If someone explains something to you, do you understand or do you conform?
When a person of supposedly better knowledge of the subject produces reasonings and theories and talks their way inside your mind and it slowly dawns on you that you are agreeing with them. Does that mean you now understand? Or does that mean you just lost your own opinion?
Truth is, if you take it just at surface level, you are generally conforming. Moulding yourself to a shape casted by many others. Anyone who's been through school will have experienced that regurgitation of formulas, scientific facts (only so called because they have yet to be debunked) and whatever it is that they call education. But unless you take each piece of information and analyze on it, reflect and draw up your own conclusions, you are simply taking a very watered-down version of another person's intellect, isn't it? But come on, who in the right mind would be able to take that sheer amount of information piled on them and dissect each and every one? So that's it! Every single one of us is a copy!
Michael Bierut once wrote an article on his 'accidental' plagiarism of a Willi Kunz's typographic work. One of very first comment that popped up was by someone who feared this act of unoriginality so condemned by the design world that he refuses to read design magazines.
That's silly isn't it? It's like saying "I insist on being original and hence I will not study the dictionary or read any books". How on earth is he going to learn? Besides, it is not just Communication Arts or Grafik that are design related. Every single object produced by man is design related. That means Vogue, that crappy tabloid newspaper, receipts from the supermarket, the power socket on the wall... chances are whatever you're touching now has been through a design process. Now try avoiding all these and come up with something totally original. I'd give 2 pences (I'm broke) to bet someone else has thought of the exact or similar idea. Hah!
Going off on a tangent, my prof recently mentioned Design for Life the BBC series kind of like Project Runway for product designers. It's pretty crappy even though Philippe Starck is the big boss insulting British design at every episode's beginning. Not surprising the series has faded into the thermosphere of public consciousness. You can catch it on Vimeo if you have an hour to spare.
i like to believe that filtering through the merits in someone else's argument is in itself excercising opinion. after all its you who are vetting through which point is good and which point is moot. after doing that, of coarse the only logical thing to do would be to consider or even adopt your new-found 'truths' and internalise them to be tested another day. i also like to believe its possible to think through everything someone else says give enough time, that way we'd never be copies. because though some people feel like copies i want to believe its possible not to be one too.
ReplyDelete