Posts Tagged ‘design process’

problem solving & pencilphobia

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

Not so many designers draw now. The benefits of drawing as a language, a process, a means of working through problems are widely overlooked. The idea that drawing is for making pictures inhibits creativity.

From primary school on, drawing is seen as something you either can or cannot do and is permanently welded to a sterile idea of ‘picture-making’. Observational, note-taking and thought-processing drawing has no place and the innate perception and creativity common to most young children (I have seen primary school sketchbooks to shame some illustration degree students) is rarely understood / encouraged. Where creativity survives education, degree teaching’s first task is to remove a decade and a half’s conditioning. Inhibition sees students of design timidly sketching an idea in 4H pencil, more concerned with what onlookers might think than than generating more ideas.

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death / watch

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

pennies

Most of us walk around with eyes closed. A slight exaggeration, but almost true. The inside of our heads is built to ignore the familiar. Observation is a key component of creativity—yet it can take the worst of shocks to fully switch it on.

Living largely via pixel & glass and distracted by everyday concerns we neglect the actual world as a source of inspiration. For those of us without the time / inclination for a Buddhist attention to the now, it can take awareness of imminent death to force a clear-sighted perspective.

As a music enthusiast I was upset to hear of Wilko Johnson’s recent cancer diagnosis. His old band Dr Feelgood
were a timeless one-off. I saw him play late last year—he and master bassist Norman Watt-Roy two fiercely animated Dickens characters. Wilko’s career was resurgent, boosted by Julien Temple’s terrific 2010 documentary Oil City Confidential (highly recommended BTW, even if you hate the music). He’ll be fortunate to see this year out, but in a recent interview spoke of feeling “alive and …existing in the moment”, his appetite for music (and astronomy) in no way diminished. This reminded me of legendary TV writer Dennis Potter, whose original and innovative 1978 TV drama series Pennies from Heaven made powerful use of music—still possibly my favourite piece of TV (The Wire / The Sopranos / Breaking Bad / Treme etc. notwithstanding). In a famous last interview (he died in 1994) Potter spoke of an ecstatic appreciation of nature: “…the blooms were the bloomingest blooms ever…”.

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take care, always read the label

Friday, August 31st, 2012

Stevenage street sign

The 1950s new town dream: envisioned, achieved, forgotten.

“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” (Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus). 

Some of us avoid ruining clothes by checking washing instructions. Fogeys young and old appreciate looking after a good pair of shoes. Some humans may have read a few pages of the user manual that came with their car / TV / computer. But most of us pay scant attention to looking after stuff. Our high expectations and short attention spans have made ‘care’ a tiresome inconvenience. 

Architects, designers and other creators are blamed when their enduring work ‘fails’ in the long run. Poorly maintained 70s buildings routinely get torn down where a little care might have preserved the optimistic social statements they once made. The City of London’s Barbican Estate is a rare exception to the rule.

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gimme a break

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

That nice Professor Cox was on TV recently (atop some picturesque mountain, waving around the Hubble’s holiday snaps) banging on about space-time being a Woonder o’ t’ Universe™. That’s true enough but down here in office/studio space, time and/or space are scarcer – time to reflect in particular. What with lunch being for wimps and none of us having an attention span any more, non-essential reflection has become so widely discouraged that it’s a woonder the world is not full of humans behaving like headless chickens plunging civilisation headlong into chaos. Oh, hang on a minute…

It’s all too easy for busy designers to get burned out, stuck in a rut, demotivated or disillusioned with a profession that will always consume more mental energy than is strictly available (that probably contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics but I’m no Prof. Cox). To be the best designer you can be requires the cultivation of a continually positive and optimistic outlook. A tangible sense of possibility is required to fruitfully inhabit the mental zone where problems get solved and ideas get off the ground. Pressure directs us away from that zone like never before. For many an old fart like myself starting out decades ago in boom times, the urgent need to eat and provide a roof over one’s head was never more than a faint rumour. Now it looms intimidatingly large over one and all, and sustainable creativity is under threat like never before.

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coloured up

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Photo: Bernard Gagnon

Is fashion is the only design discipline with colour truly embedded at its core? The search for ‘new blacks’ notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine fashion without colour. Interior design takes it fairly seriously and like fashion, devotes significant effort to forecasting colour trends. Architecture and industrial design sometimes seem timid with colour but project leadtimes, materials & regulatory issues inhibit experiment. Somewhere in the middle is graphic design: sometimes using colour well, often not. What is graphic design’s excuse?

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apophenia: it’s what we do

Friday, February 4th, 2011

Photo: Damon Easley

Most designers prefer visual to verbal communication and often do a poor job of explaining the profession to outsiders, some of whom may have an inkling that problem-solving is involved, but most of whom cling limpet-like to the idea that design is about ‘making things look nice’. If only there were a handy phrase to describe what really goes on… I have just discovered (thank you BBC Radio 4) that there is a name for what is probably the key design aptitude.

In 1958 neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined apophenia to describe “the unmotivated seeing of connections” with a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”. Finding connections and meanings in experience – is that not the most interesting/valuable part of what designers do?

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quality time

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Satisfaction is an uncommon commodity. In the context of work and in tough times, its scarcity and value rises like that of gold—the accumulation of which for some is satisfaction. Designers cannot rely on generous material reward for their labours—with each project unique, there are few easy profits or economies of scale. Wealthy designers have usually arrived there via success in ‘business’ rather than designing alone. But we are pretty fortunate in other benefits that design activity can bring. Designers can often see, if not always touch, the results of their labour and although these might have limited life, their physical existence—and on occasion, their effect on others—produces fleeting glows of satisfaction. Good design also demands a healthy interest in the world that many professions and modern lifestyles discourage.

I recently re-read a book (remember those?) which I had all but forgotten since my late teens: Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is not really about Zen, Art or keeping your Motoguzzi on the road. It is an odd piece of 70s autobiographical post-hippy-lit combining road trip, father-son relationship, nervous breakdown and fairly heavy (man) philosophical enquiry. It takes its time to get going, makes your head hurt here & there and although it does eventually offer some (unsettling) drama, a reprint is unlikely to give Dan Brown sleepless nights. Written at least 15 years before the the first personal computer, some of the language of this book is of its time (the word “groovy” appears at least twice without irony) but the relevance of its central theme—our relationship with technology—has increased a hundredfold.

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