If you read the start of Plain Journeys 1 - 'Viakal, The Universe & Everything' - then you will know what's going on here below. If you didn't then shame on you. Go and read it.
Whilst reflecting on our genetic legacy Alexander Von Humboldt journeyed through Venezuela in 1799 and remarked so profoundly –
"In the evening when the sky denotes rain, the air resounds with the monotonous howling of the alouate apes, which resemble the distant sound of wind when it shakes the forest. Yet amid these strange sounds, these wild forms of plants, and these prodigies of a new world, nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice familiar to him."
I got a shiver when I first came across that fragment of text. The shiver was as much because I didn't understand it the first time I read it and because, when the penny dropped, I realised just how much meaning passes me by every day - without any problem. How awful is that! It is a criminal act that I don't stop, reflect, cogitate and get the meaning from everything. And then I got another shiver realising that that isn't going to happen either. No way. Not a chance. Too much stuff!
"Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them." - Paul Gauguin
So there you have it - and I'm right with Paul the painter. He did everything he could to live life to the full and admittedly made some fairly bonkers choices along the way but at least he showed ambition and presumably did all his deeds with some conscious knowledge and forethought. Well he picked great places to go for his holidays right?
He managed to get some meaning into his life and he certainly used his imagination. What he put that imagination to also resulted in some amazing deliverables. I'm sure he would have said with hindsight that he had a plan. Ambition too - Gaugin would most probably have disagreed violently with Mr Wittgenstein - but then a lot of people did.
"Ambition is the death of thought." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I've long puzzled with that statement. I get the blinded by ambition bit - and the frontal lobotomy that that the brain can inflict on itself when it is driven by blind intention and maybe I'm being semantic but I have ambition and it actually drives my thought and makes me become more imaginative. I get to be disruptive about my own vision and mission just to test that it is the best thing for me to want to be doing – ever.
I guess I would say I have designed my life that way – to re-imagine the world around me – to think everything through to help me achieve my ambition. I guess Ludwig would have me believe that I should just think without any ambition attached and see what best thing emerges and go with that. Keep exploring by new thinking. So if that is correct then given my relationship with the AA (Alouate Apes) then I would naturally side with the French Captain when he suggests that – "Imagination rules the world." - Napoleon I – is that Treason?
As it turns out yes. And anyway I now know what Wittgenstein meant. He was spot on!
They say that "Design is about causing a radical change in meaning." Re-building our world needs that more than ever. And this level of disruption is most likely to come from people who you are least familiar with and likely – initially anyway – to disagree with. Like Mr Wittgenstein for example. A gathering of rebels constantly forming themselves into groups of others who are also operating outside of your current comfort zone.
The problem with too much reliance on what we know and how comfortable we are with anything is that it tries to make us at ease - when what we often need is to be uncomfortable, uncertain, in doubt and to act differently. This is harder and harder to do in large societies and of course in large organisations. How do we get comfortable with what we don't know? Stuff we don't feel comfortable with?
We have to challenge everything – even that which we preach. Even that which we speak to and obstinately call our ambition. Our own personal goals and objectives. We can't just accept that they are right or what we need anymore. We just can't. Wittgenstein has made his point - the smart ass.
You will shiver when you read the following the second time. It will make you realise the meaning that you simply don't get. Simply.
"I will not talk about the importance of design, every company knows that. I will not talk about user centered innovation, every company knows that you need to look at users to understand how to do innovation. I will not talk about the importance of having ideas, we have seen right now that there are plenty of ideas around. It’s so easy to have ideas. It’s so difficult to have visions.
Designers have been much less the visionaries than they used to be. There’s been a movement against the designer who had a vision - everything was just transformed into processes. If you look at how designers have evolved in the past ten years - if you buy books on design, everything is about the processes. You know, creativity, brainstorming, ethnography, metals – the tools. And actually the effect is that designers are looking much more like businessmen and MBA students today than they used to be, and they risk losing the capability of vision.
Design is not about styling. It’s not about technology. It’s about radical change in meaning. These are the things that people were not asking for, but when they saw them, they fell in love.” - Roberto Verganti
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment