About v-2.org

The goal of this site is to make connections.

As it happens, I’ve got an odd and fairly heterogeneous assortment of interests: media and cultural studies, architecture, industrial design, typography, new materials, and complexity theory, to name just a few. When I first got on the Web, I was gratified to see such a bounty of resources available for each of these threads, but astounded that there seemed to be relatively little overlap between them.

What made this far more frustrating was that there were obvious points of common interest. Somebody, for example, would make a point on a type site that would illuminate an issue in user-interface design. Maybe there was a Web designer whose work was particularly and delightfully influenced by chaos theory.

But in either event, the knowledge transfer was at best unidirectional. Possibly due to the incredible degree of specialization contemporary life seems to require of most of us, not many of the practitioners in the fields I followed as a dilettante seemed to have caught on to the inspiring insights and developments going on in other disciplines.

I have no wish to imply that v-2 is the only, or even the best, place for designers (understand that term as you will) to get inspiration from fields outside their own specialties, but it's my honest hope that it will provide just that. From day one, v-2’s slogan has been “beauty, utility, balance,” and we will continue to look for ways to promote these qualities in our shared global environment, wherever and however these methods arise.

Do me a favor? Let us know where we succeed, and where we fall short. We owe whatever influence this site has to your constant hard work and clear thinking, and we're acutely aware that none of this would be here without you. (Please see the Thanks + Praise page for a more specific list of acknowledgements.)

About the name

None of my first eleven or twelve choices for a domain name were available — this was still in the era of frantic domain-name speculation — and I had long since gotten to the point of entering anything that came to mind.

I happened to be rereading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow at the time, which is a beautiful and terrifying book that features the V-2 rocket rather prominently. The rest, as they say, is history. (The quirky orthography - the lowercase “v,” capitalized “O” and British spelling of “organisation” - were all retroactive attempts to pull some memorable points of distinction out of what is in all honesty a pretty generic address.)

In late 2002, I received some rather puzzling correspondence that hipped me to a series of facts I should have been aware of: that there is, in fact, quite another "v-2 Organisation" operating on Planet Earth, they've been around for a long time, they're interested in a lot of the same things I am, and they're really fairly well known. (To be precise, they style themselves "V2_Organisation," but the potential for confusion is obvious.) I've recently taken some small measures to reduce this potential, and am considering phasing the name out altogether. Five years is long enough to fly a flag of convenience.