The Art of Noticing Buying In Letters from New Orleans
Rob Walker (born 1968) is an American journalist, author and educator, whose primary interests include design, business, technology, consumer culture, and the arts.
He is the author ofThe Art of Noticing (2019),Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (2008), and co-author, withJoshua Glenn, ofSignificant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things (2012). He writes a regular column inFast Company magazine and has written forDesign Observer,Bloomberg Businessweek, andThe Atlantic. From 2013 until 2018, he wrote "The Workologist" column inThe New York Times, and between 2004 and 2012 was a contributing writer forThe New York Times Magazine, for which he wrote the "Consumed" column.[1][2][3] He serves on the faculty of the Products of Design MFA program at theSchool of Visual Arts in New York City.[4][5]
in 2019, Walker publishedThe Art of Noticing, a book about distraction, attention, and finding inspiration, withKnopf.[8][9][10][11] As an addendum to the book, he publishes a biweekly email newsletter about "creativity, work, and staying human."[12][13]
In 2008, Walker published a book exploring themes similar to those in his "Consumed" columns calledBuying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. It was reviewed favorably and received much attention for its discussion of the term "murketing", which Walker had coined.[14][15]
Walker's 2005 book,Letters From New Orleans, was compiled from essays emailed "to interested parties" about life inNew Orleans, where he lived in the early 2000s.[6] All author proceeds fromLetters from New Orleans went to relief organizations such as theRed Cross and others working with victims ofHurricane Katrina.[16]
Walker has written a number ofcomic book stories published under the name R. Walker. A collection of his satirical stories of the business world was published in 2001 together with artistJosh Neufeld, asTitans of Finance: True Tales of Money & Business.[17][18][19][20]
Walker has participated in or led a number of artistic projects including theHypothetical Development Organization (together with Ellen Susan and GK Darby), which explored renderings of purely hypothetical possibilities for blighted buildings inNew Orleans, and was part of the official U.S. presentation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.[21][22][23][24] He also started theUnconsumption Project, which tracks mindful consumption and creative reuse,[25][26] and the MLK Blvd open source journalism project, which looks at the streets sharing that name all over the word.[27][28]
The Significant Objects project, where writers are paired with an interesting object curated by Walker and co-founderJoshua Glenn, about which they write a fictional story, later to be sold on eBay.[29][30][31][32] A book compiling 100 of these stories was published byFantagraphics Books in 2012.[33][34]
