Recently, I had the opportunity to apply for a position with a coworking space, helping to forge relationships between members and link them to projects where their skills could be applied. Readers of these pages will know of my great enthusiasm for places where ideas can be exchanged, talents traded, and resources shared – coworking spaces, yes, but also many other innovative (and traditional) public spaces and forums rendered fertile not only through proximity of shared resources, but through serendipity – the happy accident that creates something new and precious.
Thinking about coworking spaces in this way – not just as physical places but as collections of resources that can generate new value simply by virtue of the convergences they create – I got to ruminating on collections in general, and the idea of “collecting” as a valuable approach to better planning and better living – a remedy to isolation in the urban context as much as it is a system for creating meaning and memories in a personal one.
When I was younger, I had the sometimes-inconvenient habit of saving everything – artful cardboard packaging, empty spools from thread, those funny little pie-tin-shaped paper covers keeping the drinking glasses in hotel rooms clean (do they still use those?) – driven by the vague notion that whatever I collected would someday come in useful for . . . something.
I’d become convinced at an early age of the idea that nothing was really trash. In the right place, at the right time, in large enough quantities, anything could be useful – just google “dryer lint art.” This way of thinking stretches way beyond everyday choices like recycling; In my work as an author and artist, architect and urban strategist, student of and advocate for sustainable systems, this concept has come to repeat itself as a powerful trope, illuminating all sorts of efficiencies that create healthier, more productive, more satisfying and more inspiring human experiences.
In California and Hawaii, I traveled and learned to build communities from the dirt on which they stood and to shape the land according principles of permaculture, mimicking natural systems where waste materials in one context became valuable resources in another.
When I began working with teams to build large-scale sculptures out of recycled metal for Burning Man, where discarded materials find new life and friendships are built over hundreds of hours in the piece-by-piece creation of unfathomable works of art, I came to love the idea that litter was referred to not as trash but as MOOP — Matter Out Of Place.
This naming speaks to that lifelong love of collecting, embodying a simple but potent concept: anything that can be out of place also has the potential to be in place — we can generate value and eliminate unwanted objects simply by reframing them, changing their situation or their relationship to each other.
These same principles can be applied in the urban context — to physical things like waste streams and energy usage (the consolidating of which will only become more automatic as databasing and big data analysis become more second nature and intrinsic to our daily operations) — but to less tangible and easily identifiable resource streams as well. In the fields of urban innovation and social entrepreneurship, we are beginning to rearrange the components of modern society to create new modes and systems that increasingly emphasize efficiency and synergy over consumption and competition, to the benefit of all. It’s not so different from those biological principles I mastered, and eventually led workshops in.
Many of the trendiest new urban forms - start-up spaces, business incubators, all those coworking spaces and even some coffeeshops – fill a variety of roles for the public, fostering new ways of interacting and promoting networks that, like healthy ecosystems, support growth. But at their simplest, many of these spaces take on the role of collector: adding value by grouping things (in this case, people, ideas and resources) in new ways.
This concept, inherent in the natural world, where matter is constantly broken down and rebuilt into new ways, holds the key to innovation in the man-made world as well. Those growing networks and databases allow for materials exchanges that help industries sort and use all kinds of raw resources which would otherwise go to waste. On an individual level, they provide an easy infrastructure for sharing everything from tools to cars to couches for the night and homes for the week. Used to their fullest, they might enable the trading of underused capacities of all sorts.
A parallel process is taking place in physical space, with a slow return to models arranged around the density and mutualism that sustained communities for generations. Renewed investment in city centers and the movement toward transit oriented development are obvious examples, but it’s a movement that filters all the way down to urban innovations that push for more and better public amenities, creative events where leisure time is “shared,” rather than provided to an individual user in a private home, and other structure like pop-up retail where barriers to entry which might otherwise be too high to allow an individual entrepreneur or artisan to participate in the market are lowered.
Collecting people for a given cause can also have unexpected, generative effects. Our modus operandi for generations, recognized by social and cultural critics across space and time (From Karl Marx to the incindiary creator of the Zeitgeist movies, Peter Joseph, to psychologist Jean M. Twenge, whose recent Generation Me describes how today's young people are more driven and entitled – and unhappy – than ever before) has been to seek individual fulfillment through competition and consumption. But, as these critics have commented, finally being able to look so much of what we thought we wanted in the face has left us so unhappy, prompting the question, maybe all of this striving and getting and owning isn’t really all that fulfilling.
The open source movement centers on sharing and collaboration as a “greater than the sum of its parts,” game, and in many industries, such as fashion, which have been “open source” since before the term was coined, the lack of copyright or other intellectual property protection does not hinder the proliferation of ideas, but rather enables it. More importantly, we may find the collaborative or communal model more emotionally sustainable, for most of human evolution we did things in small dedicated communities, where individual compensation took a backseat to the entire community’s continued well being. Psychologists are repeatedly finding evidence that we are chemically and psychologically hard-wired to find satisfying group interactions more nourishing to the psyche than success-based individual actions, even when the outcome of an individual or competition based event is good for the individual.
Of course, there are only so many “winning” scenarios to go around – that venture-capital deal or promotion – so even if an ambitious individual can amass a record of successes and derive happiness from it, such a scenario tends to invoke a “fixed-pie” model with regard to other competitors and to environmental and social externalities. By contrast, collaborative models rely on everyone participating in a project’s success, which can effectively “grow the pie,” creating more efficient workpaths, more prolific and beneficial new models, more creative solutions based on a wider swath of participants, and a more powerful and satisfying end result.
Doubtful that participating as a tiny individual in a large group can be as satisfying as being the star of the show? Ever participate in a flash mob? It’s a silly example, but the impact of the spontaneous, authentic, exuberant interaction – though the majority of the participants possess no special skill – is arguably far greater than, for instance, a high-cost dance performance by professionals in a theater. And while, elsewhere in these pages I’ve lamented how the rush to participate in open-source or trendy innovation has at times led to the eradication of a skill or the diminishing of a particular expertise, the flip side of that argument is that the total “mass” of what’s produced is greater, with a greater dispersal of utility, than in most situations involving true expertise – the line between audience and performer is broken down, and everyone comes away feeling that they’ve participated.
It’s what makes Burning Man Burning Man, where there are said to be “no spectators,” and where everyone participates in building a larger-than-life experience through innumerable small contributions, be they in cooking, building, engineering, massaging, fortune-telling, solar-panelling or what have you. But Burning Man is certainly not the only populist art movement to buy into the theory. Nearly a generation before anyone built anything on Baker Beach, Peter Schumann was busily spreading the Cheap Art Manifesto through his Vermont-based Bread and Puppet theater company.
When groups of volunteers collaborate on projects at Burning Man (though the same is true in many other contexts), it is often for no payoff other than the satisfaction of seeing the project born into the world. But what motivates participants during the day-to-day operations required to conceive, plan, and construct some of those truly monumental works of art may have more to do with the day-to-day environment than with a vision of the final product. Working hard among likeminded creative individuals, learning new skills, and enjoying a flexible and supportive working environment are all powerful motivators, and show up in all kinds of social ventures with no quantifiable payoff for the individual. Volunteering to build a community garden or hold a bakesale or carswash – even if you are not the direct beneficiary – has a social value, just like the quilting bees and barn raisings of yesteryear.
All of which speaks to the Matter In Place ideology: there is a reason that barns were raised and quilts were bee’d in big groups – not just that many hands made the work lighter, but that they also made it more fun. These sorts of events were social occasions for the community, and the ‘fun-factor’ acted as a commodity to pay for the input of capital – time and labor – that was freely donated.
As eye-roll-inducing as it may be to describe this process in terms bland enough to be borrowed from Economics 101, we’ve become so automatically and unthinkingly dependent on consumption-based modes for our entertainment and social stimulation that it seems non-trivial to describe how satisfying group interactions could slowly begin to stand in for that CD purchased or Pay-Per- viewed. The also non-trivial result is, of course, a stronger overall community with a richer social structure and more resources to go around.
It’s a model that applies not only to artistic caprices, not only to community enterprises, but to all manner of human endeavors. It’s the coworking space that prompted this musing through its commitment to providing not only the ability to share physical resources, but more importantly, mentorship, community input and cross-pollination.
Ask any collector: it’s a careful act. Amassing things, yes. That’s the creating efficiencies part of the story. Ten people sharing one printer in a communal office is better than each person buying their own. But collecting is also about creating a narrative. You pick and choose objects that support each other, that multiply the power of those numbers by the quality and type of their interactions, the contrasts and repetitions, to create a story that otherwise couldn’t be told. And that is where participating in community trumps individual ownership or success any day.
On Collecting: New Contexts
Just as much as the act, the nature and meaning of collecting has long enthralled us. Those whose work tends to emulate the art of collecting – authors who gather words and thoughts, artists who make arrangements of tone and texture – have helped us realize their profound power, their deeply rooted place in civilization and the human psyche.
Introspections like those of Walter Benjamin, on the act of unpacking his library, or more recently William Davies King, whose psychotherapy (itself a "collection of recollections") led him to examine his own journey down the path of the collector, show the occupation to be as much about the construction of personal meaning – a type of self-creation – as it is about showcasing external truths inherent in the world. The newly published anthology Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices and the Fate of Things reinforces the idea of collecting as an essential human activity through its very scope; its authors adroitly shuttle through the warp-threads of the topic a broad weft that here uncodes the semiotic meanings embedded in everyday objects and there details the devastating sense of loss accompanying an author's accidental deletion of his MP3 collection – an archive which he has come to see as a catalogue of life phases and defining events.
In At Large and At Small, essayist Anne Fadiman uses the opening piece, "Collecting Nature," as a sort of organizing aperçu, providing readers with a framework for understanding the zealous passion – in herself and a host of other s who were brilliant or crazed or both – for the art of collecting, the joy and addiction inherent in conquest followed by categorization. That collecting, specifically lepidoptery, should be a common thread linking so many figures of historical weight she sees as logical bordering on expected:
Is it surprising that the revolutionist Jean-Paul Marat, the author of a 1790 pamphlet advocating that “five or six hundred heads be cut off,” was an amateur lepidopterist? Is it entirely a coincidence that Alfred Kinsey, before he collected eighteen thousand sexual histories (along with innumerable nudist magazines, pornographic statues, and pieces of sadomasochistic paraphernalia), collected tens of thousands of gall wasps?
But in just exactly how the results of a life spent amassing and chronicling, loving and possessing, can be read in a figure's work and legacy, she takes considered interest. She describes author Vladimir Nabokov's lifelong fascination with lepidoptory – "only Nabokov, eloping at age ten with a nine-year-old girl in Biarritz, would have taken, as the sum total of his luggage, a folding butterfly net in a brown paper bag" – and makes the case that his long and influential career, which lasted six decades and included a stint at Harvard, helped shape his prose.
Many of the themes in Nabokov’s fiction – metamorphosis and flight, deception and mimicry, evasion and capture – are lepidopteran. And to my ear, his very language is too. The first canto of Pale Fire contains, within its four-and-a-half-page compass, the words torquated, stillicide, shagbark, vermiculated, preterist, iridule, and leminiscate. Nabokov collected rare words, just as he collected rare butterflies, and when he netted one, especially in the exotic landscape of his second language, his satisfaction is as palpable as if he had finally captured the brown and white hairstreak that once eluded him when he was a boy. Nabokov’s style is not just poetic; it is taxonomic.
Of course, all the same is true of Fadiman herself, who admits within the pages of her essays her own love of rare words, her own continued enslavement – though she weened herself off lepidoptery – to the collecting of things like books, a pursuit in which her connection to sense of self is no less palpable than Benjamin's.
Above all, it is the lingering propensity toward the taxonomic that she shares with the figures she writes about; this is the point of opening with "Collecting Nature." It teaches us to reflect with game study on the disconnected ephemera of everyday life, to regard what could be seen as haphazard agglomeration instead as meaningful assemblage. This is the lesson we must understand to see the true beauty of At Large, which meanders with the scientist's paradoxical mix of excitable attention and staid passion from topic to topic – considering things as disparate as ice cream and mail and the drowning death of a trail-mate in her youth – and within topics, becoming through sheer preponderance of evidence and associations ever more granular in its observation.
This ability to see meaning iteratively – the world in a grain of sand, so to speak – is the task of the essayist and collector alike, for what are the objects and ideas collected but tiny fragments that represent larger wholes?
For a collector like Benjamin, to whom the activity necessarily connotes something of a disorder, a feverish love, the true collector is not so much concerned with the objects of his infatuation for the objects' sake, but rather, for the place these tiny fragments of meaning allow him to build for himself – it is not, as he says, that the objects come alive in the collector, but rather, that he comes alive in them.
Living within one's collection may seem an abstract concept, and yet, in many ways it the perfect interpretation of collecting in the modern era, when it is practices as a highly emotional and personal art.
The popular home design and lifestyle website Apartment Therapy frequently relies on the idea of collecting as a method of making a space meaningful for its occupants. For a great collection of their articles on collecting, click through the photo.
Collecting has burst free from a rigid realm heretofore confined to stamps, coins, or high-end art. Today, it's a populist activity available to just about anyone, as perusal of any popular home, design or lifestyle magazine will suggest. Article or how-tos on collecting today (excluding the very technical) free collectors from the necessity of investing wisely or making a profit, reminding them that it's more important to assess whether the objects collected will be in storage in five years than retain resale value in fifty. Collecting today is about personality rather than mastery, and enjoyment rather than rarity or (except in the most general, anthropological sense) cultural significance. Thus freed from stifling restrictions of taste and economy, collecting objects (like collecting words and stories for the essayist) is free to be a truly creative enterprise, able to generate new forms and values in a way that the restrictive act of cataloguing simply couldn't.
Martha Stewart, whose dogmatic DIY-iscm can seem over-the-top and has gained her criticism over the decades she has spent as a home-design and lifestyle maven, frequently includes notes on collecting. In one sense, she is similar to Benjamin's true collector, a man of such excess leisure that he has the time to dedicate himself to his passion (after all, who, but someone with too much time on their hands, could patiently glue micro-collections onto accordion-folded pages contained within a matchbook?). And yet, Stewart also shares with him the idea of collections as self-defining. She has a very Benjamin-esque interpretation of the art, looking more at how collections enrich our spaces through juxtaposition and surprise, becoming an outward expression of personality, rather than conforming to strict rules about category and worth.