Something that has fascinated me for awhile is how merchants choose to display or sell their goods. Talking about a recent trip to Melaka, I was wondering why our shops always have to look chock-a-full of stuff. When in our history did it happen that our shops need to be full of things? Was it meant to convey a successful business? Wouldn’t it have just shown many things remained unsold? Was there a point in the psyche of selling and buying where we realised no one would ever walk into an empty shop?

Pick a shopping district in your town or city, and you’ll see what I mean. This need to fill a shop means we had to get the goods from somewhere, the cheaper the better, for a fatter profit margin. But rather than waxing about economics, I’m probably much better placed to talk about craft, or maybe just about jewellery.

In my travels, it has become obvious to me there’s no longer such a thing as “ethnic jewellery”. If you’re looking for something locally handmade, firstly, be prepared to be lied to about the origin of what’s in the shop, Secondly, expect to only be able to find things similar to what you’ve already seen elsewhere. Most jewellery on the market seem to come from around Tibet, India, Pakistan, China and South America, and on rare occasions, Eastern Europe. Note that this doesn’t necessarily dictate the quality of what you can buy — I’ve seen stuff that has obviously been made cheaply, but also very high quality work. Looking carefully though, it’s not easy to tell the origin of the piece by its design. What then, is authentic, if “authentic” local handmade craft is apparently imported? Is tourism to be blamed for the market for “authentic” souvenirs to bring home?

The real consequence in this is not just whether we find value in authentic experience or not, but in our bid to seem authentic but commercially competitive, we have sacrificed regional identities and uniqueness through giving in to cheaper production costs of goods.

As I was growing up, my parents, to their credit, tried to make sure I had a well-rounded education. I was given music and art lessons, and turned out to be quite good at these things in addition to being an A-student. However, the education system in the place where I was born was inherited from the British; your destiny is binary — you either end up in the Arts or the Sciences, depending on how well you did at school. (I’ve since learned this system is similar in many other places.) So, students who score good grades were streamlined into Sciences, and students who didn’t were cast into the Arts. If you were a Science student, your future is ripe for the picking, your oysters grown for you.

However, being someone who happened to be good at science and mathematics (it took me all the way until university before I started to loathe maths), as well as a performing musician when I began primary school, I couldn’t understand this arbitrary split of abilities and social rank, but I digress. At some point, I realised that to maintain a level of sanity, I had to make sure I could exercise both my artistic abilities and scientific inclination whatever I ended up doing.

I remembered one day when I came home from school and offered to help with dinner. My grandmother had always been nervous watching me cook because I was left-handed, and everything looked wrong to her. Out of nowhere, she said nonchalantly, “You’re such a good student, we can’t expect you to cook.” I remembered thinking to myself, “What?!” Even more surprising, she said it with a touch of pride. Maybe that was when it began — I refused to have my whole person judged upon one thing I did well, and wanted to do well in many things.

Recently, I was cleaning out my hard drive and found a random voice note I recorded at some point, probably for some essay that I never got around to write:

When I was in primary school, my headmaster thought I was smart enough to be a scientist one day. Looking back, I think he expected me to fill big shoes, maybe I could be like Albert Einstein or Marie Curie, but I think then that I really wanted to be like Leonardo da Vinci.

By the time I was getting into university, my matriculation score placed me in the top 3% of the state — probably not the best I could’ve done, but I didn’t really work all that hard, I was spending too much of my time playing in every single music ensemble the school had to offer. But that was alright, there were only two university courses my score wouldn’t have let me gone into: medicine and dentistry. Neither of these were of interest to me.

Throughout all these years, time and time again, my family repeatedly told me, “You can’t be the jack of all trades, master of none.” After awhile, I started calling myself a jackass of all trades.

And now, after more than a decade into my profession — which I stumbled onto rather than chose — I still hear this. Specialise, be really good at one thing. Don’t be a jack of all trades, master of none. You can’t be good at everything.

But I have the blood of a generalist. I was a fairly accomplished musician. In the realm of building for the web, I went from coding back-end systems, to front-end engineering, to designing user experiences, to leading teams, to project and product management. I wrote ever since my father thoughtfully gave me a book to fill since I was 7 years old, I sketched, wrote all the way through my difficult years, I learned to photograph the moment I could afford a decent camera. And thanks to my mother, I learned how to make things, and continue to pick up various different ways of making things. Later, I learned a little of the art of the barista, and learned how to silversmith.

If I hadn’t been a musician in an orchestra, an accompanist, or a soloist at times, I would probably not have had the ability know how to get people to work together, how it takes the power of many to create magic, how it takes careful listening, coordination and trust. If I had not graduated in computer science, I would not have come up with a team strategy that was inspired from programming for parallel processors. If I had not been a musician, I would probably never have been a good writer, communicator, teacher and speaker. What makes me a good cook is also what makes me a good project manager.

Somewhere in the way we view what we, as respectable members of society, should do with our lives, we lose out the moment we think of ourselves as a cogwheel that can be good at only one thing. So many of the skills we possess in one discipline translate to another, it seems ridiculous to limit ourselves and fool ourselves into thinking that we were each designed for only one thing.

It’s a little like mastering languages. When you begin to know a couple of languages, the third, fourth and fifth language comes easier, because suddenly you have a much more flexible model of the world through which you can adapt what you see and interpret. As you encounter new things, they either fit into something you already know, or you create a new mental model.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that if we could pick up very different skills, that we should be able to be more efficient learners, and be more adept in more of the things we do? In which case, why do we have a society that’s afraid of giving birth to generalists?

Update (Jan 7, 2010): Wow, for some reason this post is getting a lot of traffic after I’d even forgotten I’d written it. This post was a deep self-reflection, but I’m really happy to see that it appears to resonate with many. Also, seems like we lost some trackback info during our server crash a few months ago, so you may also be interested in follow up posts elsewhere:

• On Stephanie Booth’s blog: What if Generalist vs Expert was a Mistake?
• On my other blog, where I felt it’s more appropriate to take this thread: The Master of Many, Part 1 and Part 2.

I didn’t think much of it then, but as I was setting up my own studio little by little, I knew I’d like to throw as little harmful substance down the sink as possible. I had a good supply of these strange little nuts from a tiny shop in Melbourne where Mara told me I could find them, but I would be needing more — only then it occurred to me to see if I could find anything about these magic nuts. If there are ways to make the process of creating jewellery more environmentally-friendly, I want to know how.

It took about an hour of hunting online, but I finally found what I was looking for. In English, they are simply called “soap nuts”, or “soapberries”, and there’s even a Wikipedia entry for them.

Soap nuts are incredibly versatile, they are the ultimate general-purpose cleaning agent. These seems to be endless uses for them, anything from laundry detergent to household cleaner. But as a jeweller, notes like this are particularly interesting:

Soap nuts are used by Indian and Indonesian jewelers to polish and remove the tarnish from gold, silver, and other precious metals.

I’ve found almost nothing written about the technique online, so here’s what Mara taught me:

1. Boil some water.
2. Once boiled, pour the water into a pot or a container that can handle the heat, preferably with a cover. I’ve noticed the soap-solution is more effective if left to sit overnight, so you would want to keep this in a place where it stays clean and re-usable.
3. Take a soap nut, and hold it up to a flame until the leather skin sizzles a bit and begins to turn black, until the skin starts coming away a little from the inner seed. You can do this any way that you deem safe; I’ve held a nut with long metal tweezers to a candle or a cigarette lighter.
4. Drop the soap nut into the pot or container of boiled water. Sometimes, the skin will flake off into the water; this is perfectly okay, even desirable, seeing as the saponin (the soapy substance) is in the skin.
5. Use a metal brush or polishing cloth, dip it into water and use the water to polish your silver or gold.

The shine you get from this “polish” will surprise you. It does get a little wet, so I keep an amply supply of drying cloths or paper towels around.

So, where can you get these? There are a number of shops online that sell soap nuts, though mostly for laundry purposes. I happen to live close to several grocery stores that sell Indian produce and decided to go and find out if any of them happens to stock these. Finally, in a narrow middle aisle in one of them, tucked under things like tumeric and ground cumin, I found a small packet of “Aritha”. I paid $2 for about 30 nuts or so. Cool, no?

A friend/colleague of mine said he’s planning on building a cat pen, something similar to the pictures you see on this site. It looks like something cats would truly be able to enjoy even if we need to keep them safe.

My only problem with it is that it doesn’t really look all that good. Same reason why I don’t like cat trees. They stand apart in a space, looking like an afterthought.

In the spirit of good design, such as that of the ultimate cat house, I was thinking that if you had a big enough yard, it would be quite cool to create more tunnel-like structures that go right around the yard, underneath bushes and so forth, so that cats can hide as they usually like to do, and it would give them the opportunity of really exploring different places in the yard. For height, you can create archways and allow the cat to walk over the top, much like how cats like walking on beams with a view. And instead of leaving wires in plain sight, what about growing some creeper plants around it to give it some shade, and for kitty to hide and peep out?

Functional design, even for our cute, furry, clawed friends should look good for humans too.

Update:There are some examples similar to what I’m talking about, but again, I think there’s scope to meld these runs more into the landscape and make it part of your garden furniture.

There should be a video available at some point, but for now, here’s my own low-fi audio recording and a few slides to go with it.

Still, it surprises me that people around me think I travel more than I actually do. I can think of too many places I want to see and that I haven’t yet been to, and I do end up in the same few cities more frequently than I’d like. I’ve never undertaken the Australian tradition of travelling around the world for a year between high school and university, nor backpacking around Europe for a summer. To me, that arrangement seems too greedy somehow, like trying to gorge the world in one mouthful. My preferred way of doing it has been to move to a continent and poke around there for a little while.

Perhaps all it is, is that “travelling” means something different to me than to my friends. Travel is a way to see the world, and I’ve learned to do that even between the 30-minute metro ride between my home and the office. The scale of the journey is all about perspective. You can learn a lot about a city’s people by getting into the public transport at different times of day. You can learn all about the lay of its neighbourhoods — who has it tough, who has it easy — just by who gets on at which stop, who gets off where, and who are the ones driving the cars. I am a perpetual wanderer, a traveller in the city I live, because I know I won’t be here forever — whether I be eventually displaced geographically, or by the arrow of time.

And so, even if I feel myself almost native to Paris because I end up passing through almost every year, I have never been to the top of the Eiffel Tower. However, I have been to the bottom — just once. There was a famous French writer (whose name now escapes me) who ate breakfast at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower every morning when it was built, precisely because he loathed it and it was the only place in Paris where you couldn’t see it. I just wanted to know what kind of view he might have had.

From Wikipedia:

The Year is intended to address issues of linguistic diversity (in the context of cultural diversity), respect for all languages, and multilingualism. The resolution also discussed language issues in the United Nations itself.

The list of projects undertaken for the year is impressive, and of note is an informal page listing activities supporting IYL 2008. UNESCO has also updated their Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger, which is well worth a look.

March 2008 seems a long time ago! Stephanie Booth and I hosted a round table discussion (or a “Core Conversation”) called “Opening the Web to Linguistic Realities” at SXSW Interactive, on the topic of multilingualism and the Web. Joi sketched out a list of things we discussed on the day, for which I’m grateful, because it was rather impossible to take note of what was being discussed while facilitating the conversation. I got sidetracked by books since then, so never followed up with notes; it remains to be seen if the ad-hoc recording we made on the day turn out well.