Chronicle of Experts
From renowned thought and culture leaders, to members of our community, we learn about what gives meaning to what they do.
MYKIGAI is live! Our platform is a dedicated space to maintain purpose and profit from career and life experience. To coincide with our first international online MYKIGAI Talk with New York-based interior designer Rafael de Cárdenas (Thursday May 7, at 6 PM ET), we are launching our newsletter. In these we will be profiling our Ambassador Experts to learn about what makes their lives purposeful.
Interviews by Leanne Delap who has been both the Fashion Editor and Fashion Reporter for the Globe and Mail and was the editor-in-chief of FASHION Magazine.
OBJECT LESSONS
Photo credit: Weston Wells for WSJ
Within the context of this quarantine, we are all enclosed within our own four walls, frozen suddenly at a moment in time. This brings our possessions, the objects we have chosen to reflect our lives, our passions and our aspirations into sharp relief. We can’t collect right now: but we can edit, and we can dream about what to collect next. Architect and Interior Designer Rafael de Cárdenas, founder of the New York-based multidisciplinary agency Architecture at Large (RDC/AAL), will be conducting a Mykigai Experience in the form of a salon-style discussion about the role of objects in our lives. Objects, he says are to design as salt is to food: the critical seasoning factor. Objects can also hold powerful totemic and emotional meaning, in balance with aesthetic values.
Of his own life in confinement, de Cárdenas says, “My relationship to my home has certainly intensified to some degree. I am continually arranging and rearranging—flowers, objects, furniture—it's more of a laboratory than ever. And I'm getting to spend much more time with my collections.”
A passionate collector, de Cárdenas has cited the inspiration for work and life that he has found in a very broad range of sources, from 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke to David Lynch’s Dune to 80s pop culture, from the band Pet Shop Boys to the TV series Facts of Life.
So, what is he grooving on right now? He says he is drawn to periodicals from “the 20th-century Golden Age of Magazines: L'Oeil, i-D, Details, Interview, Wet…to name a few. I like their timely feel—the level of detail in their tracings of cultural life from season to season, month to month, moment to moment.”
De Cárdenas’s career has been as wide-ranging as his inspirations, but he sees his journey as of a piece. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in fashion, he worked for a spell as a designer at Calvin Klein in the 1990s. He was then inspired to switch gears and study architecture at UCLA. In 2004 he returned to Manhattan, where he grew up, to start AAL. “I've worked in a few different fields by now, but to my mind it is all intimately related,” says de Cárdenas. “All of my experience is essentially in design and creative direction. I've always tended to think of design—and culture, actually—in holistic terms.”
Some of his high-profile clients include boutiques and installations for André Balazs Properties, Baccarat, Cartier, Christie’s, Glossier, LVMH-Kenzo and Nike. In 2017, to mark AAL’s first ten years in business, Rizzoli published a monograph of the firm’s work. In addition to a Paris-based object brand called Double Macchiato that de Cárdenas co-founded two years ago, he is artistic director of the 2020 incarnation of Object & Thing (originally scheduled for this week in Brooklyn; now moved to mid-November). Object & Thing “reimagines the art and design fair concept,” he says, “by bringing together both disciplines through a focus on the object.”
He relates also to the focus of the MYKIGAI community, and its emphasis on dual values of purpose in life, and experience. He brings an open mind to the table every time he approaches a new project or challenge: “Every project is unique—it's something of a mantra at this point,” he says. “The only systematic approach I have is to start by sussing out the range of possibilities. From there almost anything can happen. With any project, we're drawing on a wealth of experience, but we're also careful not to rely too heavily on that—not to make too many assumptions.”
The MYKIGAI Experience with Rafael de Cárdenas is Thursday May 7th at 6 pm ET.
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FINDING A WAY FORWARD
Ron Tabatchnick tells the story of his many failures to explain his many successes. The 76-year-old founder of Toronto’s RT Planning Strategies, a multidiscipline professional firm that develops strategic and tactical plans for firms (or individuals) that are “overloaded, undecided, stuck, directionless, want to accomplish something like start a company, get business, build a team, solve a problem, get married, deal with a difficult situation and pure problem solving.”
But back to his experience of failure (even when he was actually moving forward). He originally set out to become a dentist, then “after trying 60 different businesses to make a living and failing (I thought) at each for different reasons, I found my perfect vocation--a dream opportunity,” says Tabatchnick. “Because of what I had learned for the first 50 years of my life I became the world’s leading expert at facilitating strategic planning meetings for corporations and individuals in an innovative and unknown way.”
Since that time, he has written a book “A Breakthrough in Strategic Planning,” and worked with public and private companies ranging from Human Resources Development Canada, City of Brampton and the Ontario Energy Board, to Mercedes Benz, NCR and Prime Restaurants.
Tabatchnick found MYKIGAI, signed up, and ran an Experience session to showcase his strategies on how to deal with how overwhelmed we are all feeling right now. Thus becoming the platform’s first community expert ambassador. “Today people can take time to STOP and think about their present and future,” he says. “Because I take clients into their future, they can think about their lives in a more productive manner.” This is actually a time of great growth opportunity, he says. “People can use this quarantine time to plan to deal with more than just surviving the financial trauma, by moving forward in their lives and careers and businesses smarter, more streamlined, new ways.”
Ron’s second community experience “Mapping the journey to success” is on May 27th at 12 pm ET.
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About Leanne Delap
Photo credit: Helen Tansey
Mykigai ambassadors are interviewed by Leanne Delap, a Toronto-based journalist specializing in fashion, design, lifestyle and profiles. She has been the fashion reporter and the fashion editor at The Globe and Mail, as well as the editor-in-chief of FASHION magazine. She is currently a fashion columnist for TheKit.ca and frequent contributor to The Toronto Star. Delap writes about style, sex, reinvention and the royal family--though not at the same time--for Zoomer magazine, among other national and international titles.