fabulous chef’s toolshed. Similarly, a smaller wardrobe (fewer shoes, fewer belts, fewer ties) allows for a smaller closet. The overall effect of conscious consumption is a reduction in the largest storage cost of all: your mortgage. What percent of the average home is dedicated to storing stuff that’s used once a year? If all the superfluous crap were removed from the average home, people would have the same cubic volume for living while paying for a much, much smaller space. The effects continue! Thanks to the jumbo manses that we purchase to store all of our goods, we all own cars so that we can commute from our low-density neighborhoods to wherever work is. If everyone’s homes were reduced in size, density would naturally go up, car ownership down, and all of the deleterious effects of car ownership would also be diminished.
  • maintenance costs: it’s not just cars that cost significant money to maintain. Everything we own rots, breaks down, or loses function over time. Couches need to be reupholstered, lightbulbs changed, dishes replaced, paint touched up, carpet shampooed, animals dewormed and groomed, and so on. Every square foot of floor I pay a mortgage for must be swept, mopped, and kept in good condition. In fact, my condo charges me a monthly maintenance fee of about $.45 per square foot. There’s not an object (digital or physical) that doesn’t impose its maintenance costs on us, and these costs add up. Corporations have learned to think of their investments in technology on a “TCO,” or total cost of ownership basis. They no longer assess the cost to acquire a desktop computer for a worker, they now also assess the full lifetime cost of supporting that desktop, upgrading it, keeping it virus free, and keeping power flowing to it. More environmentally friendly corporations are even starting to consider the disposal and recycling costs. Individual consumers would do well to think of every purchase in this way. It might steer us towards lower-maintenance objects and away from fussy, expensive-to-maintain objects. Dry-clean-only clothing is a great example of a product category that needs to vanish. Hell, even stuff that requires ironing is too high-maintenance (if not for my wife’s clothing, I wouldn’t need to own an iron).
  • disposal costs: Annie Leonard says that some 90% of what we acquire in a given year ends up in a landfill. Buying bottled water creates disposal costs that would have never existed had the thirsty person opted for tap. Buying dainty containers of food vs. bulk containers of food increases the ratio of packaging-to-calories and imposes additional disposal costs on all of us. Again, if fewer objects were obtained in the first place, there’d be fewer down-the-line disposal costs as well.

This wasn’t intended to be a complete description of the object diet. I simply wanted to get one of the core tenets down: go multi-function. Specialization may create some convenience, but specialized objects drain money directly and – especially – indirectly.

Examples of single-function vs. multifunction opportunities:

  • clothing that can be layered (and unlayered) for use in summer and winter
  • room dividers that also serve as storage
  • using folded dish towels as trivets
  • using (screw-top) wine bottles as water containers
  • using face soap instead of shaving cream
  • carpooling (converts two or three cars that had been serving one person each to a single car that now serves multiple individuals)
  • the spork (in fast food situations, this is a tremendous invention)
  • composting organic garbage for use in a garden (gives new use to refuse)
  • sleeper sofas
  • toaster oven-microwave combo units
  • washer-dryer combo units

I’ll build the rest of the list from comments, if there are any.

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NYT: What’s your consumption factor?

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel (a book I enjoyed very much), penned an op-ed in Today’s New York Times that points out how completely unsustainable American consumption levels are. It’s a short, quick read.

I love that this topic is going mainstream.

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The Object Diet

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Object Diet

I’ve been increasingly obsessed with the idea of an “object diet” — restricting the total number of objects I acquire, own/maintain, and ultimately create demand for through ancillary activities.

More on this soon.

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@ wedding, NYC

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Location Update

Thursday through Sunday I’ll be in the old stomping grounds (Manhattan) for a very good friend’s wedding. I’m very much looking forward to dinner at Peter Luger’s and all of the other events we’ve got planned for the weekend (kayaking, go-kart riding, chicken dancing, etc.). If I could write my own itenerary, the trip would also involve pizza pilgrimages to Grandaisy Bakery (SoHo) and Pepe’s (New Haven), but … maybe another time.

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@ Gamefest, downtown Seattle

Posted by Vladimir Cole under Location Update

This Monday and Tuesday I’ll be at Gamefest in downtown Seattle as part of the sizable Xbox team present. It’ll be nice to have a four-minute commute for a couple of days this week. Give me a ring if you’re in town for the event and would like to meet up for lunch, dinner, or beverages.

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