Design Blog
- Thoughts & Musings
Last weekend I had the opportunity to assist to the 14th International Conference of Architecture: InterAccion in Panama City, Panama, which takes place every three years.
The event featured some great lectures and one of my favorites was delivered by PENDA design studio. It turned out to be educational and entertaining, and quite visionary as well.
I took a lot of notes so I will share a bit of the outline.
Design inspiration is everywhere and film is without doubt a fantastic resource. It is formed by a richness of elements — the production, the soundtrack, the cinematography and use of color — that try to maintain our interest throughout the whole movie and bring to life a story.
Therefore, below a selection of films that celebrate design and show it from different perspectives, from the ugly to the beautiful.
I love drawing exercises and today I'm sharing some of them with you. What I like about them is that they impulse us to start from basics. Drawing, like most arts, is a result of practice and self improvement.
I consider mark making a development of a very unique, personal approach, it is an almost sensual process. The exercises below are built from the intention to feel and strengthen our drawing language, and they belong to the book Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing by Mick Maslen and Jack Southern, which I have found extremely helpful and enjoyable.
Today's topic is built once again around sustainability. In this case, it involves the idea of beauty in sustainability.
Specially this second questions is one I want to deepen in through my path in design. Some people even consider green design and great design to inherently follow completely different quests, being almost incompatible. Does it have to be this way?
One subject that has been a focus of interest in my recent studies is sustainability. It is “on trend”, everybody speaks about it, but we should really stop and think about what the concept means to us.
We must start thinking about sustainable develpment in a deeper and broader way.
Many believe this deals only with energy efficiency, carbon emissions and ecomaterials, but in most cases it goes beyond that.
Generally the bigger problem is with use.
Among all, one of the most fundamental questions we can ask ourselves is: why?
Why am I doing this? Why is it important?
I took a long break from publishing because of Venezuela's crisis (my home country). I didn't feel good about promoting content in the midst of such a devastating situation. This gave me the space to think about the whole idea of it.
One aspect that is fundamental for our process is to continually improve the workflow. Since this is a space for exploration and sharing, I would like to comment on a recent discovery in my learning path on illustration. As an extension of my interest in drawing, I have been immersing in digital paint and I know some of you that are on this journey too, so I wanted to communicate a find I have found very useful for myself.
As I have mentioned before, artists like filmmaker Kirby Ferguson consider one of the basic elements of creativity is copying and naturally, this happens with drawing as well. Even though you are not going to create an exact copy of another image (or perhaps you want to as a practice), it is natural to the process to create from existing references.
Precisely, one of my top recent discoveries was an awesome tool for reference materials: PureRef.
This was just to cool to keep to myself!
Creativity is a complex subject and the topic for today is originality. We may fear that our work is not unique enough, or not innovative as we would want it to be. Or perhaps even get to think it is a mere copy of a lot of content we see.
But when can you say one piece of work is truly original?
Writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something "original", nine out of ten times they simply don't know the references or the original sources involved. It is very difficult for something to spark out of nowhere. The Eureka! moment is actually a composition of diverse existing ideas, knowledge and experience we acquire through time.
Besides the relevance of learning about theory I believe it is important to create blocks of time in which we allow ourselves to explore out of our comfort zone. This applies to any area where we would like to improve: drawing, painting, creating music, dancing, and of course, designing too is a result of practice.
This week I re-encountered this awesome book that has been in my shelf for a while: Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills (also available for Kindle). The book presents a compilation of exercises that range from creating a typeface to designing a paper robot, and all of them within a time set period.
Also, it is not strange to be surprised by tasks that are unfamiliar to us, tasks that present a problem that needs to be resolved as soon as possible. In moments of crisis we might better access our intuition as designers. Even though intuition is something that cannot be teached, we can become more intuitive by frequently solving wildly divergent design problems.
Todays’ topic is about something that has kept me thinking for a while, the contrast between what we can conceive as a designer and what is perceived by the user in reality. On a conceptual level, elements are thought to look or function a certain way, but when it materializes in physical space the interaction with the user can turn out to be a different story.
For instance, let's speak about bathroom design. In areas I use daily at work, there are a couple of bathrooms that probably started with a very minimalistic, white inspiration. Something that looks like the photographs below, which appeal as a very pure and attractive space. But what happens in reality?
