Like a small insect at work, I plug away at my personal knowledge infrastructure primarily with notebooks. Devoutly, I organize my thoughts and process information with my hands (i.e., when I shop for clothes I rub the fabric between my fingers, or when I purchase knickknacks, I hold them in my palm first to feel their heft and weight). Putting pen to paper, I jump from one idea to another—one plateau to another—processing and generating new conclusions which would otherwise not arrive. Notetaking in this way, as a generative thinking practice, was a door I completely stumbled upon during my second year of teaching when a student’s mom had sent him to school the week before Christmas break with a small gift, a set of MUJI notebooks. My first thought was the price, because teachers are informed every year that they cannot accept gifts greater than $5 (according to the ethics guidelines provided by the city). Luckily, the price tag was accidentally left on the back of the thin packet of notebooks, wrapped in cellophane, reading $2.99. At the time, I didn’t think much of them and packed them away in my closet.
It wasn’t until I ran across David Allen’s Getting Things Done—a system I, to this day, still wish I had the discipline and dedication for—that I started to think more seriously about the value of externalizing ideas and setting them aside, as opposed to walking around with them in my head and thinking about them all day long. At first, I thought notebooks would provide a space to ‘offload’ ideas, as Allen advises, but quickly I began to realize that the blank canvas of a page afforded other opportunities (i.e., drawing, diagraming, categorizing, schematizing, and so on). Using my notebooks in this way, they quickly became generative spaces wherein new ideas and connections would arrive, akin to what friends describe during, or moments right after, dreaming.
In thinking of this week’s assignment, I could not help but go back to those MUJI notebooks—especially because I have been on the hunt for the perfect (the ideal!) notebook and pen combination ever since. After years of testing, I still rely on MUJI notebooks and find them to be the best for my hand and eyes (my ideal pen is a blue, mass market, Paper Mate that is no longer in production). So, in the spirit of our course, I began to think about where do these notebooks come from? And how are they made? (What are the system of substrates that make it possible for me to purchase MUJI notebooks just a few blocks from the Graduate Center, across the street from Bryant Park?). A quick search revealed that MUJI is short for Mujirushi Ryōhin, a publicly traded corporation based in Tokyo, Japan that was founded in 1980 as a “product brand” of a Japanese supermarket chain, The Seiyu (est. 1946)—which changed the way that I think about MUJI, from a stylish but ‘lowkey’ retailer to a subsidiary of a much larger retail chain, one akin to Walmart or Best Buy. I started to wonder about every aspect of the notebooks materials along with the entirety of its production, from the sourcing of the materials to the shipping across oceans—a scope that would far exceed the 500 word limit of which I am already over. As the semester moves forward, I want to keep thinking about my notebooks and pens, both as conceptual landscapes but also as material objects, considering where they come from and how I perhaps might find a better, but comparable, alternative to minimize the hidden costs associated with stationary goods that are produced half-way around the world and neatly organized by size and color at MUJI store on 5th avenue.
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