Five Lessons from the Whole Earth Catalog
More than twenty years after the last issue of Whole Earth Catalog's thirty-year run, AMBUSH® looks back on the life lessons left behind. The catalog democratized niche resources and know-how, lending knowledge to the individual, more than a guide to the world's most cutting-edge technology. When computers, the internet, and all these could provide us were just breaking ground, Whole Earth Catalog broke down instructionals into digestible nuggets and visually stimulating contents.
Looking back on these archival issues gives a glimpse into the design of the past. Beauty comes even from those graphics, charts, and typographics that were not meant to visually please. Their functional designs bridge the gap between the utility of early machines and today's overly-stimulating, packed-with-pictures World Wide Web. Beyond that, the guide offers suggestions for preserving natural resources, learning about electronic democracy, how to self publish a book, identifying edible mushrooms, and other lessons many of us never learn in our lifetime. The magazine’s offerings are vast and apply to many aspects of our lives. Below, the AMBUSH® team has chosen five rules to live by, pairing them with graphic pictures pulled straight from the catalog's pages.
1. Learn things
Be a kid again. Writer Anne Herbert explains: if you're starting to learn about a new subject, go to the library and look at books for children in fifth, sixth, and seventh grade. These books have colors and pictures to sell the subject and introduce ideas without any prior knowledge. You're never too old to learn something new.
2. Forget the rules
Get outside of your head. Your mind is full of things you've seen before: images and references from past experiences, ideas you've consumed, stuff that is already out there. The only way to escape it is to have a new adventure, define a unique problem, and find an original solution. So toss out the rules and start anew.
3. Think visually
To paraphrase culture-critic Howard Rheingold, our eyes are where our minds meet the world. Without visual thinking, you're working without an important mental tool. Books like A Whack on the Side of the Head (1983) are said to "unlock your mind for innovation," using playful visual puzzles. Get your mind moving to free creativity and new ways of seeing the world.
4. Solve anything
Using logic from mathematics, we can solve almost anything: what is the unknown, the data, and the condition? Understanding a problem is the first step to solving it. Draw a figure. Write down every part of the condition. Have you seen it before? Do you know a related problem? Use a solution to a related problem and twist it to fit into the problem at hand.
5. Look around
The cityscape from a high-rise window or the landscape from an airplane's height: the world looks different from above. But even our everyday views can be clouded by our ordinary, seemingly predictable surroundings. We spend so much time looking down at our phones, a twenty-first-century shoe-gazing, that we forget to look back up. The world is changing, and we're missing it.
