The Process of Red -- By Robin Bates The process is the goal. Aiming for this at all times demands that you name it. You crack it open. You must scrutinize all elements vigorously and tenaciously. Probe and search objects in a series of actions, changes, or functions. Do not despair of it, nor take it for granted, but dissect it until you know the nuts and the bolts and how it locks down. Locks together. What makes it grind. What allows it to bring you joy. The process for the Red issue is a mere segment of the modus operandi of Brigata Italia, which itself is basically one big meta process. In some ways the issue focus -- be it Red or other -- is irrelevant -- or, rather, it is randomly chosen, a whim or inspiration of one person or another, a rubric under which we can explore the method of exploring design. Someone shouts: "Let's do an issue about Red!" and the rest of us heartily agree... happy to have a new name to call this thing we are going through, this mild obsession, the way to get other like-minded folk to jump on our process wagon... Self-indulgent? I should say not. It is easier to break things than it is to build. This modus operandi meets resistance at every turn. It feels like wading through water in search of a path. Sometimes we are aided by a current and then caught in a riptide. Still to the point of stagnation and then swept up by a great wave. Unable to tread any longer, to see the bottom, and then suddenly lifted by a pack of graceful dolphins and carried to the shore. A momentary high -- until we realize we have lost the path. The search becomes difficult, then intolerable, and we almost give up. The process hibernate and nothing moves, nothing gets done: why are we challenging the way we get things done? Why not just do them? Surely the end is as important as the means? Apparently not. To give birth to the process, to get it moving, to get to a significant plateau... Time has shown that this rest stop is only truly satisfying if we work for it and pay our dues. Only if we work to harness enough energy to keep moving. If we work as a team. We search, we probe, we separate and go home, we spend sleepless nights or dream of winged methods, we fry our brains, we reconnect. We disagreewe make each other mad, we make each other really mad, we stop talking for a day. We make up, we work some more... and then finally, out of somewhere, the process begin to grind, to gather momentum, to make sense, to reveal exceptional things ... From deep inside we feel the cry of, "Come Home to Daddy!" because in the soles of our feet you can feel the movement of mountains. And we have done it together. It is nothing less than joyful. Why do we bother with this diligence of method? Because it allows us to fully participate in the human time of now. We bother with process because it mirrors life and regeneration. The procession through the day to night is all we have. Communication, art, design, culture -- and the challenge of building towards them and nurturing them -- is one way of respecting life and life cycles. War destroys everything, people and process along with it. It breaks down the way the infrastructures work. It ruins the cycle of things, and the ebb and flow of life. Solid communication and art ... these are the tools that lead us to understanding and empathy and volition and passion. They allow us to interpret the insane amount of information pouring in from the universe, and translate it into language that is logical and inspiring, imaginative and stimulating. The internet and its vast and ever-growing repositories of data mirrors this deluge. Probing the process of the medium and collaborating with others in the same pursuit allows us inquiry and graceful expression online, as well as a humbleness and groundedness in sharing freely and getting an exponential amount back in return. It allows us to see what is real: the deep understanding of intricate relationships between things, of the components that make up the whole. Our diligence here is perhaps an homage to the nature course of things. The master poet Czeslaw Milosz declares most gracefully in "Hymn": The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass. roll on, rivers; raise your hands, cities! I, a faithful son of the black earth, shall return to the black earth. as if my life had not been, as if not my heart, not my blood, not my duration had created words and songs but an unknown, impersonal voice, only the flapping of waves, on the choir of winds and the autumnal sway of the tall trees. ... I am humbled by the world and wish to express this joy before I fade to white.