Some thoughts on design from Syd Mead

[Patrick Salsbury <salsbury at sculptors dot com>]

While I'm mentioning Syd Mead, I thought I'd post a bit from the last page
of his 1979 book, "Sentinel", which I've just finished reading. You can see
much more of his work and purchase a few of his books (many are out of
print, sadly) at http://www.sydmead.com/

The following is from p. 157. Intro text by Strother MacMinn, who did much
of the writing in the book. The quoted stuff (everything after the first
paragraph) is from Syd Mead, himself.

(Side note: I just OCR-scanned this in on my scanner, and it did a pretty
decent job. But there are a few typos, so if I didn't catch any in the
following text, that's why.)




    Although Syd Mead is an individual possessed of many talents, he is
also aware of the refinement and application processes that have earned him
his great success. The candor with which he discusses the evolution of
these attributes is strongly colored with an appreciative sense of human
qualities and frequent touches of humor.
    "I'm not aware of any particular cosmic philosophy guiding me. I think
that can even be a dangerous thing, because there have been instances in
history where people who did have an over-riding commitment to a philosophy
have gone seriously and disastrously awry.  Let's say that you adopt,
invent or proselytise a structured philosophy and, at some point in time,
you become committed to preserving its integrity. You end up with a
built-in blind spot which colors all your judgements, and you keep
perpetuating the original point where it crossed over from becoming
objective to subjective. I sincerely hope that I never get to that point.
    "I believe in keeping an open mind so that ideas and things that
happen don't necessarily have to fit in with what you already think. They
just pop up and you use them as new inputs into whatever you happen to be
formulating at the time. In fact, it's much more surprising that way! I
can't think of a duller way to exist than to process everything that you
hear and find out through a pre-established system to see if it fits with
what you're supposed to be thinking.
    "There's a great enjoyment in imagining how things might be. Perhaps
it's a conscious cultivation of the child's point of view. Children, as
they grow up, slowly become socially sophisticated. They learn 'to do' or
'not to do' either because of peer group pressure or ridicule both from
the peer group or their parents or adults. Then they're told 'that's silly'
or 'childish' or they're told to 'grow up'.
    "So, as you get older, unless you specifically reinforce that sense of
wonder, you become educated in the classic, institutional sense. Millions
of people then proceed to go into professions and spend their days
performing some particular, exact contribution and they lose that
marvellous ability to daydream or let the mind wander through many, many
alternative possibilities.
    "Going through a design education process, if it's done correctly (and
I think that the school, the Art Center College of Design, that I went to
does), can help you to avoid that pitfall. You associate with people who
are professionals and they transfer to you that sense of wonder and that
sense of fascination with the way things might be. In conjunction with that
you're taught to analyze, to take situations and problems apart and
reassemble the parts into different possibilities. This enables you to
tackle very realistic problems of design in conjunction with hard
engineering and actual, real possibilities. It also allows you to take
that technical knowledge or exposure and combine it with imagination and
a sense of wonder. 
    "Then you really are equipped to wander through the speculative
corridors of your mind and piece together very logical possibilities on
their own terms. These alternative realities are convincing because they've
been assembled on a rational basis founded on a wonderful kind of
systematic speculation. This is thoroughly fascinating to people who don't
know how to do it. Once you've mastered the technique of assembling idea
formats, the imagination process, then the least of the problems is
thinking up the ideas."


-- 
Pat
	   ___________________Think For Yourself____________________
	 Patrick G. Salsbury - http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/
Self contained, off-the-grid, autonomous houses: http://reality.sculptors.com/
	   ---------------------------------------------------------
      "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling
	   exception, is composed of others." -- John Andrew Holmes