Regarding the Bauhaus: “The basic teaching error of the academy was that of directing its attention towards genius rather than the average.”
I am a naturally thoughtless person in that I lack situational awareness and forget to consider other people. My entire life is a Hanlon’s razor situation. People would call me selfish and I used to brush it off as thoughtlessness. It took my entire life to figure out that thoughtlessness is selfishness. That’s why design occupies a place in my head on par with Bob Dylan, Better Call Saul, and Jane Birkin–my gods, my idols. Design acknowledges that Average is the mother and judge of genius. Designers force thoughtfulness and direct attention towards the Average. Design is total empathy. Design is everything that I’m not. It’s all I want to be.
Your feelings are not arbitrary. There is a reason things are the way they are. I spent my entire teenage life working in restaurants. When I was fourteen, I realized for the first time that I had taken restaurants for granted my whole life. When you serve someone food, they don’t think about who designed the menu, about who picked the chair they’re sitting in, about who drew the art on the walls, about who cooked the food, chopped the spinach, weighed the beef, or wrapped the silverware. In short, they don’t think about anything. They only know what they feel. They don’t ask why. Most people go through all of life like this.
It only takes a little bit of paying attention to realize how malleable life is. To realize it’s really all up to you. Goffredo is the head of our design department. He told us a story related to him from a friend. The friend had workers come over to fix and repaint his living room. But he had a grand piano that was too heavy to move, so he wrapped it in paper. On the first day, the workers arrived and set all their tools on the piano. On the second day, the friend raised the piano lid and re-wrapped it, making it impossible for the workers to set their supplies on it. This was a matter of design: anticipating how people would act in a given setting, and arranging said setting to direct their natural movements. It’s endlessly fascinating.
The reading said poor design results in “frustration.” And it’s true. Life is a series of mini-frustrations. There are always too many things to carry. I take solace in the knowledge that even celebrities have too many things to carry. See below:
Good design is a way to mitigate this. You’ll never be able to stop having big frustrations. But eliminate the small ones as much as you can.