Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
One of the reasons I love living in New England is that we experience four very distinct seasons. Yesterday fall arrived right on time. The days are cooler and we closed our windows last night. It's cozy.
Happy Friday.
Brand, Visual Identity
"You are an unignorable and hopeful cultural force.”
"The Girl Scouts of the USA counts 1.7 million girls as members, spread across 112 independent councils – each of which, up until now, had been designing its own communications.
(Strategic design agency) Collins has been working with the organisation since 2019 to create a new identity that brings its constituent parts together. According to the studio, the goal was to affirm the Girl Scouts’ place as 'an unignorable and hopeful cultural force' in the lives of young women.
"Collins’ rebrand embraces a neon, rainbow palette, as well as an updated version of the Girl Scouts’ trefoil – which has been in use since the organisation’s founding in 1912. Usually displayed in green, the symbol has been freed up to appear in a huge range of colours." - Emma Tucker
This is great work. Not only did the Colins team liberate the color palette, they did the same thing with shapes, starting with the org's trefoil. They developed a simple catalog of mix-and-match shapes, then showed how to use them for messaging the brand promise.
An 'unignorable and hopeful cultural force' is a brilliant brand promise, and this program is brilliantly expressed. Bravo.
Article: The Girl Scouts’ Rebrand Cements its Place as a “Hopeful Cultural Force”
Research
People who reported transformative experiences at gatherings like Burning Man "felt more connected with all of humanity and are more willing to help distant strangers".
Photo by Curtis Simmons, Flickr: simmons_tx
"Throughout history, mass gatherings such as collective rituals, ceremonies, and pilgrimages have created intense social bonds and feelings of unity in human societies. But Yale psychologists wondered if modern day secular gatherings that emphasize creativity and community serve an even broader purpose.
"The research team studied people’s subjective experiences and social behavior at secular mass gatherings, such as the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. They found that people who reported transformative experiences at the gatherings felt more connected with all of humanity and were more willing to help distant strangers, the researchers report May 27 in the journal Nature Communications.
“'We’ve long known that festivals, pilgrimages, and ceremonies make people feel more bonded with their own group,' said Daniel Yudkin, a postdoctoral researcher and first author of the paper. 'Here we show that experiences at secular mass gatherings also have the potential to expand the boundaries of moral concern beyond one’s own group.' ” - Bill Hathaway
This year's Burning Man commenced on Sunday, August 28 and will end on Monday, September 5.
,
Article: ‘Transformative’ Effects of Mass Gatherings Like Burning Man are Lasting
Collective Intelligence, Neuroscience
The technological advances that could spur greater cooperation:
"We have become too used to thinking of intelligence as the private skill of individuals, vying against one another in a neoliberal world of relentless competition. What is needed, especially in an age of irredentist warmongering and climate disaster, is a greater emphasis on our ability to reason together, our 'collective intelligence'.
This has been possible, of course, since we gruntingly taught one another how to make flint tools around the cave fire. What does neuroscience add to our understanding of it? Well, the brainwaves of people cooperating on a task can synchronise, which is interesting. And feelings of empathy help groups solve puzzles – as do higher female-to-male sex ratios...". - Steven Poole
Book Review: Joined Up Thinking by Hannah Critchlow – the Power of Collective Cognition
Learning
A new study suggests that ants as a group behave like networks of neurons in a brain.
Image by Motab Bin Buty, via CC
"Temperatures are rising, and one colony of ants will soon have to make a collective decision. Each ant feels the rising heat beneath its feet but carries along as usual until, suddenly, the ants reverse course. The whole group rushes out as one—a decision to evacuate has been made. It is almost as if the colony of ants has a greater, collective mind.
"Daniel Kronauer, head of the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at Rockefeller University, and postdoctoral associate Asaf Gal developed a new experimental setup to meticulously analyze decision-making in ant colonies.
"As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found that when a colony evacuates due to rising temperatures, its decision is a function of both the magnitude of the heat increase and the size of the ant group.
"The findings suggest that ants combine sensory information with the parameters of their group to arrive at a group response—a process similar to neural computations giving rise to decisions." - Katherine Fenz-Rockefeller
Article: Ant Colonies Work Like Brains When Making Decisions.
Retail, Sustainability
British department store group responds to customers’ demand for more sustainable shopping.
 ‘Reselfridges’ initiative is aimed to change the way that people shop. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
"Selfridges is aiming for almost half its interactions with customers to be based on resale, repair, rental or refills by 2030 as the upmarket department store responds to increasing demand for more sustainable shopping.
"The retailer said it wanted to step up action after increasing sales of secondhand items by 240% to 17,771 pieces last year and facilitating 28,000 repairs, more than a third of which were pairs of trainers, in its effort to trade in a more environmentally sustainable way. It also rented out more than 2,000 items to customers and sold more than 8,000 refills.
"Andrew Keith, the managing director of the department store group, which has four outlets across the UK – in London, Birmingham and two in Manchester – said its 'Reselfridges' initiative aimed to change the way that people shop and would form the 'backbone of the business', making up 45% of transactions in future. He set a deadline of 2030 to reach that target." - Sarah Butler
Article: Selfridges Wants Half of Transactions to be Resale, Repair, Rental or Refills By 2030
Media
How to attracted a younger, more diverse audience to public radio.
Image via Vocalo 91.1, Chicago
Article: Corporation for Public Broadcasting to Fund Urban Alternative Public Radio Expansion.
Visual Identity
How Trader Joe's gets its signs to look hand painted.
Commissioned art by Trader Joe's team member Zoe Terrell of Athens, GA
Each of the idiosyncratic grocery store’s 500-plus locations has custom-made signage, created by staff artists, who also do things like stock the shelves and ring you up.
Article: Behind Every Trader Joe’s Sign is a Working Artist Who Painted It.
One-liners
Article: The Muppets are mostly left-handed.
Article: Why almost every wooden barn you have ever seen is red.
Article: Can you inoculate people against misinformation before they even see it? This study says yes.
Article: Lithuanian university invites consumers to help co-develop a takeaway food package that does not contain a single gram of plastic.
Playlist
Last week Mable John died. She was 91. Amongst many accomplishments, she was the first female singer ever signed to Motown Records. Rolling Stone did a great summary that starts in the 50s:
"Mable John worked at the Friendship Mutual Insurance Agency, a company run by Bertha Gordy, the mother of Berry Gordy, then an aspiring music producer. 'He had no money and no way of getting around, but he had these people who wanted to hear his songs, so I drove him around,' John said of Gordy.
"Gordy founded his own label Tamla in 1958. John became the first solo female artist to sign and record on the label, which two years later became Motown Records."
In 1965 she joined the Memphis label Stax Records. "John’s first single on that iconic label, 'Your Good Thing (Is About to End)' written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter, became a top 10 single on the R&B charts, and was later covered by singers like Bonnie Raitt, Etta James and the Bar-Kays." - Daniel Kreps
And then there's the Raelettes, Ray Charles' back-up group. She filled in now and again in the 60s, but in the 70s she led the group on world tours, the only time that famous group appeared without Charles. They had his full support, and she is attributed to contributing to more than a dozen songs during her decade with the genius of soul.
And she didn't stop there. She appeared as blues singer, Bertha Mae, in John Sayles' 2007 film Honeydripper, a film that also featured Danny Glover, Keb' Mo', Kel Mitchell and Gary Clark Jr.. She was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. She became a minister, founding Los Angeles’ Joy Community Outreach. And she performed in concert as recently as 2015.
Article: Mable John, Motown’s First Female Solo Artist, Dead at 91
Image of the Week
Installation view of Sasha Huber, "Tailoring Freedom" (2021), metal staples on photograph on wood, 38.18 x 27.16 inches (photo by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy the artist and Tamara Lanier)
"In June, a Massachusetts court finally ruled on Tamara Lanier’s pioneering lawsuit against Harvard University to repatriate daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors, Renty and Delia Taylor. The photographs were commissioned by Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), the famous Swiss-born naturalist who became an advocate for ethnic cleansing and racial segregation after moving to the USA, as part of a eugenics campaign when he was director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnology."
Detail view of Sasha Huber, “Tailoring Freedom” (2021), metal staples on photograph on wood, 38.18 x 27.16 inches (photo by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy the artist and Tamara Lanier)
"In addition to his role as museum director, Agassiz was one of the 19th century’s most influential 'scientific racists' whose pseudoscientific notions have generally been overlooked in light of his many contributions to the fields of paleontology, geology, ichthyology, and glaciology. No one awaited the court ruling with more interest than Swiss-Haitian-Finnish artist Sasha Huber, who has spent the last fifteen years trying to undo her countryman’s problematic legacy. As part of her 'Demounting Louis Agassiz' campaign, Huber, who lives and works in Finland, stages what she calls 'reparative interventions' in places named after Agassiz — an ambitious undertaking, considering the seven animals and over 80 landmarks bearing his name on Earth, the Moon, and Mars." - Faith Adiele
Article: How Do You Repair the Scientific Racism Embedded in the History of Science?
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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