So let’s talk about ideas.
Every day I see hundreds of entries from various design related websites and blogs. I supersaturate my mind with imagery of design from the web. Someone asked me the other day how I keep up with so many and the answer is simple. I don’t. I can move quickly through dense mass of posts and zoom to the ones I like and move past those I don’t because I’m not looking for pretty pictures, I’m looking for ideas; and they’re easy to spot.
Tonight I came across this link, and if ever there was a case where it easy to spot the idea through the imagery this is it.
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/14385/habits-make-us-blind.html
Let’s look through this for a moment; through that perfect amount of retro/modern that Legos seem to have. The idea here is clear. Many of us, especially urbanites, experience areas of disuse in the built world every single day and don’t think twice about it, be it abandoned city blocks or abandoned big box retail centers. I’d be interested in the types of responses these images conjure in people who have not studied urbanism and architecture. These areas are rich in character from their history and adaptive and continued use, whether those uses are marginalized or not. The scenes in these images, even without the Legos, would be beautiful spaces ripe for the proper and responsible kind of development and use.
-
A few months ago a friend recommended a book called Ishmael to me, by Daniel Quinn. The book itself represents some very bold, well considered ideology concerning how we as a society conduct ourselves in contrast to the beliefs of those many of us put our faith in. If you haven’t read it you should, if you have, then this will make even more sense to you. More than anything the book is about seeing things differently and therein lies my connection with it.
For a long time now I’ve been making an effort to remove myself from the whispers of “mother culture” as Quinn terms it. To remove from my mind the bounds placed there by the collective expectation of the world around me; to see things different. A goal I think I must have in common with many artists and designers. I’m beginning to get there. The ability to see these expectations that are not our own, that are in fact tastes we’ve acquired over years of repetition, of pressure on our minds.
I’ve seen flashes of it, when seemingly familiar things have become foreign to me, even if only for an instant. This quality of unfamiliarity in the inane and ubiquitous is incredibly important to foster. It’s not about understanding that things are but why they are.
-
I recently started a new job. The only way to get there is an hour plus commute through suburban sprawl; there’s no way to get there by highway that isn’t massively circuitous. As someone who’s made a necessitated transition from living without a car to commuting via highway to commuting via two to four lane roads I’ve found the new route even more infuriating than the highway commute; and that response is appropriate. I have noticed, because of the inevitable and inherent traffic dictated by the paradigms of sprawl, that many of my fellow drivers have adapted driving habits to suite the conditions.
Everyone’s frustrated. And it shows. Yet rather than adapt the necessity of the system itself we adapt how we fit within the system; we just accept the conditions and move on. We have acquired a new taste.
This is a stark example, but the scenes in “habits make us blind” are so wonderful because they are less obvious and because they illicit such a mixed response. These spaces are beautiful, dangerous, playful, artistic, exotic, familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time. They are the visual representation of this acquisition of taste that we all suffer from, highlighted by contradiction, something that is so generic that it often goes entirely unnoticed. This is the challenge, to see past the pretty pictures and find the ideas; to find clarity in the vague outlines of the fog of society.
