NorthSouth09

Where we came from?

High school aka close-mindedness, naivete and childhood fantasy. From far and beyond, different places and cultures, with our tool boxes full and our minds empty. Some came by mistake, fate or even a series of inexorable dates led us here.

The journey togetherness and growth! Peers became friends, became boyfriends and girlfriends and enemies! Helvetica & mac books & coffee! Learning how to have an opinion … about everything! Long term love affair with adobe creative suite! Yes!

Where we are going? Firstly insane. Secondly on holiday. Job hunting? Into ‘industry’. With our heads full and our tool boxes & bank accounts empty! To far and beyond – the big wide world, the wild blue.

Where are we going?

Good question. The metaphorical ‘where’ of our lives, our careers, our work rears up time and again. One day it’ll be either ‘where are we going?’ or ‘where are we going wrong?’ The latter may force the issue but it might also provoke self-renewal. Which is called ‘life-long learning’.

For these young designers though, the ‘where’ is literally ‘out there’. Into the blue . . . that so-called ‘real world’ of grasping corporatist greed, self-interest and over-productivism. Oops . . . really? Sounds scary! Let’s hope not; after all, isn’t making a living just business as usual? Like most sound-bite homilies, the meaning of ‘real world’ has been distorted. Nowdays it’s shorthand for getting ripped off. Yet in Victor Papanek’s original sense (in ‘Design for the Real World’) it was where poor hardworking, modest ordinary people struggled to get by. Where five billion of ‘us’ live. Where ‘design’, as we understand it, just doesn’t figure.

Where will we be?

That’s why, for Papanek, as for anyone who must economize to sustain realistic ambitions designing (with a small ‘d’) simply means everyday commonsense trial and error. That plan you sketch to help get to where you’re going. As he famously put it, it’s a “basic human ability to help autonomous self-realisation”. That’s another way to say that ‘independence’ is where we’re going. Talking Heads, in ‘Road to Nowhere’:

Well we know where we’re going But we don’t know where we’ve been And we know what we’re knowing But we can’t say what we’ve seen And we’re not little children And we know what we want And the future is certain Give us time to work it out