Capsule: Tim Parsons
The most engaging designer on display at Design Mart at the Design Museum at the moment is Tim Parsons, mostly for his truisms. These are faithfully transcribed from an image on his website. Go to both web and exhibition.
Having been impressed with the power of the ‘truisms’ created by American artist Jenny Holzer – lists of frank, brief statements, believed to be true at the moment of writing – a set of ‘design truisms’ were compiled over the months prior to the show.
Although highly dogmatic in tone the statements tried to convey some of the sticky and contradictory issues and anxieties that product designers face.
A product may be a word in an essay
Adding another object is not always the answer
Advertising is design's spin-doctor
Branding camouflages substance
Change is good for the soul
Creativity cannot be taught
Design education is a life skill
Every design has a political undertone
Form without content is waste
Freedom is slavery, especially in design
In the mind, a design is never finished
Independence encourages audacity
It is a luxury to have time to create
Marketing is design's pimp
Movements decay into styles
Patenting allows ideas to be imprisoned
Perfection creates waste
Post-Modernism was a necessary evil
Preoccupation with objects is unhealthy
Pride in ideas obstructs progress
Providing more choice is a smokescreen
Real value doesn't evaporate after purchase
Resistance to trend is commendable
Signature styles reveal vacant minds
Solving artifical problems is cowardly
There is humantity in mis-use
Utopia is the only honest starting point
With volume comes responsibility
posted by BetaRish @ 1:02 pm
1 Comments:
I've been thinking about this on and off for the last couple of days, trying to work out a coherent response – too much coffee and not enough sleep.
One thing that immediately came to mind was the comparison to a manifesto – although arguably the two are very similar in terms of making a (quite dogmatic) statement, the truisms seem to be more... valid, i suppose is the right word, because they are believed to be true at the time of writing.
Of course, a manifesto's words (must be? should be? are?) 'true at the time of writing', but if say published by a political party, and then some of them retracted or changed a year or two later, then we perceive their words to be hollow, to have no genuine meaning. Because they changed.
And people's ideas and 'beliefs' do change. Tschichold, considered to be one of, if not the, definitive writers on Modernist typography, changed his ideas and returned to working with a more 'traditional' idea of design.
Perhaps design studios could (should?) begin to compile a list of truisms, to replace the manifestos displayed so prominently on their sites. They smack too much of 'revolution', when really they are (generally) not that radical. My own site is guilty of this. A list of truisms, changing over time would be a much better, and more interesting, way of documenting thinking, than making broad, sweeping statements.
This is a truism.
I think.
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