Design Thought Leader

Whenever someone tells me that the Bauhaus is out of date, I always know that I am dealing with an individual who never understood the Bauhaus. To understand the Bauhaus you must be able to separate philosophy from product.

Rob Roy Kelly
Graphic Design Educator, Historian and Collector

Whether it’s called design thinking, lateral thinking, right-brain thinking, systems thinking, integrative thinking, futures thinking, or my own term of ‘metathinking,’ from my perspective, the concept itself is rooted in a capacity to understand the world and our relationship to it, and within it, in a different way.

Design thinking is a ‘human-centered approach,’ and for me that means truly getting down to the core of what we think it means to be human, of what it ‘should’ look like, and how we want to experience life. When we see the word ‘design,’ we may immediately think of just products made by a snooty designer; items we see displayed at a museum that bear no resemblance to something we’d find in our home, artwork that makes us somehow feel stupid because we don’t understand why it’s so special, or architecture that is said to make “a statement” but feels completely alien in the way it impacts us. That is not the same design that is being proposed by design thinking. …

So whether you hope to employ design thinking to restructure the culture of an organization or to innovate a new product or service, it’s important to remember that it’s more than a set of simple tactics that can be implemented overnight. It’s more like a new ecology of mind, that takes time to grow, adapt, and evolve. It still requires an adherence to sound business decision-making, but also a commitment to challenge one’s own beliefs about ‘the way things work,’ and to keep coming back to a human-centered approach by focusing on addressing people’s unspoken and unmet needs.

Venessa Miemis
Pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School, New York City

To me it’s the most important thing when working at home to have an inspiring workroom. I spend a lot of time in the room so I have tried to make it as inspiring  and comfortable as possible. As you can see I love mid-century design and I feel its one of my main influences. Being able to live with and work with good design makes everything more efficient and it’s just great stuff.

Matte Stephens
Artist

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time. …

A city speaks to you mostly by accident—in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something you can’t turn off. …

Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city? No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren’t the only places that do. For some kinds of work, all you need is a handful of talented colleagues.

What cities provide is an audience, and a funnel for peers. These aren’t so critical in something like math or physics, where no audience matters except your peers, and judging ability is sufficiently straightforward that hiring and admissions committees can do it reliably. In a field like math or physics all you need is a department with the right colleagues in it. It could be anywhere—in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for example.

It’s in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren’t conveniently collected in a few top university departments and research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn’t need to rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. It’s in these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.

Paul Graham
Essayist, Programmer and Programming Language Designer

We think this kind of online peer-to-peer criticism is counterproductive on a very practical level as well. In our view, what this whole subculture of small, independent studios really needs is a sense of solidarity. It could do with less bickering, less backstabbing.

We think this whole international scene of small studios is really special, and we should try to protect it as much as possible. The independent studio is pretty much a threatened species. The catastrophic influence from branding-, marketing- and PR-people becomes more and more visible every day. Large advertising conglomerates are taking over the kind of territory that was usually covered by smaller, more cultural studios. The world has gone mad, and even the smallest client suddenly wants to work with pitches and competitions, because they believe this is the way it should be. We really think that, in the middle of all madness, we should stick together. We should use our combined energy to defend this whole subculture of small studios. We shouldn’t be putting energy in complaining about each others work. ‘I would have kerned this logo in a completely different way’ … well, of course you would have kerned it in a completely different way. But what’s the point moaning about that in public? We all have different graphic languages; that’s the beauty of it. Why spend so much energy on what are basically small stylistic differences? …

You know how people sometimes say that ‘the work should speak for itself’? We never really bought that phrase. The point is, we are quite traditional, old-school graphic designers. We design objects to function within very specific contexts. So the moment you present those objects within a totally different context, as flat digital images on a website, it’s only logical that you need some words to at least sketch the original context.

Added to that, we really enjoy ‘background information’. We love reading about artists and their methods, watching documentaries about the making of movies, listening to writers being interviewed on the radio. We like the idea that behind every artifact, behind every designed object or piece of art, there is a complete universe of ideas, references, stories. So we like to add to this ‘background genre’ by creating, on the internet, a small hidden gateway to our own micro-universe. We are not saying that everybody should read it, or like it; on the contrary, we really created our archive for the small group of people really interested in it.

Marieke Stolk, Danny van den Dungen and Erwin Brinkers
Founders and Designers, Experimental Jetset