Designing Design Excerpts
Some quotes that I collected from Designing Design by Kenya Hara for inspiration. Just for fun. 📖
The future lies ahead of us, but behind us, there is also a great accumulation of history — a resource for imagination and creativity.
Both human wisdom and design are found in the bosom of individual cultures around the world. We have to become aware of the wisdom and insight that is being threatened with extinction, soon to be swallowed up by the torrent of globalism.
Design is the energetic acknowledgment of our own living world through the making of things and through communication. Outstanding perceptions and discoveries should make us happy and proud as living human beings. New things are not born of nothingness, and they are not taken from without, but from our attempts to boldly awaken our everyday existences, which seem ordinary and mundane. Design is the provocation of the senses and a way of making us discern the world afresh.
I don't intend to trace history precisely, but to summon my courage to create a rough portrait, like a croquis.
From the instant anthropoids took the sticks in their hands, they started changing the world around them through intelligence; the working of their intellect began with the construction of their own environment, and that led to the spaceship.
If design is the transforming of the world based on understanding, which forms our environment, the beginning of human wisdom may have been the beginning of design.
The vessel developed into various kinds of containers, but it also evolved into all kinds of tools, like clothing and shelter, that hold emptiness within and also hold or preserve things. Likewise, languages, which act as a tool for emotions and speculations; letters and characters, which preserve languages; or books, which house letters and characters. All these are vessels too. Extending from the vessel are also receptacles of intellect, such as the hard drive, which archives all data, including sound and image.
Mankind has constructed civilization by considering the operations of acceptance and preservation as antithetical to those of manufacture and change. Within their evolution, club-descended tools and vessel-descended tools have sometimes united, giving birth to innovative tools like the spaceship and computer, which are neither sticks nor vessels, but comprise both; they are both stick-like vessels and vessel-like sticks. With these innovative tools, what kind of wisdom will mankind cultivate now? The present is the first step in this new situation.
The Bauhaus is simply the result of the convergence of activities carried out by individuals of many talents. We could draw unlimited speculation from a detailed, microscopic examination of this group and its activities. But if we observe their combined activities from some distance, through the telescope of the 21st century, the collection of glittering stars would certainly appear as swirling galactic clouds. Unless we look at it with our eyes half-closed, we often lose sight of the essence of history, but here, viewing the Bauhaus just as we would a galaxy from afar, I'd like to roughly summarize its entity and continue my story.
Basically, the concept of design was conceived and developed in no small measure on the premise of idealistic social ethics. Now, within the intense magnetic field of economic principle, the purer the concept, the less able it is to live up to its ideal.
People around the world, billions of them in myriad nations, cultures, and religions, all live by their own sense of value. The more intense the dynamism of interrelation, which is allowed by the progress of movement and correspondence in the form of trade and philosophical exchange, the more frequently egos and forces collide. Without a framework for international intervention undertaken with the rationality of a bird's-eye view, these collisions spiral into wretched catastrophe, namely, war. After having experienced two great wars, the world seems to be maintaining just enough rationality to restrict the appeal of arms, which would cause more misery. Instead, economy, as the new unarmed method of competition, has begun to run the world as if it were the driving source of human activity.
In industrial design, the individuality of designers is suppressed, while the will and strategy of the corporations that plan, produce and sell goods or services are reflected accurately. If this system works well, we get rational design that skillfully gathers materials and technology in response to the demands of the contemporary lifestyle. If it does not, we get shameless design that has ingratiated itself to the market.
The appearance of a new style forced the aging of the existing product and turned it into an antique. Series of plans were drawn up based on the strategy of "making things that are fresh today seem old tomorrow," just to motivate consumer spending, and design responded to that role with continual changes to product appearance.
In the past, "management resources" meant human resources, equipment, and financial resources. Recently these have been joined by information, which includes both corporate image and brand, two concepts that have filtered down to the general public.
Examining European design in minute detail, we sense the independent spirit of its designers as well as a lingering craftsmanship. This is probably because the lineage of craftsman-like handiwork is inherited as part of the vocational consciousness of European designers.
In the latter half of the 20th century, when economic power strengthened its control, economy was the main source of power behind the development of design. Expected to do more and more, as a service providing quality, innovation, and identity, design began working to respond to these requirements.
Photos of people in old-fashioned clothes of any past era make us laugh because of the strangeness of an entire society's participation in this empty agreement called fashion.
I question reading postmodernism as the aging of a certain generation because this is a world of pranks, directed by designers weary of spending time with modernism and ordinary people who have attained some sophistication regarding information. In the generation tired of pouring its pure passion into modernism, I sense a phase of mature insight.
The world should have let postmodernism pass with a smile, but the economy alone was serious, trying to use it to revitalize the market, and spreading it into the world much more than was necessary.
Even critics acclaimed postmodernism as a duel between modernism and a new era. Here lies the cause of postmodernism's wandering, its bewilderment, and its bitterness.
In spite of the fact that our rockets have only gone as far as the moon, the world busies itself with worries and preparations for intergalactic travel.
Apparently, people think they shouldn't criticize technological progress. It may be that deeply seated in the consciousness of our contemporaries is an obsession of a sort, to the effect that those who contradicted the Industrial Revolution or the machine civilization were thought of as lacking in foresight and were looked down upon. That's why people have such a hard time speaking out against flaws that are likely felt by everyone. This is probably because they're afraid that anyone who grumbles about technology will be thought an anachronism. Society has no mercy for those who can't keep up with the times.
We are so excessively and frantically competitive that we have repeatedly planted unsteady systems in unsteady ground, which has evolved into a variety of trunk systems that are weak and liable to fail but have been left to develop anyway.
The computer is not a tool but a material.
The implication is that we shouldn't use computers in the manner of just swallowing whatever software comes along but need to think deeply and carefully about what kind of intellectual world can be cultivated based on this new material that operates with numbers.
For any material to become a superb material, we need to purify its distinguishing attributes as much as possible. As a material for modeling and carving, clay has endless plasticity, but that limitless plasticity is not unrelated to the material's development. If it were filled with nails or other shards of metal, we wouldn't be able to knead it to a usable consistency.
Design, which is accustomed to showing its strength in "making what's fresh today look old tomorrow" as well as bringing novel fruits to a table full of curious dinners, is further exacerbating its contortions, in obedience to the new technology.
Within its innermost parts, design carries an extra gene of idealistic thought: the pursuit of shape and function, and even while operating on economic energy, it maintains some semblance of a cool, pious way-seeker.
Every time technological progress reveals a new possibility for creating new products or communication infrastructures, design plays a role in persistently and consistently pursuing the best possible solution.
Creation of novel things is not the only creativity. The sensibility that allows one to rediscover the unknown in the familiar is equally creative. We hold a great accumulation of culture in our own hands, yet we remain unaware of its value. The ability to make use of these cultural assets as a virgin resource is no less creative than the ability to produce something out of nothing.
Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.
To create an indicator that can be trusted in chaotic circumstances is to amass sensible, practical observations on the real state of affairs.
The conventional is not replaced by new technologies. The old accepts the new, resulting in more options.
Design is not merely the art of making things. Our brief jaunt through history proved that. No, design is the occupation of straining our ears and eyes to discover new questions from the midst of everyday life. People create their environments by living. Beyond the rational observation of this fact lie the future of technology and the future of design. Somewhere near their loose intersection, we'll find the future of modernism.
Design is the vocation of taking both old and new media, favoring neither, putting them into a cross-disciplinary perspective, and making full use of all. Design is not subordinate to media; design explores the essence of media. In fact, within the labyrinthine complexity of today's media, we can expect people to more clearly understand the genuine value of design.
