Football: A global conversation?

This blog has been in hibernation for several months as I finished eating my way from Kingsland Road to Stamford Hill and tried to construct a reasonably sensible first draft of my thesis. Nearly 35 pits stops and 70,000 words later I am beginning to think about posting the backlog of stuff around the food project. So here goes for post number one... my experience at Tropicalia, a Brazilian café at Stamford Hill, where I dropped in for a can of Guarana during the world cup.



I don’t think I have ever eaten or drunk anything Brazilian before. I am not hungry, so I decide just to have a drink. I stand at the fridge unsure of what would be the ‘most’ Brazilian. The woman behind the counter asks if she can help. I explain I am looking to try something that is typically Brazilian, immediately she suggests a can of Guarana, which she tells me, is more popular than Coke at home. To confirm this she asks her young son’s two school friends, who are eating their tea at one of the tables. They agree, and are sharing a can as we speak. I sit down to drink it and quite enjoy the cherry flavour, though it is quite sweet. Another woman enters, orders food and also has a Guarana. I can see what she meant, it certainly is popular. A television sits on top of the chiller cabinet that is stocked full of Brazilian foodstuffs. France are playing South Africa in the final match in the group stages of the World Cup. I ask the owner if she thinks Brazil will win, she shrugs, not seeming too confident. I suggest that, according to the newspapers, no one in Brazil likes Dunga. Ah Brazilians, she says, they never like the coach. 180 million of them and they each think they know the best team.

So, this made we wonder, is football a global conversation opener?



The late Bill Shankly said that ‘some people think football is a matter of life and death; I assure you, it’s much more serious than that’. Whether you believe that or not, there is no doubt that football is a global sport, and one of the easiest ways to start a conversation with someone you don’t know. FIFA, football’s international federation, has 208 countries as members. From Accra to Accrington Stanley, football is avidly watched, played and discussed, night and day, especially the English Premier League. I met a Moroccan guy in France recently. I only had to say the words Marouane Chamakh and voilà, our conversation flowed. So before you next go to some far flung outpost of the world, check which players from Latvia, Ecuador or South Korea, or wherever, play for a team near you and I guarantee you that uttering their name will make an instant connection with your hosts.

What did EWG do for me?

Michael Gallagher, organiser of EWG has asked all the participants to write some stuff about how our involvement with EWG has affected our ongoing research and practice. So here goes...

At the time, I didn't quite realise how much of an affect it was going to have. It was actually only at the point I was writing up the first draft of my thesis (yes, this happened over the summer, hence the distinct lack of blog posts) that I really reflected on the impact of the event in any great detail. Somehow, it seems to have imperceptibly shifted my approach—both to place and also to my research...

Through my engagement with the EWG workshop I began to think about the potential residing in a more ‘immediate’ experience of place. As a designer I have always been taught to research the brief thoroughly in a relatively traditional way, and to develop a range of ideas that are capable of being defended or reinforced by that research. In Edinburgh I was surrounded by sound, video and performance artists, and one in particular who was running drumsticks along railings just to see what it sounded like, jumping onto their bike to film themselves cycling to a derelict Wild West town south of the city, and recording howling dogs to create a canine reworking of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti Western soundtrack. Being literally out of my usual place, and surrounded by people working in a different way enabled me to shift my thinking and approach slightly. This approach, primarily using walking, perhaps wasn’t as extreme as those listed above, but it became both more hands on and, paradoxically, a way of letting go more.

Both of the small projects (A Haptic Journey and Old Town) executed post EWG derive, in a sense, from a ‘gut instinct’ of Edinburgh. There was no in depth research, no interviews, and limited exploration of a wider context. It was, and to an extent remains, an immediate response to my surroundings and my experience of them. This is not how I usually work—other design test projects tell more peopled stories of place, utilise diverse types of content and develop more obviously complex narratives. However, these are built over time, and often with participants, but I was in Edinburgh for one week only. This time frame effectively became a parameter that led to a productive exploration of the value of improvisation, immediacy and experience within the context of the act of walking.

At the point I returned from Edinburgh I only had one more design test project to complete before finishing the practice, and it is clear to me that my experience there, and the work produced from it, informed this final project. Food Miles, although ultimately a complex, intertextual weaving of different types of information, has its roots in an experiential, experimental exploration of place. To experience Hackney through the food of its diverse cultures brings a multi-sensory approach to the research. Tilley, drawing on phenomenological thinking, suggests that ‘the body is the medium through which we know place’ (2004:25), and that ‘such experience is always synaesthetic’ (2004:221). Whereas up till now I had predominantly focused on sight and sound in my approaches—with touch explored in one of the Edinburgh books—through taste and smell I was now bringing my full range of senses to the exploration of place. It was smell that drew me to the idea for the design test project in the first place, for it is what I noticed most as I walked along the road charting the different commercial premises. It can be a powerful, sensory way of experiencing place as Zawieja (2010:141) captures in her description of Mare Street, Hackney.

Mare Street cuts through East London like a diagram. In a straight line from north to south one smell follows another. Fried chicken, sweet potatoes, salt fish pie, banana cake. Spring rolls, lemon grass, soy sauce, fish sauce. Cumin, ginger, dal, coriander, cinnamon, saffron. Lamb, yoghurt, sesame, mint, hummus, thyme.

Through this research I was literally ingesting and digesting place, and whilst the eventual design piece did not attempt to solely represent this physical exploration, as the EWG Old Town book did, this new, more immediate, bodily approach clearly informed my thinking and the development of the idea.

Throughout these projects there is perhaps a thread subtly appearing that is about ‘letting go’ of one’s own research journey. To have no preconceived idea of destination, or perhaps in research terms, no hypothesis, might be seen in some more positivist circles as foolish, but in this research it has been entirely productive. To open myself up to exploring places without knowing where I might be going, to make rubbings instinctively without questioning ‘why’, to engage in unstructured, open-ended, often unplanned, conversations, has taken me on a journey that I could not have anticipated. It brings to mind the flaneurie or dérives of the Surrealists and the Situationists, and several of Bruce Mau’s (1998) statements from his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth:

Allow events to change you
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

Process is more important than outcome
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

Drift
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

Engaging in this way with regard to place also seems appropriate, as it is always ongoing, always undetermined and unfinished (Massey 2005) therefore, there is no one ‘truth’ to establish.

Whilst I won't talk specifically about the design of the two EWG inspired test projects, as I have covered that in previous posts, I will say the the hands on approach fostered by EWG also fed into the work. Old Town especially, developed through a physical interaction with the materials used and would not have developed in the way it has without a ‘hands on’ engagement with paper and scalpel. Such immediate, often low-tech, types of experiments and prototyping bring into play Schön’s (1987) notion of reflection-in-action—a more immediate type of analysis executed during the process of making. This form of reflection may only be recorded in brief note form on a prototype, or perhaps not even that as one may realise a potentially useful development within the actual process of making, enabling a swift change of direction that is recorded through the adjustment of the design of the prototype rather than in words.

However, a low-tech approach does not have centre on pre-production prototypes. It can be seen as an accessible way of approaching the geo/graphic design process—one that is inclusive to both disciplines, rather than just graphic designers who may have access to specialist printing facilities. Also, low-tech doesn’t have to equate with low production values. For example, both EWG books use 80gsm ivory coloured paper purchase from Staples and are printed using a £60 black and white laser printer. The colour of the paper echoes much of the brick I encountered in Edinburgh and the thinness of the paper leads to some show through, which I think adds to the sense that is more to reveal behind each page. The original rubbings for A Haptic Journey were done onto the ordinary paper of cheap sketchbooks with a wax crayon, and the facsimile map was scanned using a £70 desktop scanner. Binding has been done by hand after consulting instructions from the web. There is nothing here that is prohibitively expensive or difficult to get hold of. Perhaps the perception of a phrase like ‘artist’s book’ conjures up the kind of limited editions that cost thousands of pounds and are held in the special collections of national galleries. However, this idea of a limited edition can be used in a positive way—equipment such as photocopiers, scanners, A4 paper and printers, found in most academic departments regardless of discipline, can be used to generate work that goes beyond the traditional use of such tools.

So, somehow, perhaps by a strange process of osmosis, my research and practice has developed dramatically through my engagement with EWG, and for me, it is that strangely productive conundrum of being both more hands on and yet more hands off that has affected the greatest change.

One last hurrah

Unbelievably I find myself about to start my last test project of the PhD. The newsagents' window project started to pick up little traces of different languages and cultures and this is something I want to focus on more in my final piece of work. But what exactly to do?

To start with I decided to take the stretch of road that goes right from the junction between Old St and Kingsland Rd, right up to the Stamford Hill and Amhurst Park junction. This stretch pretty much runs from as far south in Hackney as you get to as far north as you get. On the way it also takes in Kingsland High St, Stoke Newington Rd and Stoke Newington High St. I started by simply walking stretches of the roads with my camera, and the first thing I noticed was the pockets of particular types of restaurants and food shops—Vietnamese towards Shoreditch, Turkish in Dalston and Stoke Newington and Jewish at Stamford Hill. In between these main concentrations were others—Caribbean, Ethiopian, Brazilian, Polish, Chinese, English greasy spoons and English cafe bars of an all together more gentrified type.

Clearly the only thing to do was to eat my way from one end of Hackney to the other!



So I began to eat, but after two or three days I thought perhaps I should run this by my holy trinity of professors as they were blissfully unaware of my plans. Immediately I was asked 'how does this fit in with your research?'

Well...I said, I suppose it fits with the ethnographic methodology, and am I doing some observation/field notes stuff, which is something I said I would do and hadn't really yet as I hadn't had a particular reason/focus to do it for. It will be good to have that to work with as I guess the issue of 'translating' the field notes and data into some kind of final 'text' is at the heart of the research, and will be something geographers/ethnographers will be able to relate to. I also think it is a subject matter that is quite relevant to Hackney and the many other places that have a multi-cultural mix of people. I suppose it also tests a different kind of 'relationship' with the field - I am participating, but it is more 'removed' than the stuff book, where I engaged with a few people over the course of a few weeks & months, having to build up relationships. However, as I am chatting to waiters and asking about foodstuffs, etc, it is more in depth than the overhearing conversations. In a way, it is the middle of the idea of a macro to micro view again. It is also, like the Edinburgh books, a very experiential and immediate way of relating to place in terms of the research process—it puts me physically right in the midst of the everyday and perhaps is a more usual experience of place, and therefore will give me content to work with that gets towards a 'sense of place' in a slightly different way to some of the other projects. So I think it works well as another project to test the front end of the geo/graphic design process in terms of ways of engaging with, and, researching and recording, place.

With regard to the specific graphic design element, I guess I don't know yet exactly what it will turn into, it may even become more than one thing. However, I think it will be interesting to play an editing role with data I have generated, rather than that I have gathered from other people - I am thinking two things here - a reflexive awareness of my own presence in the text, but also just a plain old 'is this interesting enough' take on it. One thing I am thinking about is creating a piece of work that brings together a range of different bits of writing - observations from the field by me, and related social/cultural historical texts, so it will be a challenge to weave these in successfully, thinking about hierarchy, meaning, narrative and Ingold and Mermoz's thoughts on the page and typography. I think there might also be something in there about mapping. Not that I may make maps, but that I am dealing with data that is spatial in relation to the pockets of different types of restaurants along the roads, but also spatial in terms of the communities roots in Vietnam, Turkey or wherever. It might be interesting if the piece or one of them ends up exploring some more maplike graphics but not in maps - I guess that will also then link to the Edinburgh book and the little map books. There is, for me something very seductive about 'mapness' and maybe this could be interesting to incorporate/test. I am sure as I start to work with the 'data' more things will emerge, but I am not sure I can plan to test something particular graphically (other than the broad things I have said above) as that would kind of prejudice the design process.



So, 10 food and drink stops in, and I am starting to sign off my emails as 'Fat Al' and am attempting to get to the gym more often to counter the calorific effects. I shall start to post some of my experiences shortly. Maybe I'll also have some kind of weighometer going on also!

Closely kerned pairs

So many posts to post and so little time. I have been thinking about starting a regular item called 'closely kerned pairs' for a while. I see it as the graphic design equivalent to 'separated at birth.' I shall start what could be a series (but then again probably won't be as graphic designers aren't very recognisable) with my esteemed Professor, Phil Baines.



Surely he makes a closely kerned pair with this tricky Dutch customer, don't you think? ...



That'll be Arjen Robben, of Holland and Bayern Munich, for those of you not interested in football.

Newsagents' windows

The final part in the 'stuff' trilogy, and the macro as opposed to the micro view, this project was inspired by some of my very first photographs and explorations of Hackney. I was amused on discovering diametrically opposed advertisements placed next to each other in the windows of Newsagents—adverts for 'massage', next to adverts for Christian meditation groups. I was also struck by stereotypical divides in some of the content—Stoke Newington Church Street=psychotherapy, singing lessons and retro sofas for sale, Upper Clapton=massage.





These initial, and yes, superficial, observations made me wonder what I would discover if I undertook a wider analysis of private advertisements placed in newsagents' windows across Hackney. Within social science research it would seem that it was something that hadn't been researched, other than within the wider context of the selling of secondhand goods. They seemed to me a visible site of exchange, one that gave you a microcosmic sense of all the 'stuff' circulating throughout the borough.

Some of the advertisements also had a pleasing handwritten quality, in particular many of the massage ads used chunky marker pens, often on flourescent cards. Was this a kind of branding strategy at work?

But I needed to develop some kind of method to aid my analysis. As Hackney is a large borough there was no way it was going to be practical to assess all the shops that had ads in their windows—my deadline says September 30 2011, and I think that would keep me occupied till well beyond then. I needed some way of sampling the shops in order to make the task manageable. The Freecycle project had proved relatively easy in that respect as I was able to take one week of messages per month, over a period of six months. However, dealing with an unknown number of shops and advertisements within a relatively large geographical space was more complex. One thing the Freecycle project did provide was a sense that people tended to use the letter(s) and first number of their postcode (E5 or N16 for example) as a way of making it easy for other people to get a rough idea of where the item was. It also gave a clear indication that the more 'active' areas of Hackney in relation to stuff were E5, E8, E9, and N16. N4, N1, EC1 and EC2 are partly in Hackney, but they are perhaps more closely related to Haringey, Islington and the City, and made little impact on the Freecycle stats, so I chose to leave them out of the newsagents analysis.

My first attempt to identify the particular shops within the postcode areas seems a little pseudo scientific and a bit stupid now. I simply took a map of Hackney, outlined all the small postcode areas N16 6, N16 7, N16 8, etc, and located the rough centre of each area as the place in which to locate the nearest shop and advertisements. Obviously I did miss out the large expanses of park and marshland, as I was pretty sure most shops would be in residential areas. In my defence, I wasn't convinced that I would necessarily find a shop near this point, nor that it would be representative of that small area. For example, the centre method left Stamford Hill junction out of the equation, even though I knew it to be well populated with shop windows containing adverts.

Still, off I set on my bike. It became fairly apparent quite quickly that many of my defined 'centres' were certainly not centres of activity in relation to ads in windows. Indeed, many of them didn't have a shop visible nearby and I was reduced to cycling the streets in order to try and find one. At this point the 'science' of the method went totally out of the window as I set off in whatever direction I fancied, probably in relation to which side of the road I was on!

So, back to the drawing board. The 'inhuman' postcode boundary evident on a map does not give a coordinate that relates to the use of place in everyday life. I looked at using the main thoroughfares as a way of defining the shops, Kingsland Rd, Mare St, etc, but many of them were borders for the postcode areas, so if I wanted to retain the area definition established by Freecycyle, that wasn't going to work. I then went back to look at the first few photos that I had taken to see if anything was evident in them that could help me define my method. I realised that both the Upper Clapton and Stoke Newington Church St shots had been taken in areas that were very close to a local Post Office. I used to live round the corner from the Upper Clapton Post Office on Mount Pleasant, and I knew it to be a well used office, that seemed to be a part of the local community. For example, on pension days, a queue would form, predominantly of older ladies, well before opening time, and it seemed to be part of their weekly routine to use this waiting time to share their news and perhaps discuss the local gossip. Post Offices seemed like they could be away to go. After the swathes of cuts there certainly wouldn't be too many sites to research and it would seem likely that the ones that were left were in areas that also had well used local shops. Within my four main postcode areas I identified 15 Post Offices. They were reasonably equally spread in relation to size of area apart from E5 which only has two. But what can you do, them's the breaks for E5.

So, off I set on my bike again, and what do you know, it seemed to work, the first five post ofices I went to all had a shop or shops nearby with ads in the window. This journey started to throw up the occasional other method wrinkle to be smoothed. At 'Victoria Village', the shop that was closest to the Post Office with the most advertisements was a greengrocers. Should I branch out beyond Newsagents? I decided I should as what was important was the ads and the community, and if they used this shop as a prime site, then that was good enough for me. This proved to be a good decision in the end as some small supermarkets that sold food targeted towards specific cultures led me to find pockets of ads targeted at very particular communities, especially Polish and Chinese. These shops almost seemed to function as community noticeboards.

Occasionally anomalies would seem to crop up. The Post Office on Dunsmure Road was amongst a really well used set of local shops, in a relatively small road, within a Hasidic Jewish area of N16, however, there were no shops that had ads in the windows. I wonder if this is a cultural thing? I wonder if I'll ever find out? I did find other Post Offices without ads nearby, but these were either on large roads that did not encourage much pedestrian traffic, or were in small shopping centres that were quite deprived and seemingly not as well used. I also had to decide the cut off point in term sof distance from the Post Office, as some streets, Stoke Newington Church St, for example, has many shops that carried ads in the window. By trial and error I decided on approximately 75 metres, so not to include too many, but not to end up with too few for analysis.

Once I had got the shops all logged and photographed I now had to start thinking about what I was actually going to do with it all...and this is where it all started to go a bit Pete Tong...

As I was gathering the material I had started to think about looking at the types of things advertised, did they relate to areas in any way, were the ads handwritten or done on a PC, what kind of language do people use to sell their stuff, etc. Some of these became headings on my 'coding schedule'but as I went on I still felt I was getting no closer to identifying content of interest, never mind an idea for a design project to capture this content. Ithink perhaps one of the reasons was that the ads ar far less personal than the messages sent out via Freecycle. These ads are matter of fact, even most of the rooms for rent ones, there is little there of the person who is advertsisng, there is little in the way of personal narrative to pick up on. They remian adverts for unknown passers by as opopsed to the message a Freecycler sends to the group they belong to. As the ads were not analysed over time, there was also not an overall narrative of changes and fluctuations evident either. The data felt very 'empty' and quite superficial I suppose. But I still had to carry on, as even a 'failure' of a project offers useful insights as to how to do things differently next time.

I did discover certain types of ads had visual traits. The majority of rooms for rent (75%) were handwritten advertisements mostly using black biro, and massage ads were mostly handwritten (87.5%), often using marker pens. I did discover that there were seven times as many rooms for rent ads as there were 'man and van' ads—clearly a man with a van will never be out of work in Hackney. But all of these discoveries seemed to remain very quantitive in nature and not offer me anything to get my teeth into to in order to tell a story about Hackney through the design. In fact, in desperation I began to attempt to develop pieces of information deisgn (or perhaps misinformation as some of them weren't really very good) to solve my problem.

But what was the point, it was just the skeletal landscape of statistics.

I tried to start incorporating some of the ads within the information graphics, using the format of cards. But these didn't really hang together comfortably.













I then decided to try and use the stats I had generated, but visualise these by using the language of the ads themselves. So the percetanges were translated into proportions and these areas filled with typography taken from the ad cards. This began, at least, to have some human quality. Different languages were evident and different stances towards certain parts of the population—No DSS and DSS welcomed for example.



Although I am not particularly excited about the design of these posters, I think they are going to have to do as time is marching on. But the travails of the project have revealed things worth writing about. Also, perhaps I need to ask myself what is wrong with superficiality? It is one view of place, and a view that one would get if one just passes by ads like these. The engagement with them, unless, for example, you are looking for a room, is superficial. You are likely to just vaguely read them if waiting for a bus, or waiting to meet a friend. There is also a danger that to keep suggesting one should go beyond such representations to a 'deeper' representation of placeimplies that there is a 'truth' that can be found, when clearly place is a multi-faceted, polyphonic entity. If I had wanted to generate a more clearly 'peopled' project, then perhaps I should have contacted those who were advertising items and then I could have explored a more personal story of shared houses, dog breeding, and carpenters for hire or perhaps a more political story of women caught up in the sex trade. Not only did time preclude this, but I had set this project out in contrast to the personal explorations of the 'stuff' book. It was always to be the last of the trilogy, a less close up view. Perhaps its not surprising then, that what I have generated seems relatively impersonal. So, don't know why I was worrying, it was obviously meant to be like this from the outset. Doh!

Edinburgh Old Town

During my week in Edinburgh I was also fascinated by the alley ways—or to give them their proper names, closes, wynds and courts—of the Old Town. Along the Royal Mile, with the Castle at one end and Holyrood Palace at the other, a series of narrow alleyways lead off it in a disorienting, herringbone-like pattern. The closes and wynds are, in some places, no more than a few feet wide—the Old Town of Edinburgh retains its medieval layout.

As one walks along the Royal Mile, the entrances of the alleyways beckon the visitor in, giving glimpses of small courtyards or steps that suddenly transport one, as if by a magical shortcut, to a lower part of town.

Exploring these alleyways one constantly moves from dark to light and back again—from being enclosed by walls and a low roof, to standing under the open sky within a courtyard. The history seems tangible within the walls themselves, but is also overtly recorded in a series of plaques relating to names such as Fleshmarket Close or Old Stamp Office Close and residents of note.

I wanted to try and recreate this physical sense of exploring these spaces within the pages of a book. I noticed an antiquarian map seller on the Royal Mile, towards Holyrood, who sold facsimile versions of 1765 map engraving of the Old Town, where the negative space created by the closes and wynds was clearly detailed. I began to think about using the traditional form of the map in such a way as to place the reader 'within' the space rather than above it. Hopefully the photographs can give you a reasonably decent idea of how it works. If you click on the each photo you will get an enlarged image but then you will need to hit the back button on your browser to get back to the rest of this post.



I wanted to emphasise the disorienting nature of the Old Town and the sudden changes from light to dark, and back again. To this end, I scanned the map and began to enlarge sections of it, which I printed onto A4 paper. As I enlarged the images, they retained a sense of 'mapness', but also took on a more clearly geometric sense of negative and positive space.



I began to cut away small, self-contained sections within the pages I was printing. By folding the page in half, with the image on the outside, and binding the edges, it creates a 'hidden' space and it occurred to me I could reveal some of the events, buildings and characters who once brought to life these overcrowded streets within this space of the book.



Fragments of text are therefore visible through the cut away areas, and with the edges of the page perforated, the reader can reveal the full text if they so wish.







The scale of the map increases and decreases as one moves through the book, attempting to get a sense of moving from the main streets into the small closes.



Occasionally the pages are reversed and then blank, to imply the change from dark to bright sunlight as one moves towards and into the open courtyards.







The book is about looking, exploring and physically interacting—which is what Edinburgh engendered in me.

One thing that did also occur to me is that I think this book relates to the small mapbooks I made much earlier in the process of the PhD. Maybe its cheating to rework maps into other things, as the quality of 'mapness' is inevitably going to carry through into the reworking, but I think you can't go wrong—it'll always look lush because of that 'mapness'!

As with the other Edinburgh book, this 'mapbook' has developed from an immediate sense of place and a very basic physical interaction with the streets. I also think it couldn't have developed in the way it has without a physical interaction with the materials—paper and scalpel—used to make it. You can't really theorise about cutting random holes in paper (having said that, someone somewhere is probably doing a PhD on the very subject!) and making the text fit accordingly.

What I also like about these two books is not only their immediacy, but also their low-tech production values. They are both printed on 80gsm ivory coloured paper from Staples using a £60 black and white laser printer. The colour of the paper echoes much of the brick I encountered in Edinburgh and the thinness of the paper leads to some show through, which I think adds to the sense that is more to reveal behind each page. Rubbings were done onto ordinary paper with a wax crayon, the map was scanned on a £70 scanner. Binding has been done by hand after consulting instructions from the web. There is nothing here that is prohibitively expensive or difficult to get hold of. If I am to promote the idea of a geo/graphic design process, it should be one that is achievable by geographers in their academic offices, not just artists or designers in a high-tech studio.

Edinburgh: A haptic journey

From the moment I arrived in Edinburgh I was struck by the solidity of the city. It seemed to be literally hewn from the rock. From the imposing figure of the castle, to the refined Georgian terraces of New Town, the stone facades face the elements, silently seeing out season after season, year after year. I found myself running my hands across the stone as I walked, feeling textures made by nature and by stone carvers. The city seemed to heighten my haptic perception.

I began to take simple rubbings of things that I caught my eye as I explored the city. This process retains a sense of connection between the hand, the paper and the stone. Had I photographed these sites there would have been a physical separation—a barrier between person and place negating our multi-sensory experience of the world.

Many of the images recorded are of traditional materials, but others are more contemporary. The more I walked, the more I saw, the more I touched. This haptic journey is retold through the pages of a small book. If you click on the photos below, you will get an enlarged image, but then you will need to hit the back button on your browser to get back to the rest of this post.



The cover is made with P180 fine grade sandpaper, thus giving the book itself a rough, stone-like quality when touched. The final rubbing is of the seat I sat on at Waverley station as I waited for the train to take me back to London.



The book is perhaps not particularly interesting from a design point of view, but what was interesting for me was the method and approach. It is, in a sense, work deriving from a 'gut instinct' of Edinburgh. There was no in depth research, no interviews, no exploration of a wider context.



It was an immediate response to my surroundings and my experience of them. Perhaps this could be said to be exploring my phenomenological take on the place? This is not how I usually work—I normally prefer to tell richer, more peopled, stories of place; to work with more content and to develop more complex narratives.



However, these are built over time, and often with participants, but I was in Edinburgh for one week only, so I had to improvise and explore other ways of working. It was a nice change to develop something so quickly and in such a short space of time—unlike the ongoing PhD.



Perhaps it will enable me to look afresh at the work I am doing in Hackney, or the ways I am working generally. After all, my physical encounter with Edinburgh is inevitably no more subjective than any other representation of place by anyone else, and therefore just as valid in its own small way.

Experimenting with geography

A very belated post... I was lucky enough to gain a place on the week long 'Experimenting with geography: See, hear, make and do' workshop at Edinburgh University at the beginning of May. The workshop was organised by Michael Gallagher and gathered together a wide range of artists, social scientists and geographers, all who are interested in exploring alternative ways of re/presenting space and place.

The week was punctuated with presentations from practitioners, workshops and DIY time. Presenters I really enjoyed included Sans Facon, Victoria Clare Bernie and Louise K Wilson. All really inspiring stuff.

A discussion board was set up before the event and will continue to function, so if you are interested in learning more about the other participants and some of the project discussions have a look here.

The week also enabled me to take some time out from the daily grind of the PhD and spend time in a beautiful city just exploring and thinking about place. From these explorations, two small books will emerge. Postings on those shortly...

The marathon that is the PhD and words of encouragement from Iain Sinclair

Right now I am thinking that doing a PhD is how I imagine running a marathon to be. You set off, the sun is shining, the adrenalin is pumping, you are surrounded by your fellow runners and everything seems possible and achievable, probably even in a personal best time.

Then, after about 20 miles, wracked with total body fatigue, unsteadiness and possible light-headedness, you hit an invisible wall, an apparently insurmountable physiological barrier which stops you in your tracks.

This sounds familiar to me and seems to be happening around the same time. 20 miles is pretty much 75% of the way there. I am in month 29 of, hopefully, about 39, so similarly 75% of the way there. I think the only thing that can get me through is to grit my teeth and get on with it. It is all about getting over the finish line for a while. Making lists, crossing things off, seeing tiny achievements within the bigger, as yet almost incomprehensible, picture. The personal bests have gone out of the window, good enough will do. Maybe through this the rhythm will return to the running and the sight of the finish line will dredge up some better spirits. On the other hand, with the PhD, the sight of the 39 month finish line seems to be coming a bit too quickly, almost as if I am trying to do a marathon on a treadmill and someone has ramped up the speed button and I can't quite keep up! Hey ho...

A bit of passer-by encouragement probably helps and I have to say it was nice to receive this recently from Iain Sinclair.

Dear Alison -

Thank you for letting me know something about your various assaults on the culture. The use of the Hackney Gazette headlines was especially inspiring: I've been collecting them for years. I think they are a great artform. And your use of them is on the money. The weight and range of activity, seen and unseen, around the branded emptiness of the Grand Olympic Project, confirms me in my conceit of this area having a perverse and unquenched spirit.

with my best wishes,

Iain Sinclair

So, I must take heart and get back on the road to oblivion, I mean enlightenment...

An urban Richard Long?

A while ago, after seeing some of my letterpress prints, a friend of mine said to me that she thought I was a kind of 'urban Richard Long.' Whilst flattered to be held in comparison, or perhaps parallel, I wondered what the similarities or disimilarities might be.

In basic terms I suppose I do undertake a lot of walking, I do take photographs and I do use type—all seen in the work of Long, though his journeys are more often undertaken in the open spaces of fields and mountains, not the urban confines of Hackney.

For me, however, the walking is a prelude to the work, it is a method for exploring, experiencing and thinking about place. For Long, the walk is the art, as much as the documentation of it that appears on the gallery wall. He assigns each element equal and complementary status, seeing his art as the essence of his experience not a representation of it. Apparently he was inspired by Lawrence Weiner's work and the idea that 'a work need not be made,' that one can replace the object with language. Hmm, nice idea, maybe, I could just submit a thesis and scrap all this practice...

Seriously though, I feel there is another overlap here. What I am trying to do with my research and practice is generate a geo/graphic design process that enables the development of visual design work that offers the reader an experience of place, one that goes beyond the geometric concerns of the traditional map, or the 'skeletal landscape of statistics.' This shift from representation to experience is something the Fluxus artists explored with their Fluxkits, attempting to sidestep the problems of representation and the instability of meaning—this is not something about a thing, it is the thing itself. I guess this also links to the previous post about the use of / and the way it might change the interpretation of re/presentation as opposed to representation.

Long seems to have developed a bit of a system for his visual re/presentation. He usually documents his work/walk with an image of the location and a text work that records selected facts or experiences of the walk. The majority of these share a simplicity of form using a single typeface (predominantly Gill Sans), with words usually set in caps and either centred or range left. The type is usually printed in a combination of black with one other colour, more often than not, red, blue or green.

As a graphic designer—and one who is persistently pondering Mermoz's idea of 'working at the level of the text'— this seems a little problematic. Why Gill for starters? Was he aware of any connotations (bestiality or otherwise)? Yes I can see the logic for the English walks, it is associated with the identity of the BBC, Gill was a pupil of Johnston who designed the London Transport face, and the visual references are obvious, but what about the walks in other countries. What about the difference between a walk in a field of corn and a boulder strewn desert? The walks and the experiences on them are clearly different, so why is the type so systematic? It seems to bear no relation to the content. Maybe the 'Englishness' is about Long himself, but then the art doesn't seem about him—as much as his body is a tool in its making—it seems about the experience he has within the landscape.

Perhaps Long is attempting to find a 'neutral' form, to allow the words to express themselves somehow free of their visual form? But surely the two are inextricably linked and, as Robin Kinross noted, this is really just a 'rhetoric of neutrality', therfore it is in fact a style in itself, with its own connotations.

As an artist, I suppose Long has had to build up a body of work over a period of time that becomes something of a 'signature' that is instantly recognisable. Essentially Gill Sans is as much a part of the Richard Long brand identity as it is the BBC's. To that end the type is performing a role, but it doesn't seem to be one that is actually about each specific work or walk itself.

-/: Little lines, big shifts?

OK, so unwittingly I have just created an emoticon of a top hat wearing person, but I'm more interested in how these innocent looking glyphs, characters, lines, or whatever you like to call them can change emphasis and meaning with their use.

At my confirmation/upgrade meeting it was pointed out that the proposed title of my PhD contained at least 3 words with potentially contentious or unclear definitions—landscape, the everyday and geo/graphic. I have been using geo/graphic for a few years now, probably since 2005, and it has gone down well, particularly in Geography circles. So well, perhaps I should ™ it! However, as yet, I have not specifically defined it or explored how and why I am using the / character. So here is a bit of a stab at this...

A literal translation of the word geography is earthwritings, coming from geo—earth and graphy—writing. By taking the word geographic and inserting the / between the two elements of the whole word I wanted to re-emphasise its constituent parts—geo and graphic. Graphic these days is perhaps associated more with pictures than with words and, as a graphic designer, graphic also obviously relates to my home territory. This hopefully shifts the interplay of meaning to a more visual end and points towards the cross disciplinary nature of the study. It is this visual side of things that geographer's seem uncomfortable with—as Chris Perkins says, geographers don't make things anymore; they are very good at deconstruction, but not so good at construction. Incidentally, this sentence was probably the starting point for my PhD.

This is quite a literal description of the use of the / so far, but taking it further, I remember reading an article a while ago called A/r/tography as living inquiry, by Springgay, Irwin and Wilson Kind. The article is about the potential for using 'arts-based' research within an educational research context and it is a bit 'out there' in my view, but it did contain the following that is interesting in relation to my idea of geo/graphic and the use of the /.

The slash is particular in its use, as it is intended to divide and double a word—to make the word mean at least two things, but often more. It also refers to what might appear between two points of orientation, hinting at meaning that is not quite there or yet unsaid. This play between meanings does not suggest a limitless positionality, where interpretation is open to any whim or chance. It is the tension provoked by this doubling, between limit/less that maintains meaning's possibility. The slash is not intended to be one or the other term; it can be both simultaneously, or neither. The slash suggests movements or shifts between the terms. For example, the term un/familiar is a movement between the familiar and the strange. The slash makes the terms active, relational, as they reverberate with, in, and through each other
(Springgay, S, Irwin, R & Wilson Kind, S, 2005: 904)

This research is cross-disciplinary, and in talking about interdisciplinarity, Phelan and Rogoff (2001) describe it as a place of being 'without'. That one leaves behind the certitudes of previous work and processes without yet having found a new methodology to replace them. So perhaps the use of / also highlights this gap as a productive new place to be found between the discplines of geography and graphic design?

The / could also be seen as a kind of fold, with graphics and geography folding into each other, around each other, etc. Springgay et al quote Meskimmon (2003) in relation to folding:

Folding holds out the potential to diversify endlessly without falling into the logic of binary oppositions. This sense of the fold thinks matter as doubling back upon itself to make endless new points of connection between diverse elements.

This idea of a productive interplay between the two elements also makes me think of the idea of montage and the 'charge' that can be created by the coupling of two diverse elements or images.

So, it would seem there are a multitude of powers hidden within the humble /.

Does the - offer the same potential? Whilst contemplating the problems around representation, I had moved to thinking of a re-presentation, rather than a representation. This perhaps shifts the reader into active mode—they are not passively accepting a representation of something. Or maybe it makes the author/designer more active. The difference between a drawing and an illustration for example... But, would it be more productively stated as re/presentation?

I guess with a - I was trying to imply that the artefact in question was a new or different presentation, not a stab at creating some kind of visually replicable 'truth'. However, taking the previous thinking about the / on board, the - perhaps is a little one dimensional in its effect. It literally makes a simple, direct connection between the two things. The angle of the / allows for more changes of direction, each word seems to move both towards and away from the other—a more interactive coupling, with the / acting as a kind of fulcrum. So with re/presentation perhaps it brings into play the obvious idea about a new presentation, but perhaps also alludes to the question of the word representation in a more dynamic way. It also could be seen to be highlighting the question of presentation itself by reading the re as in 'about'.

I guess this kind of discussion can get lost in itself, or perhaps up itself, but I think it is kind of interesting to think about the potentially powerful semantic changes or possibilities that can be gained by the use of a humble /!

The liminal space of the page

I love the word liminal. Maybe it is a bit poncey, but I have been quite taken with it since I watched a documentary about the British and their relationship with the beach. In it some academic described the beach as a liminal space—not quite land, not quite sea, a threshold between the two.

Re-reading Species of spaces by Georges Perec (1999) I noticed he makes various spatial points about the page.

I write: I inhabit my sheet of paper, I invest it, I travel across it.
Perec 1999: 11

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page.
Perec 1999: 13

So, what does this have to do with liminal? Well I was wondering whether it is the page that acts as this threshold. Indeed, for Perec, it seems that the page is where the words are read and come alive for the reader. This is in direct contrast to Ingold (2007: 26) who thinks the space of the page has been 'silenced' since mechanical print.

This reminds me of Saussure's idea that sound and thought cannot be divided. He uses the image of a sheet of paper as a metaphor for this—one is not able to cut the front without cutting the back at the same time. They are inextricable linked, interdependent. Perhaps the same could be said of typography and the page. In a simplistic sense, the type literally becomes part of the fabric of the page as the ink bleeds. One becomes part of the other.

Beyond this chemical reaction I would also suggest something more alchemical is possible. The page is not, in a traditional sense, a physical landscape, but it can act as a gateway to place in the mind, an it is the possibilities offered by a holistic approach to typography, content and form (perhaps another indivisible pairing) that can open up such a space. The page is therefore the threshold between words and the imagination. I think this is regardless as to whether the typography has been executed by hand, digitally or using letterpress—it is the fusing of the pairs: type and page; form and content that is key for me, not the link between the hand and the page as Ingold believes.

I feel a project coming on

Strolling down Northwold Road on a sunny Saturday morning I decided to look down, not up. Just about every two steps was some kind of manhole cover for the various different services—water. cable, phone, etc. The variety was quite astounding and I'm feeling a little project coming on to record the patterns, types and placement of these. I think I am creeping further along the spectrum... See more of them at my Flickr site.

Hackney Freecycle: Stuff part II

After drowning in data for weeks on end, the design aspect of the work on the Hackney Freecycle group came relatively quickly. The group is phenomenally active—approximately 400 messages a week. I had six months worth—July to December—so clearly had to sample to get anywhere near something that was digestible in terms of analysis. I chose to sample one week per month, starting on the second Sunday of each month.

I ploughed through the data in order to transfer it from the original email messages into a Word doucment for each month. I then transferred these from Word to Excel files that listed the date, type of post, item, brand, area, poster's name and whether or not an item had been taken or received. From these I then conducted a quantitative analysis in relation to a range of elements, for example, types of posts, types of items, prevalent brands and the most active areas of Hackney. During each phase of the handling of the data I was getting to know it better, seeing more and more details, noticing more and more quirky posts, strange coincidences, seasonal fluctuations and repetitive themes—moving more from a quantitative analysis to qualitative. This felt, in some ways, a similar process to that of the 'Stuff' book, though instead of building up relationships with contributors in person and getting to know their stories, I was developing a relationship with the data. I was getting to the point where I knew the data well and could therefore begin to comment on it both visually in terms of the design, and also in terms of generating the content and structure that would form the 'conceptual container' for the piece of work.

This process aligns with Seidel's (1998) qualitative data analysis process of 'Noticing, collecting and thinking' that I read and then wrote about in a very early methodology chapter about 18 months ago. It's worth reflecting on again here I think, as now I am at a point where the theory and practice are working in a much more symbiotic way—18 months ago there was no practice, there was just reading and writing. Anyway, I chose Seidel's method as I felt it reflects and complements the design process, in that it is not linear, but 'iterative, progressive, recursive and holographic.' Each of these characteristics is present in the design process—it is often drawn as a cycle or a spiral like form that enables the design practice to progress through many iterations, it offers recursive flexibility to revisit previous ideas in the light of new discoveries, and each step of the process cannot be taken in isolation.

The fact that Seidel describes the process as recursive (one part can call you back to a previous part) and holographic (each step in the process contains the entire process) gives a sense that it enables a holistic practice, one that will unite theory and practice. It also has a 'physicality' about its terms of reference—noticing, collecting, thinking—they are all 'active' words that align well with the notion of practice. These definitions also perhaps link, in turn, to Tuan and Massey's definitions of place that form a basis for this overall inquiry. Tuan's definition focuses on place as a container of memories, a palimpsest-like landscape, layered with partly visible inscriptions, and recursive in the way that a particular building or street can call you back to a previous time as you pass it. Massey sees place as being continually made and remade, a process that could be thought of as holographic.

Seidel's method works in the following way. Noticing works on two levels; firstly it relates to the actual fieldwork—producing a record of the things one has noticed; secondly, it relates to the coding of data. These codes are, in simplistic terms, a way of highlighting elements of interest, or patters within the content. They can then function as heuristic tools that enable further, deeper investigation and analysis of the content. Collecting refers to the sorting of the information that has been recorded and coded. The final step in the process, thinking, is the examination of the materials. This process, if looked at from a design perspective, could be seen as a form of editing. The goals are making sense out of the collection, identifying patterns and relationships in the materials and to make discoveries about the subject of your research.







What is interesting here, is that there weren't actually that many iterations in relation to the actual design. The iterations came very much in relation to the content. Through the analysis I noticed more and more things, that enabled me to develop not only a clearer idea of content and structure, but also a clearer picture of how I felt the Freecycle group operated. As I said before it is a hugely active group, with usually 60 messages a day. It exists solely in virtual space and because of this relentless amount of emails continually replacing the last one received, each one felt quite fleeting or ephemeral. To this end I felt another book would be appropriate in order to give a 'permanence' to the data in a format that offered a temporal aspect. I was able to make these judgements quickly as I was embedded in the data and it had become embedded in me. Subconsciously, the design was working itself out as I worked the content out.







The subtitle, 'This much I think I now now,' is deliberately something of an oxymoron type affair—I think & I know. A nudge in the direction of the fact that any analysis or re-presentation of everyday life and place always has something of a subjective element to it. The 'now' is a bit of a nod to the fact that things are always ongoing, so what I have shown is but a moment in time.







The book uses Univers throughout and adopts a fairly stripped back, content led approach, allowing the wording of the posts and my qualitative deductions to take centre stage. The minimal, dare I say it, Modernist 'style' seemed appropriate for an organisation that is focused on reducing consumerism and unnecessary waste. A seasonal trail of posts adds a little colour to pages and shows the idea of time passing—tents wanted in July and August, heaters and Christmas decorations in November and December.







Ultimately I will print this out on A4 recycled paper. I have designed it so it is an A5 french fold with no bleeds, so again it is as minimal as it can be in terms of its environmental impact. I did post a wanted ad on Freecycle for used paper but as of yet have not received anything. I shall make various versions, some will be made of redundant print outs of itself, some from A4 recycled paper found from various places—currently I have just acquired a random stack of sheets from the CSM research student space. If you are reading this and have some one side used A4, send it to me! I am also thinking of developing an 'art' series that is printed on the reverse of cropped down A2 letterpress posters of the statement pages.

What follows next will be a design project about Newsagents windows. The third part of the stuff trilogy. The three form a view from macro to micro of the stuff that is accumulated and circulated within Hackney.

Is there really little to think about?

Last Thursday I went to the talking graphics lecture at LCC. The speaker was Freidrich Forssman, a book designer and typographer who is little known outside of his native Germany. His lecture was entitled 'Book design as a way of thinking' and I thought a few points he made were worth remembering.

1. There is little to think about, but these little things should be thought about thoroughly.

This comes from a man who has written a 400 page book on the typographic possibilities one needs to consider when seeting one sentence of type. Yes, just one sentence, yes 400 pages. This is a man who knows how to think long and hard about the smallest detail! The point is true in typographic terms, but in the context of a PhD, the thought is overwhelming—so many 'little things' all to be thought about in such depth.

2. We don't invent things we have to discover them. They are always there, you just have to ask the right questions.

This sort of reminds me of the Bruce Mau Incomplete manifesto for growth point that states something like the wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. It is a great mantra for a practice PhD I think—the answers will come from the process, and the process needs to be allowed to develop in its own way, not forced.

3. Arrogant design doesn't look straight into the eyes of the reader—it looks down to the reader and has fellow designers in mind in a contest of coolness.

This is the only one I am not so sure of. Its a very subjective statement, which in itself isn't a problem, but it seems to be assuming the reader is incapable of understanding the work in the way a designer might. Beyond that I suppose one could also refer to Barthes' point that the text only becomes active when it is read—death of the author (or perhaps designer in this case), birth of the reader. But I've got a right headache, so I'll leave you to ponder on that yourself.

Firmitas, utilitas, venustas

I went to the LCC Graphic Design PhD forum this week. The speaker was Ranulph Glanville and his talk was entitled 'Designing®, researching, knowing'. The ® after the word is not a RSI induced spasm, but intentional. Glanville uses it to reinforce his use of the word 'Design' in a particular way—that is design as known and understood by designers. Implict here is, I think, not as 'understood' by design engineers, but that is another post entirely.

He started his talk with Vitruvius' characterisation of architecture, which as the title suggests, is 'Firmitas, utilitas, venustas' and he offered his own translation or interpretation of this—well made, useful and delightful. Glanville suggested that it is easy to do the well made and useful part of the equation, but that what is difficult is the 'delightful'and that this requires the designer to do more than is necessary, to make something better than what is there. It is the more than necessary that is the necessary bit—it is what brings the delight.

I can definitely see where he is coming from, but I am not sure about the word delight. At the time I suggested 'engaging' which he dismissed as too neutral and I agree with that, however, for me there is something about the word 'delight' that is too 'lightweight', too momentary and perhaps too much aligned with some kind of aesthetic pleasure. Reading over this again, maybe delight is also too subjective a term? As venustas means beauty this isn't surprising I guess, in fact it apparently literally means the salient qualities possessed by the goddess Venus and implied a visual quality in architecture that would arouse the emotion of love. However not all design is pleasurable in this way, nor does it intend to be. Even in architecture, the area of design and subject that Glanville's talk was originally given in, one only has to go to Berlin and visit the Holocaust memorial to know that the affect, whilst powerful, is not pleasurable or delightful.

So maybe what we are after is something that captures that effect or charge a building or piece of work can give you. This maybe brings us back to Barthes and his idea of 'punctum' in a photograph, an emotional response which is elicited by the ‘prick’ of an unexpected detail or contrast. I think these days it has been superceded by the idea of 'affect' so punctum might be a bit dated, but it seems to offer something to the discussion. Whether this charge is always related to something unexpected or some kind of contrast I don't know, we can get pleasure from familiarity also. But then perhaps the idea of the unexpected links nicely with the idea of the designer providing something extra, something that is more than necessary.

Two other things spring to mind in relation to this experience and design and designers' ability to construct it. Firstly, I recently re-read Gaston Bachelard's The poetics of space and he writes about eperiencing the 'reverberation' of 'poetic images.' I think he is referring to images that are conjured up in the mind through poetry, and if this is not too much of an over-simplification, it seems to me that this idea of 'reverberation' is also what Barthes is getting at with 'punctum', and perhaps Glanville with 'delight.' Secondly I recalled having read Malcom Barnard's Graphic design as communication and his description of the four functions of graphic design: Information, persuasion, decoration and magic. It is this idea of 'magic' that got me thinking in terms of how the 'delight' (or whatever I decide I might prefer to term it) is engendered. Barnard suggests that this idea of magic relates to Tibor Kalman's idea that what most graphic design is about is 'making something different from what it truly is.' That it makes absent or distant people or places 'present' to us, the spectator (Barnard 2005:15). This seems to tie in—that whether it be a logo or an advert, it is more than just type and image on a page. The Nike tick signifies a brand that offers more to some than a functional pair of trainers. The image and copy used in an advertisement for Barnardos puts us into the position of seeing the abuse and therefore offers us the opportunity to take part in ending such awful situations, or if we do nothing, collude in the perpetrator's actions. Maybe his title should have been Graphic design as teleporter?

That 'magic' then made me think of something I read that Bourdieu had said about a 'magical act.' Digging about I found it is referenced in David Crow's Visual signs. In this case Crow describes Bourdieu as defining this magical act in relation to the use of language. I find it a difficult idea to get my head round, and I wonder whether such a small snippet is being taken out of context here, and also possibly in Crow's text as neither of us quotes an original source. However, it seems to be about the possibilities of the performativity of language, that one can, in the sphere of social action, 'act through words beyond the limits of delegated authority' (Crow 2003:97). The written example Crow uses to explain this is of a passer by smashing the champagne bottle against the prow of a ready to be launched ship, instead of the diginatry who has been given the responsibilty, and in a sense, I guess, the power. What Crow doesn't make clear, at least to me, is does this mean the ship is named and can be launched, or does the fact that the passer by didn't have 'the power' mean it is null and void? The visual examples Crow uses are those of individuals subverting corporate communications to their own ends—Joe Magee's 2002 illustrations for the Daily Telegraph. The illustrations seemed to be decorated with dots as part of the design. What the Torygraph didn't realise was that these dots were actually braille and spelled out anti-capitalist sentiments. Anyhow, I am not sure I quite see the parallels between the word and image examples. Am I being dim? Never mind that, this post seems to be getting off topic. I suppose in a way there is magic in both of them. Someone who didn't have 'power' utters the magic words 'I name this ship...' and becomes powerful. Someone who was supposed to be the slave of the corporate fat cats uses their own media against them. So maybe there is some kind of magic in both.

But what of 'delight'? I'm still not sure it feels like the right term to me, I shall continue to ponder. If anyone has any better suggestions let me know. Oh, and if you can explain the 'magical act' better, that would be great too.