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So-called “design for development” toes the line between humanitarianism and paternalism, as tends to happen in any situation where there is a significant power/wealth disparity. The problems of economic disparity on a geopolitical scale are larger and more complex than can be solved in a single human lifetime, and as such, seem overwhelming and irresolvable, as do the environmental crisis and nearly every domestic question that appears repeatedly in the New York Times. Last week, Despina argued that though such problems (she was referring specifically to the environmental crisis) are in a sense unsolvable—at least by us—it becomes our responsibility to change attitudes and model appropriate behaviors to ensure that the following generation is not hampered by the political resistance that hogtied us. What does that mean in terms of design?

At least based on this week’s readings, it seems like no one is too sure. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s formulation of welfare economics, Martha Nussbaum lays out a philosophical framework for thinking about people’s basic needs separately from any cultural considerations. She identifies ten different basic “capabilities” as prerequisites for a full and dignified life. Designers and development professionals wax equally enthusiastic about the capabilities model’s applicability in developing world contexts—especially as an alternative to more value-laden functional and economic approaches that lead to many children with one laptop but no food. The universal applicability of this particular approach, however, comes at the cost of vagueness. Economic and functional models are prescriptive: make a bicycle generator to save on electricity costs; build a water pump to cut the time spent collecting water from 5 hours a day to just 2. Makes perfect sense. Justifying the same technology in terms of its user’s dignity is a little trickier.

In the case of the water pump for instance, who’s to say that our hypothetical user doesn’t enjoy the five hours spent collecting water, that those five hours provide him/her with a great sense of accomplishment through physical exertion and communal collaboration that the pump, which landed in the community like the Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy, an alien artifact that disrupts years of harmonious if hardscrabble living? To someone living in the West, it makes intuitive sense that something that is hard to do and takes five hours is less desirable than an alternative approach that accomplishes the same result with less effort in two hours. Increased productivity! More time to do more things!

But is or should productivity be a universal goal? It was the search for increased productivity and decreased effort that led to mercantilism, colonialism, and most of the developing world’s problems to begin with. Well-intentioned and empathetic professionals devote themselves to the arduous and often thankless task of “developing” their less fortunate brethren only to then fantasize in writing and in film about a return to an Edenic state of nature. Avatar is just the latest in a long tradition of white man’s guilt stories in which a nature-worshiping indigenous race collides with an advanced techno-capitalistic race that threatens to obliterate it until one of its more enlightened members switches sides and fights to save it or at least delay its destruction. But this is the same sort of hubris that I objected to in environmental discourse last week: the market can’t fix what the market caused.

Design is not inherently capitalistic. We have been inventors for our entire history. People use and make objects and tools in every culture. Making tools that work well and objects that are beautiful (whatever the local definitions of good and beauty) is a natural species-wide compulsion. The reasons for doing so, however, are culturally (or economically or politically or socially) determined and have changed—placating angry Gods, saving time, increasing market share, sounding luxury cues. As many of the readings we looked at this week noted, the world’s wealthiest countries are the principal consumers of contemporary design, so design educations are tailored to addressing their needs. The market reduces design to applied aesthetics on the low end and conceptual misanthropy on the high end (talk to any MIT student who’s lived in Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall).

That kind of design does not work in the Chinese countryside or in a remote Bolivian town or in an African village for the same reason that democracy will never work in Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean that designers shouldn’t work to improve people in developing nations’ capabilities any more than it means that statesmen should abandon seeking peaceful relations between nations. It does mean, however, that both should be more sensitive to the problems they are seeking to solve from the point of view of the people who ultimately will be living with their solutions.

DESIGNING THE DESIGNER

Design for development. I readily admit that each assignment has caused me mild insomnia and that the constant thought stymied my ability to make anything until the day or two before its due date, but never as badly as this week. I lived in the developing world for nearly seven years, several of which I spent creating products for developing markets, but I couldn’t think of a single need I might address in a manner consonant with all my grandstanding above. I thought about creating passive solar heaters for the parts of China where Mao’s enlightened policies dictated there be no central heating, but then I remembered that southern Chinese think it’s unhealthy to be warm when it’s cold outside. I thought about anti-corruption devices of different kinds, but realized that no sane Chinese person would ever believe that a whistle-blowing device was not part of an elaborate entrapment ploy. Nussbaum’s capabilities were little help generating other ideas.

But I easily came up with a handful of products almost certain to fly off the shelves in Chinese supermarkets. Why? Because I spent years talking to Chinese consumers, working to understand their needs, no matter how bizarre they seemed to me. Nabisco, for instance, was not selling nearly enough Oreos to meet its targets. The reason, it turns out, was simple. The Chinese have never eaten cookies. There is simply no occasion in which to eat them. They’re too sweet and fatty to eat for breakfast, too heavy to snack on, and too cheap to serve to guests for dessert. Once they realized this, Nabisco created a snack-sized Oreo wafer that was less sweet and much more familiar in form to Chinese snackers. It was an instant hit.

Everyone seems to agree that economic development is the road to, if not salvation, then at least improvement, for former colonial countries. I’m not sure that in the long run encouraging local entrepreneurship through micro-finance and other community-based economic schemes is anything more than a way to polarize communities and delegate the problems of doing business in developing economies to local lieutenants, especially in resource-rich countries we will need to plunder in the future. But I do know that the tools of capitalism—of marketing in particular—are the most efficient way of uncovering people’s “unmet needs” and tapping into their desire to own and use things.

My question then shifted from how can I possibly design for development when I have no idea what problems I’m trying to solve to how can anybody? The answer most of the time is that NGOers solve problems they take as givens and those solutions aren’t adopted. Mosquito nets get used on parents’ beds or put away and saved because according to local lore children don’t need them. What if instead of tackling solutions, designers focused on using their critical thinking to uncover the problems?

Rather than a specific product or design to solve a problem established a priori, I am proposing using marketing principles to design a process that uncovers problems with a likelihood of successful solution, guarantees community involvement and investment in the outcome, and can be carried out by design teams with minimal local experience in relatively short (six- to ten-week) timeframes.

A couple of important pointers:
- Small multi-functional groups work better both on your side and the “client” side;
- Momentum is crucial. Work as hard as you can as fast as you can;
- This process will be trying and tiring. It’s a Navy Seals approach to local innovation;

STEP 1: IMMERSION

Be them, with them, about them is the credo of consumer insight. It basically boils down to “do your research” but proves especially useful in developing world contexts. Talk to people who have some perspective on your challenge. If you’re trying to help African farmers, don’t just talk to experts on small-scale African farming—if you talk to the same people as everyone else, you’re going to have the same ideas as everyone else. Learn about farming and growing things. Talk to farmers of all scales in different climates and conditions, to African urbanites who’ve never farmed, to agronomists, to the ladies at a garden club, to Africa scholars, to grizzly Africa hands, to meteorologists, to entomologists, to local food wholesalers, to children and their grandparents. Visit greenhouses and farms and markets and irrigation projects.

Once you’ve got some idea of the context of these farmers, learn to see the world as they do. Spend time farming in a variety of settings. Plant a garden. Use the tools they use. Live with them and shadow them until they stop paying attention to you. Try to sleep as they sleep, work as they work, bathe as they bathe, eat as they eat, and drink as they drink, and, holiest of holies, think how they think. Ask questions constantly. Don’t assume anything. Laugh at your own ignorance. This sort of research, if conducted with an open mind and a genuine desire to experience another’s world, leads to a volume of insight that’s simply not available to people who go home to their air conditioned tents at night. It also lays the groundwork and relationships for the next step.

STEP 2: IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM

Having spent the bulk of your time being, shadowing, and talking about your target “consumers,” you should have a good idea of the things they consider troublesome or problematic. You should also have identified the people within the community that will make good brainstormers and thoughtful discussers, as well as the stakeholders whose buy-in will be necessary to ensure any sort of lasting solution.

When you’re ready, make a bit of a spectacle when they’re around, signal that something out of the ordinary is happening, and recount observations of your troubles living with them (long hours, back-breaking lifting, not enough coffee), soliciting input and encouraging them to discuss how to solve your problems. Since you are an outsider, they will consider all sorts of solutions they wouldn’t normally for your problems and more often than not start bringing their own experiences to bear. It’s at this point that the addressable problem you’re looking for should boil to the surface.

STEP 3: ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM

Now comes the familiar iterative design process. Try to use locally available materials and techniques that are within reach of the community in which you’re working. Enlist local helpers. Credit them with all progress and good ideas. Try out your design and get them to try it out. What don’t they like about it? What could be better? Iterate. Repeat.

Once a working solution is in place, see if you can get your community to show it off to another nearby community. Once they do, the idea has become theirs and you can leave, knowing that knowledge has been transferred and that you’ve earned a hot shower.

This week I thought about sustainability, energy, and systems. Specifically, I thought about how people encapsulate and divide systems in ways that would be considered shady by even the most unscrupulous accountant. Solar energy, yay! Except that solar panels don’t last all that long and their production requires huge amounts of cadmium and other super toxic and “unsustainable” materials. Or the DDT ban in the 1960s that went into effect only in the developed world. DDT sales continued abroad for decades. But guess what, the water in Africa is connected to the water in Ohio! Rachel Carson’s movement, like much of the activism of the 60s, was eventually commoditized and co-opted when corporations adopted its language of environmental responsibility while engaging in virtually unregulated dumping and disposal practices that have led to the mercury-filled fish that we’ve been eating for the last twenty years.

Part of the problem, I realized, is that there is little alternative. Here is everything I threw away over the past week:

1. Orange juice carton and plastic screw top
2. Toilet paper (about one roll)
3. 15 banana peels
4. 2 plastic forks (neither at home)
5. 1 plastic spoon
6. 17 plastic supermarket bags
7. 1 Styrofoam dinner tray (social hour at ITP)
8. Pork fat
9. 3 egg shells
10. Grape stems
11. 2 dozen roses
12. 3 paper plates (pizza)
13. Numerous paper napkins
14. 2 individual plastic cream containers (diner)
15. Plastic 1 qt. yogurt tub
16. 10 plastic bags vegetables and fruit came in
17. Broccoli bits
18. Pork rib bones
19. Used saran wrap
20. Tin foil
21. 3 Q-Tips
22. 15 tea bags
23. A ball of my wife’s hair
24. English muffin cardboard box and plastic wrapper
25. Garlic peel
26. Onion peel
27. Celery stalk
28. Fish bones
29. Junk mail
30. Plastic magazine sleeve
31. Half a broken plastic watch band
32. Padded envelope
33. Plastic cookie tray and wrapper
34. Various receipts/tickets
35. Cabbage bits
36. Squash ends
37. Can clams came in
38. 3 glass bottles
39. Paper bag
40. Paper coffee cup
41. Sandwich wrapper (wax paper)
42. 4 Styrofoam meat trays
43. Soap, dish detergent, toothpaste, shampoo
44. A fair volume of urine
45. Four or five respectable shits
46. Sawdust/small electronic bits in the shop
47. 5+ hours playing Chain Factor

Most of my garbage is either organic food waste or the packaging it comes in. No matter how fancy/organic/expensive food is, still comes wrapped in several layers of plastic. Much of my out of the house waste was the result of eating at cheap places around NYU, where everything comes in disposable containers/on disposable plates. Reducing my packaging waste would ironically require me to spend a lot more money: on meals at better restaurants with reusable flatware and silverware and on “responsibly packaged” frou-frou organic groceries. I would compost my organic waste if I had the space or something to do with the compost, but I have neither. I could buy one of those midget pigs. But even that seems shortsighted. I buy a pig, it eats my garbage thus keeping it out of landfills where it would eventually turn into methane, but its porcine stomach also turns it into methane. There is no escaping the interconnectedness of everything on earth.

This why the idea of “organic” products is such bullshit. Yes, it makes sense to minimize our impact on the planet’s ability to sustain us if we can, but the implication that the application of technology to a problem renders it somehow artificial or inorganic is preposterous. You can’t just pick starting and stopping points to assess some product or interaction’s impact. For instance, not using chemical pesticides in no way eliminates the residual pesticides, industrial particles, and all the other human-made muck that will fall with the rain as long as somewhere in the planet people are spraying chemicals on their crops and releasing smoke into the atmosphere. Rain cannot certified organic. Neither can groundwater. Everything is interconnected. So-called organic products are still shipped using trucks and trains and boats and planes which burn fossil fuels. Where do we stop assessing for sustainability?

The real problem is that it doesn’t even matter. If I leave every energy-inefficient tungsten bulb in my house on for the rest of my life—and if everyone else I’ve ever met does the same—it won’t use even a fraction of the energy required to run a steel manufacturing plant for one day. It is not in the interest of governments or corporations to assess the real costs of their activities, nor do they have the tools. Cost accounting is a financial process. From whose bottom line do we subtract dead rivers? The market can’t fix what it is responsible for breaking. That’s what makes the commoditization of C02 and other pollutants and emissions allowances so nefarious and nonsensical.

In the end, progress, production, and consumption serve to distract us from our lack of significance, taking over religion’s role throughout much of history. If I remember correctly, human exceptionalism—the idea of humanity as somehow separate from “nature”—arose in response to the industrial revolution. Romantics, Transcendentalists, the Sierra Club, Hippies, and New Agers all called for a return to nature. What does that mean? At what point did we become separate from nature? Aha, you say, plastics don’t occur in nature. Really? Did we get them from aliens? Or did we make them from materials available around us, much as bees make honeycomb? Just as fusion at the center of a star produces heavier and more massive elements, so we produce increasingly complex materials—that doesn’t make them unnatural. That they don’t decompose just means that no creature has yet evolved to take advantage of their energy-rich polymers—and that they’ll outlive us.

A maudlin and silly nostalgia for an idyllic pastoral past (and, I suspect, the lack of yearning for meaning that comes with consciousness) has plagued us since our expulsion from Eden. In the end, our exceptionalism is our humanity. It’s also the source of a great many of our problems. Environmentalism pits “us” against the environment, which is absurd. We are our own opponent. We talk of poisoning rivers or warming the globe when we’re actually poisoning ourselves and making the globe uninhabitable for humans. The rivers and the earth will survive. Ultimately, it makes no difference what we do because we’re just like any other species, and that, I think is something that most people find very hard to accept.

BLACK HOLE BOX

I was supposed to create something that responded to my relationship with energy. I use energy, selfishly. Like any other creature, I think about my needs, not about how those needs impact the larger systems of which I’m a part. I wanted to make an unnatural, inorganic living thing, an exceptionalist machine.

Black Hole Box is a black box connected to the internet that uses up batteries by continually checking the charge remaining in the batteries. When it drops below a certain threshold, the onboard microprocessor orders more batteries online. The batteries, which it orders from a local supplier, arrive within four days and the Black Hole Box’s owner must change them. The system’s survival depends on money that it doesn’t earn, energy it doesn’t produce, and processes it can’t control.

This week, a film canister with a roll of paper was hidden somewhere in New York, its approximate location posted on a Google Map along with a video with extra clues. My clue (no. 5) is on the corner of Broadway and 8th and was filmed on a Sony Ericsson G705. Double click on the YouTube clips to see them in their own window.

Make a system. Do it with three of your classmates. Go.

Matt, Marco, Sarah, and I met two nights ago to talk about systems. The conversation started with fully formed systems. Matt brought up a number of ideas for creating interesting interactions within the class—ropes on pulleys, melting snowballs packed with India ink—which I objected to on the grounds that “neatness” does not a system make. Having just read an article that noted that only humans can provide feedback in a technological system, I countered with the possibility of creating a system that devolves into chaos unless constantly tended, like audio feedback or juggling. Not so popular either. Marco mentioned food and and mobiles, to which Sarah added balancing. We discarded games outright (too tip of the brain). We were briefly enthusiastic about using the whole Floor in some way—laying a string-based communication system along all the cable trays or bouncing a laser beam from room to room using a series of mirrors—but Matt had already done that (and it was awesome, by the way, so still a solid idea).

Discouraged by our seeming lack of progress, we tried teleology. What purpose could a hypothetical communication system of our creation serve at ITP that was not already the province of an existing system?

Marco mentioned the water bubbler in the front hall. We have two water bubblers at ITP. One is in the front hall; the other is across from the bathrooms at the far end of the back hall that leads to Red’s office. The extra jugs are stored in the men’s room, stacked floor to ceiling on their sides in crates along the wall. If the bubbler in front of the bathrooms runs out, no problem, some passing man can easily be co-opted into going into the bathroom to grab a full jug or some free-thinking woman can make a quick incursion when the coast is clear. The bubbler in the front hall, however, often goes empty several days before someone finally lugs a full jug all the way across the Floor. What if we created a way of communicating that the jug in the front hall needed replacing to the bathroom? We discussed wireless radios, string, a siren, and abandoned the idea for more talk of melting, inky ice.

I remembered going to see Eric Maskin talk right after he’d won the Nobel Prize for his work on mechanism design theory, a system that allows two or more parties to reach an agreement that accomplishes a desired outcome even when their priorities and goals are unstated. The simplest example is the mom with two kids and one piece of cake: she wants them to split it without complaining, they each want the bigger piece. One mechanism that gives everybody what s/he wants is to have one child cut the cake and the other choose which piece he wants. I mentioned this story. Everyone nodded tiredly. We reluctantly returned to the water jugs as our frontrunner, and then we had our breakthrough.

A SYSTEM, SYSTEMICALLY PROBLEMATIZED

Trying to hammer out the technical details of signaling an empty jug across the Floor, we realized we didn’t need a technological solution, we needed an incentive! We could hide money behind some of the jugs so when they are pulled out, a dollar bill drops down. No, too venal, and besides, who’s going to pay? We could attach messages or riddles or candy or some other small reward. Then Sarah brought up the crucial point that the jugs are in the men’s room, thus only men will receive the incentive. That made us jump. Porn! Matt drew us all close together and whispered, “Juggs! Juggs behind the jugs!” thereby tying the conceptual knot into a tidy little bow.

I’m not joking when I say that this is one of my favorite projects so far this year. We’ve created a system that with its very existence calls attention to itself as well as lots of other systems. By choosing pornography as our reward for altruism, we’re calling attention to and extending the male stereotypes that played a role in the decision to store water jugs exclusively in the men’s room. Men can lift, men are brawny, men like boobs. On top of that system flows its opposite, a current of political correctness that will find such assumptions offensive or, less contentiously, single out a few ITP men at random to dispel any illusions of brawn. Pornographic portrayals of women also raise questions within religious and political contexts, and placed as they are in a charged semi-private space, one also wonders about their social implications. Should any discussion ensue, it will take place over a variety of communication channels, exposing our decision-making and accountability systems.

Besides facilitating discussion of itself, this system is also notable because despite its crudeness, it works. It has a clear purpose, a mechanism that coordinates several distinct components, and an agnosticism for other systems that while important to our community are not essential in this particular case. Changing a water jug requires only one person. It doesn’t matter if our pornographic incentive discourages 119 people from having anything to do with the water jugs if there’s 1 that can’t help but think of breasts every time he passes the bubbler. In a community that includes roughly 120 men, it seems safe to assume that a good portion like to look at women’s breasts and that a few are true enthusiasts. So even if we alienate a portion of the community that might otherwise occasionally change a jug, by creating one or two water jug fanatics we ensure that there is always water to drink in the front hall.

The most front-of-mind are purely physical connections, binding two separate things together. Most of the connectors I saw/thought about this week rely on some form of friction and/or a change in state (most often from liquid to solid). In no particular order: rope, wire, string, screws, nails, buttons, zippers, spray/liquid/solid adhesives, tape, sticky tack, epoxy, chains, springs, snaps, hooks and eyes, lashes, concrete, solder, welds, friction (dovetails), plugs and sockets, threaded joints, folds, roots, suction, magnetism, knots, sewing/weaving/knitting, bites (army ant sutures), staples, pins, mixing.

Some connections also rely on alterations of chemical/atomic structure to connect. These tend to be much harder to reverse than many physical connections: fusion, dissolution, cooking/firing/baking.

Then there are metaphysical connections, the connections we talk about between people or ideas or events, which I would characterize as a kind of sharing—be it of traits, genealogy, interests, friends, provenance, themes, or causality. We use the language of physical connection to describe these: bound in holy matrimony, causal chain, linked in, ties of blood.

The thing that connects all these expressions is the purpose of the connections to which they draw analogy: to constrain motion. Hinges, shackles, cuffs, reins, and handles all restrict motion through connection. Connectors are often also channels for the passage of something from two otherwise separate entities: tubes, pipes, wires, electromagnetic waves, buses, word of mouth, and all manner of electrically conductive materials act as connections that transport.

The most interesting of these of course being neurons. It is in connection, impossibly tangled and branching and complex connection, that our consciousness resides, that we understand the world.

I prototyped a nifty switch hidden in a magnetic box. A light is on when it’s not physically connected to something, but as soon as the magnetic (physical connection) is made, the electrical (channel) connection is broken. The two cannot coexist. But that’s an arbitrary fact of wiring. I could just as easily have wired the light only to turn on when the box is magnetically attached to something else.

Which made me realize that connections are most interesting when they are broken, when they’re forbidden, when they are unintended. Secret liaisons make good stories, short-circuits end in fires, ruptured pipelines induce panic. This is the great appeal of the mashup—possibly even the power of cinema (wasn’t it Eisenstein who wrote about cutting and the mental jumps the mind makes?)—the juxtaposition of disparate elements that our minds nonetheless connect.

That is pretty much how my favorite parts of my brain work, making strange and unexpected connections with unpredictable outcomes. It’s also the way humor works, uncovering the unexpected connection to spark a laugh. So after much unsatisfying PComping, I ended up turning to the now almost clichéd connectivity of the web to explore the pleasure of the unexpected connection. Part php and part spit, Jumblr is a website that makes unexpected connections by jumbling links, either within a site or between two sites. It works by scraping a site, parsing its links and storing them in an array using XPath, shuffling the array, and then returning them via preg_replace(). Right now it breaks when sites use relative links because they end up pointing to my domain, but once I figure out how to construct a conditional regular expression, I’ll be able to fix that problem. I’m also going to develop a Javascript link interceptor so that the randomization persists with each link click.

Made with the Casio Exilim still camera we have on the Floor (which Final Cut just doesn’t seem to like) (which I have since reformatted).

Make a module. This is the kind of assignment that is always better in retrospect (as this tardy write-up can attest).

Thinking about modules and the arenas in which they frequently appear led me to some interesting insights, not the least of which was a clear idea of the connector I want to build this coming week.

A module encapsulates a functionality within some larger, more complicated system. When properly designed, it can be joined smoothly with existing modules of the same or different types. Modular furniture, trains, pre-fab architecture, object-oriented programming, modulated and demodulated data streams, toys, and space stations are all modular because modularity makes decorating, managing freight, building, coding, communicating, playing, and not dying in a vacuum easier and less error prone, even in the presence of significant future uncertainty. Think back to Powers of Ten—the entire universe is modular!

I started my exploration of modularity by making modules of something homogeneous, which if my notions above are true achieves no added efficiency or ease through modularization. I peeled and sliced a banana such that the slices could be interchanged within the peel. Then I ate it. Not quite the robustness I was aiming for.

I then toyed with creating a code-based exploration of image pixels and letters (by translating one into the other so that an email might be encoded as an image composed of apparently arbitrary pixels), but the spatial advantages of modularity were just too compelling to ignore. You can place a modular couch in a space of any shape! Have a corner? It wraps around it! Straight wall? It becomes a love seat for twenty!

But how does one modularize without atomizing, without simply breaking something big into identical smaller segments? By separating functions the way code does. For some reason, I immediately thought about clothes and those zip-off sleeves from the Eighties. Clothing’s modularity (at least wearable clothing’s) is anatomically constrained. In theory I could make pants that accept as many legs as you care to attach—fun maybe, but not so useful.

Thinking about pant legs got me thinking about the make-up of clothing more generally—and led me to pockets. Most of my pants have at least two sets of pockets: the side ones that are sewn into the garment and the back ones that are sewn on. I carry lots of stuff in my pockets and I don’t ever seem to have enough room, and I prefer the bulge of a full exterior back pocket to the chafing of a stuffed inner one, though I can’t stand carrying things around where I can’t see them and inevitably crush them when I sit too enthusiastically. The answer?

Modular magnetic pockets. They can be attached to any part of any garment using a discreet, low-profile magnetic strip (or wadded up and crazily sewn elastic as in my prototype) that lies flat along the inside and firmly attaches the pocket to the outside.

And if it’s not in use? Just put it in your pocket.

This week’s cinematic challenge was to create the visual equivalent of Hemingway’s terse but complete “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn,” a microcinematic three-shot story. I composed and shot a story about putting an egg carton with only two eggs left in it in the fridge and opening the next morning to find the two eggs snuggling cozily in adjacent spaces, surrounded by half a dozen quail eggs. Then I read Robert Bresson’s Notes sur le Cinématographe, and it made me think that maybe I shouldn’t force the egg to tell a story but rather to capture the story inherent in the egg.