Welcome to Gornisht. Issue #108.
What am I doing writing this newsletter? Nothing. And a little of everything.
Welcome to Gornisht. I’m glad you’re here.
Gornisht is a newsletter that tackles the state of contemporary design, the nature of consciousness and how designers might grapple with both.
It’s about nothing. Or, more accurately, Gornisht is about my own machinations — through and by design — in grappling with nothingness and learning to see everything, both critically and compassionately.
Forever and a Day
This newsletter is about six months in the making. I spent days and nights thinking and deliberating about its contents and structure. (I’m still obsessing about it. We’ll talk about that, too.) What do I have to say that could be so important that others might want to read it?
Ultimately, I created a Venn diagram of the things that are most important to me more generally (Circle 1) and what might be most important for other designers (Circle 2). In the middle are ideas related to design, communications and consciousness — or more specifically, the relationship between becoming a good designer and doing good as a designer. There are short and long bridges between these two outposts and I’m very interested in all of them.
In a world awash in writing, newsletters and visual ephemera, is there an audience of designers and design-adjacent workers that might rationally be interested in this newsletter?
I don’t know. And yet I push Publish.
What is Gornisht?
So what is Gornisht? And what the hell kind of name is that for a newsletter? In Yiddish, the traditional language of European Jewry, gornisht means nothing. No, it is not a word without definition. Rather, gornisht means zero, nada, zippo, or bupkes (also Yiddish for nothing but stands in for something more impolite). For purposes of this newsletter, gornisht means the nothing of getting to nothing: not nothingness itself but the recognition of something, which is the cogitation of everything.
But gornisht does not mean death nor does it mean futility. And it’s definitely not a project of nihilism though their are nihilistic tendencies to both Judaism and Buddhism. Gornisht just means nothing, and therefore, everything. In the Mahayna scripture called The Heart Sutra (below newly translated by Thich Nhat Hanh, emptiness is described as all that is and all that ever was.
“Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body. This Body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body. The same is true of Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, and Consciousness. “Listen Sariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing. “That is why in Emptiness, Body, Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations and Consciousness are not separate self entities.
So basically, I gave myself a whole lot of latitude to write about everything. Nice little jujitsu move, right?
Gornisht is about the deep sense that everything is important — and that some things are more important than others in order to understand their importance.
We begin.
Where does design come in?
Right. So how does an understanding of that which is nothing connect to the state of design? This is the great unfolding.
The planet is creaking under the weight of over eight billion people who successfully designed their way into madness. We are indebted to the ancestral past of all species that came before us and especially those who lived during the Carboniferous era 60 million years ago. But we are also deeply indebted to the project of design, which over the past century, has helped us create comforts that our ancestors could only dream about: food and human staples packaging, global and instantaneous communications, and international travel.
Those of us who avail themselves of these innovations should be immensely grateful for such outrageous access. But with the rapidly warming climate, we also must act responsibly for the outrageous outcomes that are spawned by that access.
Designers have a seat at the table of conscious work in a way that others do not. This newsletter is about that intersection — we need a world of conscious and conscientious designers that can handle what is about to be thrown at them over the next decade. I call this design consciousness.
Great. So what am I going to write about?
Here are some topics that will be covered over the lifespan of this newsletter:
What a designer is today (and why it has become more difficult)
How to run a socially responsible (and more conscious) design studio
What designers can do to develop a meditation practice
What is, and is not, mindfulness and why it matters
The race towards artificial general intelligence and design’s influence
User experience as a means to short circuit awareness
Why organizations that represent designers have it backwards
How students of design might benefit from meditation
Why designers may be more receptive to meditation practice
Tools that designers use to practice both design and mindfulness
The failure of failing fast and failing often
Depression, meditation and how I struggle with both
I hope that some of these topics may be of interest to you. Thank you for hitching a ride with me on this journey toward nothing.