PlanetShifter.com Interview with Berlin Resident and Studio Blixa6.com Designer Amy Stafford by Willi Paul

In addition to design work, Amy writes a weekly column on art and culture for "Outskirts" on web journal Fashion Wire Daily. She also contributes bi-weekly insights to "Off the Cuff" under the pseudonym AutoBonBon, offering observations on society and intercultural developments. For three years she served as the Arts Editor for Surface Magazine, as well as having been a contributor to the New Arts Examiner and other international publications. Check-out her web site for Katarina Witt.

Community is both a simple idea and a tough thing to "map." How do you foster community in Berlin from a business and personal perspective?

In many ways the community I have fostered in Berlin is an amalgamation of both professional and personal contacts that feed into one another. For example, 5 years ago I helped to found a dance performance organization called Lucky Trimmer Dance Performance Series. We curate and present a collection of short pieces by international choreographers 2x a year in a theater located in a bombed out old department store turned cultural center called Tacheles. The group was formed in an emergent sort of way from a loosely knit group of friends from East Germany and the US who saw that there was a lack of opportunity in Berlin for young choreographers to test ideas in a public arena. We didn't have money and have never gotten state funding, but we manage to pay the theater and dancers from the ticket sales and 5 years later we are still going strong. We have set up a non-profit foundation, have toured other cities in Germany and our shows are consistently sold out. Though I haven't been paid directly for my contributions as their advertising designer and strategic advisor, my work on the board of Lucky Trimmer e.V. has led to numerous client projects, given me valuable exposure and helped me promote my own design business in Berlin.

Another area where I "blend" business and personal is within a community of practitioners and trainers of the Grinberg Method. This is a form of body working and an approach to life that is very new to the US and currently only available in the LA area. In Europe there are centers in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Austria and France. It is growing in popularity as an effective form of healing and personal development. The method combines elements of massage, reflexology and other movement and breathing techniques, which are effective in the treatment of chronic pain and other things that inhibit living life to the fullest. I am both a client of this method as well as working with many of the practitioners as an identity designer and strategic consultant for their practices. Our relationships are mutually beneficial and because I am experienced with the technique, while still standing slightly to the side of the Grinberg Method world, I am able to apply my knowledge of the processes and philosophy to the development of personalized marketing strategies and design systems.

The Grinberg Method community is loosely woven in with the dance community, which is further connected to the creative communities in which I also work. Somehow each feeds into another and weaves a rich tapestry of personal and professional interconnections are based on the basic principle of operating with integrity and confidence while fostering these qualities in others.

How does the counter culture feel in Berlin vs. the USA? Are youth active?

Certainly Berlin is a big hub of German counterculture. This stems from various phenomena unique to the city including plentiful cheap housing, many universities and a rich history of being a center of arts and culture. Since I arrived from San Francisco in 2000 things have changed though and the conversion has become more apparent in the past 3-5 years.

At the time of my arrival the center of the city, called Mitte, which was once part of the former East – was full of un-renovated buildings full of artists and squat houses where punks and anarchists set up alternative communities in run-down buildings. These were properties that hadn't yet been re-claimed by owners who had held them before they were turned into DDR state property during the cold war/ Berlin Wall era. Living was cheap and infrastructure was limited, making it a haven for artists and people seeking platforms for alternative lifestyles. The law prevented the buildings from being taken over by developers so they sat in wait for the return of the original owners (who were, upon occasion, sent to concentration camps during the second world war) -while being occupied by "squatters" either as cheap studios or housing.

Today there are only a few buildings like this left in my neighborhood – and these are under attack from outside investors eager to develop the sites and neighboring property owners who argue the anarchistic lifestyle brings down the property value of the neighboring buildings and disrupts the neighborhood with noise and chaos.

Over time the illegal bars, clubs and alternative art and theater spaces that were commonplace when I arrived have been pushed out and replaced by commercial enterprises, branded shops and hundreds of art galleries. Only a few remain today, while the counterculture moves farther east into less desirable neighborhoods that still act as holdouts of this Old School Berlin anarchistic feeling.

As an example, a few weeks before Christmas '09 one of these squats, just around the corner from me was shut down by the police – precipitating an unauthorized "demonstration" of angry punks who had been forcibly ousted - marching down my street, knocking over barricades, snarling traffic while waving hastily made banners and shouting angrily. The police were quick to follow – both chasing them on foot and in riot wagons. I walked past the squat house the next day and saw that it had been boarded up with a security guard wearing Kevlar standing in front of the blocked entry.

During the first 14 years after the fall of the Wall, there was such a flowering of experimental spaces and projects that flew in the face of capitalist ideology– with room to try unconventional concepts. Amazing things happened - like secret restaurants in private living-rooms based on a communist model of paying what you felt like at the end of a meal, innovations in temporary landscaping of vacant lots and ad-hoc boutiques selling hand-made clothes. But since about 2005, the influx of western consumerism has overtaken these spaces and pushed out the counterculture. In one poignant example, not far from me used to be a pop-up summer beer garden parked in bombed out vacant lot, selling beer out of a shabby caravan and offering beach lounge chairs to sit for hours in the stubby grass, enjoying the long summer afternoon/evenings. In the last 3 years it has been converted into condos and an LPG (an organic grocery store along the lines of Whole Foods).

This kind of low-tech anti-capitalist experimentalism is not as possible in the US or other cities of Western Europe since the cities are already so built out and commercially developed. In certain areas where economic decline and urban decay are apparent, there definitely are outcroppings however, like on the fringe of downtown Phoenix and the underground creative activities in Detroit. Additionally, with the high cost of urban living in most cities, the ability to survive on meager incomes and have time to play, create and try new things is not as accessible. In Paris for instance, life is expensive and squats are illegal though I have visited a few which are careful position themselves as "cultural centers" to avoid being shut down by the cops.

As far as the activity of youth within these counter culture circles – it is harder for me to say. The scenes I have explored in Berlin and Paris are typically inhabited by "kids" ranging from 22-45 years of age. Berlin is only now becoming a center of rising birth rates in Germany which has been experiencing a baby crisis and declining birthrates for many years. But it certainly is an attractive, affordable and exciting city for students, who start university much later than we typically do in the US – generally at about 21-23 years of age.

Who is in the Green Movement there and why?

Cem Ozdemir, is the new Green Party co-leader, along with Claudia Roth. While both are originally from Germany, Ozdemir is the first Turkish-origin leader of a big party in Germany. Although he tries to downplay his family's foreign-national heritage, it is still a talking point here where "the Turkish question", mixed-race Germans and German Nationalism are touchy subjects. He commented to The Economist "The fact that we're still talking about this shows how far there is to go."

The German Green Party platform is based on defending civil liberties and social justice, and also fighting climate change and nuclear power. They want substantial investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transport and new electricity networks. The Greens also call for greater investment in childcare and education to function as forms of indirect economic stimulus.

Admittedly I don't spend much time following German politics. This is in part because I am not permitted to vote on national elections. While technically my permanent residential status allows me to vote on the local level in Berlin, certain laws invoked by the US Patriot Act would place me in peril by aligning myself with a political party outside the US. So – instead I find other ways to be involved with the community – outside the explicitly political world.


How is Germany dealing with its War ghosts - and what new stories and myths are building stream now?

While we are still on the subject of the green movement, it might be interesting to point out that one of the less discussed war ghosts is that the first political party who advocated ecological policies was the National Socialists (Nazis). For them, preserving ecology and creating a society that was integrated with the whole of nature – striving for connectedness with the totality of life and with nature itself - was deeply connected with their idea of the preserving the German Volk and the mystique surrounding the Fatherland's "roots of blood (the race/volk) and soil (the natural environment)". The Nazis were ideologically inclined to agrarian romanticism, denigrating the rationalism of the Enlightenment, urban culture and the evils of industrialization – pointing an anti-semitic finger towards the rootless evils of the foreign Jewish influence as a key threat to the purity of the homeland.

During the Weimar Republic there was a popular youth movement called the Wandervögel – loosely translated as "the wandering free spirits" – who dreamed of harmony with nature and stressed the primacy of direct emotional experience over critical critique and action. While they claimed an apolitical stance, this idealistic youth movement became an easy target for the Nazis who leveraged the seductive terminology of reactionary ecology, bringing them into their idealistic fold early on. This is not to say that the Nazis were cynical in their environmental actions – even the Autobahn's design and construction was as environmentally sensitive as possible - becoming a proud expression of the German landscape and the German essence.

Ultimately ecology and environmental themes are neither issues of the left or right - but if we are to learn from what happened with the Nazis, we see these issues need to be considered in larger social context – not based merely on overarching notions of "ecological or green" – but also recognizing that even our ideas of nature are socially constructed. Perhaps it is interesting to mention that today the German Green Party's largest constituencies are affluent, well educated and reside in the urban centers.

So, in the wake of Nazism, the Germans still struggle with how to remember and not memorialize the ghosts of the war. This is a huge topic here – and the subject of many a massive PhD thesis. One of the phenomena I have found particularly apparent is the resistance to mystical romanticism of the kind that was perpetrated by the National Socialists. This is hammered home with an overarching adherence to a rationalism, academic intellectualism and proud mechanical superiority – as evidenced by their most famous brand exports: Mercedes,VW, BMW, Porsche and Krupps (Thyssen Steel) .

The currently growing myth is called Ostalgia – looking back at the old East with warm fuzzy memories of a simpler time. The first 10 years after German reunification were filled with horror stories about the Stasi and the cruelties of Communism, but in the past several years this has been replaced with more personalized accounts of the things that are missed about the old East. Many movies have come out to help foster this feeling – like "Goodbye Lennin" for instance, which I saw in the theater at Alexanderplatz – a few meters from where the story took place. This Ostalgia feeling culminated last year in a wave of articles, documentaries and exhibitions commemorating the 20-year anniversary of the fall the Berlin Wall.

We will see how things go from here.

What are the tools of your craft?

My tools include a MacBook Pro, an extra monitor, notebooks, loose paper, pencils and pens, watercolors, a digital camera and scanner, Adobe's Creative Suite, MS Office, tons of books on all kinds of subjects for inspiration (not just art/design oriented but also dealing with science, sociology, politics, post modern theory, business and economics), a huge collection of images and graphic samples that I give my clients to brainstorm with, my head, my heart, my eyes, my hands and my belly.

"When I moved to Germany in 2000 my discussions with him about simplified living, reduced eco-footprints and resource management became practice where in the US they had been theory - for example: every-day German standards of energy efficiency, using bikes not cars, living with less and emergent community driven projects (often fueled by remnants of post-East German solidarity and American can-do optimism)."

What makes your creative products unique? Please describe your innovation process. How important is evaluation and client feedback?

Many clients have commented to me that I don't have a specific design style, but that I create designs to suit their unique needs without foisting my "vision" upon them. While each artist has their own "hand", like each person has their own handwriting, my work as a designer and artist is driven far more concept than style. I was not trained as a graphic designer, but have a master's degree in fine art – with a conceptual, multi-disciplinary foundation. This gives me the ability to look at clients with a much broader approach and viewpoint than simply problem solving with layout and graphics. I also have professional experience working in several facets of the business of branding – from high-end retail window display to commercial photography and marketing for start-ups. This gives me a unique advantage that classically trained graphic designers, particularly in a country of specialists like Germany, do not have. I also have that plucky American style of optimism and "can do" spirit that is rare in this country. This in itself makes my services unique here.

My process involves in-depth intake and brainstorming sessions with my clients and then more self-directed research to study the markets they operate within before I start any actual designing. Normally the core ideas start to emerge during the brainstorming sessions – when we get to the questions about favorite childhood stories, superhero personas and other metaphors that get their creative juices flowing. Often I a direction just pops into my head and I know it is right. Although I may have the general idea there, I give myself time to let it simmer and refine before I start sketching things out.

The way I explain it to my clients – the intake session is like selecting the different ingredients that will go into a giant stew. Will it have lots of carrots, beef and thyme or tofu, noodles and lemongrass? When you make soup it takes time for the flavors to blend and deepen – and it usually tastes better the second day. I do the same thing with the materials that emerge from the brainstorming. I let them stew for a while, cooking and reducing until specific, unique flavors emerge. Then I develop about 3 different directions that the client gets to choose from. This feedback is a fundamental part of the development – and it happens at many stages along the way. It is a collaborative process that requires me to step aside from my ego. Heck it's not my brand that is being developed - it is my client's. They may not know exactly what they want or need, but they know it when they see it.

You make use of personal dreams and mythologies in your work with clients. Is this always a positive thing?

Yes – I believe so. Even if some of the myths and unrealized dreams are painful to face – they challenge my clients to see the overarching dramas that influence the choices they make in their lives, their relationships and with their careers. It is always enlightening for them to pull back from the close-up view they normally operate with and see the red line that connects the different dots of their life that are often seeded in early childhood. By getting people to think in metaphors instead of concrete facts they start loosen up and get results in the process. They also begin to feel more coherent and clear in their work – and can become better at articulating not just what they do but how and why in a way that's compelling for others – whether customers, prospects, partners or their employees.


Please give us your definition of sustainability.

Ultimately I see sustainability as an umbrella encompassing all facets concerning the notion of enduring over time. This umbrella creates space for behaving thoughtfully and responsibly - in ways that honor the past while supporting both the present and future generations through actions that consider the interconnection between social, environmental and economic needs.

Is sustainability like a new religion?

Mmm – I wouldn't put it in the same category as religion. I would be more likely to say that it's a relatively recent re-discovery of a basic awareness that we have forgotten about as a result of our move to a Cartesian way of thinking, which has led to industrialization and the resulting consumer culture we are finally beginning to wake up from. We now have to re-integrate this knowledge and weave it with our current frameworks of economy, environment and societies – reinventing and re-tooling certain beliefs and behaviors, stepping back to see how the subtle interconnections between things are affected – like when we pull on this production chain or tweak that chemical compound.

However, I do see some zealotry cropping up within this new re-awakening – which could be compared to the behavior of a new religious convert. Ultimately I would like to avoid the push for sustainability turning into another Inquisition ( again, we can look back to the Nazis for an example of how people can get carried away with an idea and wind up destroying so much in the pursuit of their misguided notion of what is right).

Are there special symbols and colors in "sustainability?"

There are certain colors & icons that have become clichés in the sustainability movement. There are also graphic styles that have been harnessed to create an emotional response that links to fuzzy ideas of sustainability. For example, just think of all the brochures at Starbucks, lined up next to the carafes of milk and various pre-packaged sweeteners that promote their fair trade policies and local charity programs. The pamphlets are decorated with natural textures and layered with torn bits of paper, handwritten texts, warm toned photos of indigenous farmers and botanical wood block prints from history printed on 60% recycled content paper.

When I think of particular colors, icons and symbols for sustainability, I imagine colors like the greens of fresh grass, the deep sea and fir trees, warm natural hemp and tobacco colors, a little dash of earthy brown and some pale robin's egg blue. The typical icons include trees, plants and leaves, hands holding hands or 3 arrows bent into a circular form – like the recycling symbol, but I also see something like an interconnected network – like a mind map where each element is connected to many other ones, making up a web of complexity.


What is alchemy and how do you see it working in the world?

The traditional idea of alchemy is the arcane art of turning lead into gold. While many may believe that this was a real practice, employing such mythic tools as the philosopher's stone, I see it more metaphorically - as a description for the art of manifesting one's desires in the world.

In recent years a video called "The Secret" and subsequent books have soared to popularity – giving the general instructions for how to apply the law of attraction in one's own life. Ultimately this law of attraction could be considered a form of alchemy – of working within one's current situation and generating new, desired outcomes out of old orders. While there is no arguing with the enormous commercial success of "The Secret", I find it to be a bit simplistic and object oriented in its approach – sidestepping the fundamentals of how this phenomenon actually functions. Louise Hay has been teaching this stuff for years. Additionally, the journalist Lynne McTaggart has done significant work researching and documenting scientific experiments in her book "The Intention Experiment" and others. These books delve more deeply in to the science behind the "the Secret" and have also revealed much more profound applications beyond getting your dream house or car.

At the end of the day the lesson is very inspiring, empowering and yet sobering at the same time – showing us that we are each creating our world around us with our thoughts at every moment. When we can change our thoughts, we can change our lives and in doing so gently impact the lives of those in our sphere. I have certainly experienced the positive effects of this in my own life.

Tell us about key initiations that have taken place in your creative instruction and work. Any lessons to share?

Your ability to achieve in the world is equal to your ability to imagine the kind of world you chose to create for yourself. If you can imagine it, you can create it.

That being said – beware of the barrage of negative messages we are constantly bombarded with in the media, internet and even the visual noise on the streets from advertising and billboards. I gave up TV 10 years ago, stopped listening to the BBC when I wake up and instead get my news from carefully selected sources. I have taken control over which stories I read and which I don't. I pay attention to the agendas of the sources I get my news from and have more control over my mental state because of it. This does not mean burying my head in the sand and ignoring the world – but really, there are some things that just don't help anyone to know about.

Today I dug through my spam folder and out of morbid curiosity read all the "breaking news alerts" from CNN that wind up there throughout the week. While I didn't expect any good news, I was also disturbed to discover that 9 out of 11 of the messages since New Years have been about fatal shootings or suicide bombers. The other two were about a political figure stepping down and a sports figure being suspended for bringing a gun to the arena where the game was being held. Sheesh – is this what I'm missing? Thank you spam filter, you rock!

Studying critical theory, feminism and postmodernism in art school gave me the tools to observe and critique the mechanisms of mass media with a well-focused eye. While it makes it difficult sometimes to feel free to be wantonly creative, it also makes me aware enough to step back and ask tough questions of the guys trying to force-feed me the pound of industrial sugar hidden in my cornflakes. In my Branding Design classes I teach my students how to deconstruct the ads they are barraged with every day. I challenge them to think beyond the snap judgments we have been conditioned to make in a sound-bite world. It is enormously gratifying to see the little light bulbs going on over their heads when they start to recognize the tools of tyranny we so easily take for granted, from unethical photo retouching to coercive language manipulation. Then they begin to realize both the power and responsibility they hold as communication designers and the imperative for making ethical choices that foster a healthy and sustainable world.

Many are talking about a major collapse in the world economy and a catastrophic period of anger and hunger. Do you see this near-term scenario? If not, what is your perception of the next 2-5 years on the planet?

I'm not a futurist – so anything I project about the near-term scenario is mere speculation drawn from my observations as an American gal living outside the US.

Certainly we are barraged with daily updates on the economic collapse, terrorist plots, dying real estate markets, failing healthcare reforms and other bleak announcements that paint a dark picture of the future. Some point to 2012 as the culmination point for all these atrocities, buckling their seatbelts and getting set for the wild rollercoaster ride to that not so distant destination.

Ultimately I see that as the darkness intensifies, so does the light – in equal measure. As the facades of the old guard start to fall, people are becoming more aware of other choices available all around them. The post-materialist society is growing each day, embracing alternative methods of healing, natural energy, food production, transportation and how to relate to one another as community. We are beginning to adjust to the idea of "being" instead of "having" – and discovering the fulfillment of this new perspective. It is enormously freeing and empowering to discover the pleasures of living with less. But it takes a serious jolt to kick-start this paradigm shift – particularly in an environment designed to keep people on the hamster wheel of desire, consumption and debt. Perhaps this consciousness shift is an inevitability that has grown from the collapse. I would argue that it has been there the whole time, but only now are people clueing in en-mass to a new way of being. As people lose their old ways of life – their jobs, houses and the trappings of an untenable debt cycle, they are forced to re-invent and question what is truly important in their lives. It may be painful at the start – but ultimately people are adapting to a more simple and authentic way of life - and how can this be a bad thing?

I had my own experience of this in 2002 when I lost my job as a high powered creative director for a Swiss/German think tank and found myself unemployed in East Berlin – forced to re-invent and re-envision the kind of life I wanted to live. The nature of the beaten down economy here meant most people were in the same boat – but those with good attitudes, strong communities and social networks, those who weren't so busy looking back at what they had lost instead of what they actually had in front of them, they were the ones who were successful at building a strong, meaningful life for themselves and others.

So – we can choose to look into the darkness and say oooh how terrible it is all going – or we can turn and look into the light that is right there as well and say – "wow – look at all these opportunities I hadn't considered before. Imagine the power I have to create the world I choose – right here. So knowing what I now know, what can I do to bring value and meaning to my life and contribute to the lives of those I love?".