Postcard Booklets Done! Leaving for Darj in 2 Days

My sum­mer plans are very excit­ing. I leave for India in two days. I will be in Dar­jeel­ing for about eight weeks to work on the post­card project. Then I will be in Ethiopia for two weeks vis­it­ing Sud­den Flow­ers Pro­duc­tions, a video arts col­lec­tive of HIV/AIDS orphans. For the final weeks of the sum­mer, I will be in Rio de Janeiro to visit my friend Tri­cia Perry as she works on a Ful­bright project cre­at­ing edu­ca­tional mul­ti­me­dia on HIV/AIDS stigma­ti­za­tion. I get back to New York City on Sep­tem­ber 1st.

In India, I will be deliv­er­ing the post­cards that the Guatemalan cof­fee farm­ers wrote to the Indian tea farm­ers and col­lect­ing responses. The month has been non­stop efforts to get this together. I am deliv­er­ing the post­cards as book­lets with the front and back of each post­card and the trans­la­tion of the Span­ish mes­sage into Nepali.

We were very close to get­ting the fonts prob­lem fix, but didn’t quite get there. Nepali is writ­ten in Devana­gari, the same alpha­bet as Hindi. There are two kinds of fonts, Uni­code and True­Type. Coor­di­nat­ing what kind of font the trans­la­tion was in and how to make that work on the apple com­put­ers we were doing lay­out on was a total headache. In the end, half the trans­la­tion was in a usable font and half was all gar­bled. We just went with copy­ing and past­ing from a PDF, which worked just fine despite giv­ing us fewer lay­out options. Maral Minass­ian worked on the lay­out, putting in all-nighters in the mid­dle of finals. I am very happy with the design, as is she. Thanks so much, Maral.

I worked with MicroPage for the print­ing. The staff at MicroPage were con­sis­tently gen­er­ous and respon­sive. I thor­oughly enjoyed work­ing with them. They started jok­ing that I had a time sheet in back because I was there so often to address prob­lems and pro­vide updated mate­ri­als. The Par­sons Stu­dent Sen­ate and the Lang Stu­dent Union at The New School funded the printing.

The 450 book­lets were fin­ished on Fri­day. I pack­aged them up and FedExed about 350 of them to Dar­jeel­ing. I will be car­ry­ing about 50, and leav­ing 50 in New York. Thank you to the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Design and Tech­nol­ogy depart­ment for fund­ing the ship­ping. I will give a pre­sen­ta­tion on the project to the incom­ing grad­u­ate Design and Tech­nol­ogy stu­dents in early Sep­tem­ber. I showed Colleen Mack­lin, the depart­ment chair, the final book­let. She is famil­iar with the project from my pre­sen­ta­tions through the India China Insti­tute. Her take is that I am doing inter­ac­tion design, just not in the com­puter. This inter­pre­ta­tion opens up doors for apply­ing the con­tent and spirit of the project to a vari­ety of media formats.

My his­tory advi­sor Paul Ross saw the final book­lets and con­grat­u­lated me on suc­cess­fully sub­vert­ing the colo­nial his­tory of the post­card. This kind of accom­plish­ment makes me raise my fist in the air and holler a tri­umphant, Yea!!! I wrote my his­tory the­sis on the his­tor­i­cal iden­tity of the two com­mu­ni­ties, includ­ing how Santa Anita, the Guatemalan com­mu­nity, talks about them­selves in the post­cards. The the­sis still needs a major revi­sion that was sim­ply not fea­si­ble in the time span of the semes­ter. It’s also miss­ing impor­tant things like thor­ough foot­notes… That said, it is an artic­u­late doc­u­ment, and per­fec­tion is pro­cras­ti­na­tion. So, here you go (34 page PDF). Any com­ments and sug­ges­tions are wel­come. Keep in mind it is a work in progress. This is an inter­est­ing dif­fer­ence between the social sci­ences and design prac­tices. In design, it’s quite accept­able to pub­lish your iter­a­tions, while in the social sci­ences, drafts aren’t accepted as pub­lish­able doc­u­men­ta­tion of a process. ~shrug~ As always, I’m glad be obnox­iously interdisciplinary.