Im just going to paste everything here from my working document....
An incomplete manifesto for growth - BRUCE MAU
“process is more important than outcome”
Collaborate.
The
space between people working together is
filled
with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative
potential.
I think collaborating will be something everyone needs
to be comfortable with, we all hate group projects, but life is somewhat like
that at work. There will always be people you should be asking opinions of and working
with to get the best outcome. Also if you start your own business,
Maybe a good
rule for the transition between design and career? Maybe that’s the area I want
to focus on. I could have like 20 points.
1.
Laugh.
People
visiting the studio often comment on how much we
laugh.
Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how
comfortably
we are expressing ourselves
I also really like this one. We need to laugh in order
to stay happy and relaxed and to let our creative juices flow well.
3.
Power
to the people.
Play
can only happen when people
feel
they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re
not
free
This one also works.Bruce Mau’s incomplete manifesto is a good references
Note: I definitely want to have a point in their about
how impossible it is to escape the reinforcement of consumerism, however we
still need to keep it in mind.
A sustainability point also should be mentioned.
Critical Design
Sustainability
History
The Everyday
Consumption/Consumerism
Efficiency will always get in the way.
Relevance in a complex world: ICOGRADA design
education manifesto:
This manifesto is
very close to the area I want to critique I think. Perhaps I am interested in
just how prepared we all are for the real world after having completed a
degree?
Anyway, Although specific
to graphic design I like this idea:
My greatest concern for the
future of graphic design education is the ever-widening gap between what is
taught in college and university programmes and the global context in which it
is practised. This is not to say that there are no design programmes that
demonstrate foresight by addressing the shifting landscape of design practice,
only that the vast majority of design curricula promote a 20th century vision
of the field that is increasingly irrelevant for contemporary issues and
scholarship demands.
“Now what?”
Our design education vs global design practise.
What are you going to do with that?
I don’t know. An answer we
all know well. It is ok not to know, Design in practise is a MASSIVE topic, and
many of us do not know what area we will end up in. Getting a job is step one.
Realising we miss university and that all of our assignments were actually 100%
more interesting than we thought they were is step 2. Trying to find an outlet
or job that can bring home the bacon, and fulfil our creative urges is step 3.
It is ok not to know what you are going to do. It is a journey. You don’t know
what you are not going to enjoy until you try it. Try and try again.
Maybe this manifesto can be a 3 part thing…the first say
a first point is a main point hammered home by Victoria design school
curriculum (for me anyway)
School rules
What we have learnt rules
What are we going to do what those rules
The kind of designers we would like to be vs the kind
we are likely to become once we enter the real world and realise we can’t get
jobs.
Learn three years of design school In Three minutes?
School is not school.org is interesting, although it
is not a manifesto, it is an interesting viewpoint:
it’s where we learn to live
a life of selfless service on behalf of the community; it’s where we find the
path to virtue, subordinating innate self-interest as individuals to the
interests of the community, the good of the whole. And where, on graduation
day, the highest possible title in a free society is conferred upon us:
citizen.
The self guided education
manifesto, also is not specific to design, but has some really amazing points
applicable that resonate with me:
“Showing up is just the beginning”
“Theory is not optional”
“Connections are everything”
The UnCollege Manifesto:
Interesting view on all the things we learn at uni and
how to unlearn them.
to be told how we would be good designers if we go
into this world and focus on social/sustainable/Critical design where we are
helping humankind and the world to come up with ideas to help us survive for
longer.
Interesting quotes from this:
“Study
without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
-
Leonardo da Vinci
I never let school interfere with my education – mark
twain
“College isn’t the place to go for ideas” – Helen
keller
this is interesting:
If college is the new
high school, a Bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma. A piece of
paper is not the end-all, be-all in life! As more and more people go to college
and the market becomes degree-saturated, the college
degree loses value.
Not necessarily
exactly what I mean – but a point I wanted to get across was that once we leave
school and apply for jobs, all that employers are going to want is a degree in
a design related discipline (for design jobs which I assume we all want) and
then they will train you up exactly how they want you. Send you on courses,
show you programmes. A new kind of schooling. You may use some of the skills
you learnt at university, but the most important skill is we learnt at
university is critical thinking.
“Education
is what remains after one has
forgotten
everything he learned in school.”
-
Albert Einstein
Similar idea here.
It actually doesn’t matter what our degrees are in. What a degrees tells
employers is that you can stick to something and complete tasks as required and
have enough self-efficacy and motivation to succeed.
A manifesto for creative professionals
is actually really perfect for me as it discusses clients and life outside of
university in the real world:
We
are amplifiers. Clients need to bring their skilled craft to the table for any
project to succeed.
We
work on trust. Clients pay us because they trust in what we do and the skills
we possess.
We'd
rather be challenged with innovation than model any project after one that
already exists.
Every
project must be useful and good for the world.
We
work for our client's clients, so we sometimes side with them.
We
only work on projects where we believe our clients can succeed. Their success
is our mission.
We
don't work with committees or teams; we work with leaders and decision makers.
Art and creativity goes to committees to die horribly.
We
go all-in on every project. Our clients must as well.
I particularly like
“Every project must be useful and good for the world”. I do not think this is
something that can feasible be completed every project – for example if you go
back to your client and with a 100% sustainable design which costs too much
because your passion with designing for change is to always do sustainable
design, then it is likely the client will say, sorry we can’t afford that and
ask for something cheaper. Efficiency
and money will always be chasing your tail..
The 1000 word
manifesto:
Context Before Absolutely Everything
Understanding that all design happens within a context is the first (and
arguably the only) stop to make on your way to becoming a good designer. You
can be a bad designer after that, of course, but you don't stand a chance of
being a good one if you don't first consider context. It's everything: In
graphics, communication, interaction, architecture, product, service, you name
it—if it doesn't take context into account, it's crap. And you already promised
not to make any more of that.
“Institutions that stress
sustainability, social responsibility, cultural adaptation, ethnography, and
systems thinking are leading the way.”
EVERY DESIGNER WILL
AUTOMATICALLY JUDGE THE TYPEFACE YOU HAVE CHOSEN.
The Awesomeness
Manifesto:
Let’s face it. “Innovation”
feels like a relic of the industrial era. And it just might be the case that
instead of chasing innovation, we should be innovating innovation.
A better concept, one built for a radically
interdependent 21st century, is awesomeness. Here are the four pillars of
awesomeness:
Ethical
production. Innovation turns a blind eye
to ethics — or, worse, actively denies ethics. That’s a natural result of
putting entrepreneurship above all. Buy
low, sell high, create value. That’s so 20th century. Awesome stuff is
produced ethically — in fact, without an ethical component, awesomeness isn’t
possible. Starbucks is shifting to Fair Trade coffee beans, for example. Why?
Starbucks isn’t just trying to innovate yet another flavour of sugar-water:
it’s trying to gain awesomeness.
Insanely great stuff. What is
innovative often fails to delight, inspire, and enlighten — because, as we’ve
discussed, innovation is less concerned with raw creativity. Awesomeness puts
creativity front and center. Awesome stuff evokes an emotive reaction because
it’s fundamentally new, unexpected, and 1000x better. Just ask Steve Jobs. The
iPhone and iPod were pooh-poohed by analysts, who questioned how innovative they
really were — but the Steve has turned multiple industries upside down through
the power of awesomeness.
Love. You know what’s funny about walking into an
Apple Store? The people working there care.
They don’t just “work at the Apple store” — they love Apple. Contrast that with
the alienating, soul-crushing experience of trying to buy something at Best Buy
— where salespeople attack you out of greed. (Or, as editor extraordinaire
Sarah Green put it, “where you wander around for a full half-hour unable to
find anyone to help you before you finally get the attention of some
blue-shirted 12-year old who turns out to know nothing about the products she
sells and ultimately end up committing hara-kiri with a Wii controller”). Their goal is to sell; the goal of Apple
Store employees is simply to show off their awesomeness, and let you share it.
Love for what we do is the basis of all real value creation.
Thick value. It’s the most hackneyed phrase in the
corporate lexicon: adding value. Let’s face it: most value is an illusion.
Nokia, Motorola, and Sony tried for a decade to “add value” to their phones —
yet not a single feature did. Food producers and pharmaceutical companies claim
they’re “adding value,” but mostly they’re just mega-marketing.
Internet Manifsto:
3. The Internet is our society is the Internet.
Web-based
platforms like social networks, Wikipedia or YouTube have become a part of
everyday life for the majority of people in the western world. They are as
accessible as the telephone or television. If media companies want to continue
to exist, they must understand the lifeworld of today’s users and embrace their
forms of communication. This includes basic forms of social communication:
listening and responding, also known as dialog.
The social role of
the graphic designer:
Interesting as it
talks about collaboration again.
In
the process of communication, the graphic designer and the client together
constitute the transmitter. The message will be the result of their
collaboration. Who chooses whom? By nature, the client needs the graphic
designer only occasionally, whether the arrangement is repetitive or
continuous.
Unlike
the graphic designer, who looks for a kind of communication that is in relation
to the nature of the message and of the presumed receiver, the client’s
concerns and existence are elsewhere, outside of the communication process. The
client looks for what would appear to be a solution (a graphic product) to his
problems, in a competitive context. It is for this reason that the client tends
to consider communication as strictly instrumental, and the graphic designer as
a neutral transmitter of his message. The instrumental conception of visual
communication is often the one adopted by clients who themselves have a very
narrow view of their own role as transmitter.
But
can neutral aesthetics exist? Can the message of the client always be
unequivocal, never ambiguous? The truth between the client and the graphic
designer will always be a complex and subjective truth. Otherwise, this
collaboration has no reason to exist and can be advantageously replaced by a
mechanical act.
It
is through the contact established at the outset of the collaboration with the
designer that the client can be brought to widen his perspective and transform
his desire in order to obtain, among other things, that result. It is this
contact that can make him conscious of his cultural role and his power of
decision over the time frame of the communication.
The
designer would like to choose a client for his apparent social role. The client
— whose pragmatism about cost influences his demands — chooses the designer
because of his know-how in relation to the economics of production. The depth
of the relationship depends to a considerable extent on the nature of the
consideration the client has for the know-how of graphic design. While many
small-scale clients in the social, cultural, political, and even economic fields
have high expectations of graphic designers, many others with considerable
social influence are unaware of graphic design or have a very simplistic
conception of it.
It
will be absolutely essential, in the years ahead, to make graphic design known
in its complete technical, intellectual, and artistic dimension. Then, graphic
designers will be in a position to identify and respond consciously to requests
that generate social acts that they can support in their role as co-authors.
This
notion of co-authorship seems essential to me, from an ethical point of view.
The necessary co-operation between client and graphic designer will lead the
client to share the aesthetic position (not devoid of ideology) of the
designer, and it will lead the designer to accept the validity of the
ideological position of his client. It is this particular balance between
co-authors that allows the production to be oriented toward a cultural act,
which. by definition, is always risky.
If
this important notion does not operate in the client-graphic designer
relationship, then it becomes a service relationship only. And under these
conditions, professional responsibility becomes a delusion
This design
manifesto is similar to where I am headed – it has looked at designers at
school and does refer a little to after school
I’m going to paste
the complete thing her cause it has a lot of good stuff.
A Design Education Manifesto
School
is hard. Design school is especially hard because so much of it exists within
the abstract, the opinion. There are few, if any, absolutes as you go through
design school. Much of design education is about learning some key techniques and
then trying to apply them to your work in interesting ways. The following are
some thoughts I have about how to go through a design program and get the most
out of the experience, and beyond as a creative professional.
Always take risks. It is easy to learn
and then repeat exactly what you have learned. However, you will not grow that
way. I can see value in the regurgitation of knowledge if you are a lawyer, but
I have a hard time with it as a design student or a creative professional. You
should be pushing yourself and you should be taking risks, especially in
school. Big risks. Trying what may not work. Asking questions that may not have
answers. Seeing if what you throw against the wall sticks. In my experience,
taking risks in school has always paid off big time.
Be aggressive. There are many
opportunities available while in design school. For example: collaborative
projects, extracurricular activities, and freelance work. These opportunities
will not always come to you, you must go get them. Every school has a
publications department that designs and produces internal and external
collateral. There is no reason that you should not be the person designing
these projects. Make contacts and ask for work. If you are talented and a
little lucky, you will get it.
Be
aggressive in terms of your academics as well. There are two kinds of design
professors at school: pushers and pullers. Some professors will push their
knowledge on you. Others will make you pull what you need from them. Ask
questions of both. Challenge their statements. Ask for precedents. Beyond the
curriculum of the class, ask your favorite faculty who they know that needs an
intern (because they do know people, I assure you). Ask faculty if they need
any assistance with their own work. Find out which exhibits they enjoyed at
local museums. It is very important that as a design student you do not sit
back and let things happen to you. Be aggressive and create your own luck and
opportunities.
Break the rules. I lecture to my
students that they should “fuck the rules” as long as they have a good reason.
I have consistently found that the students who are conservative, stay inside
the lines and try to appeal to the teacher, are the students who do the most
predictable work. Not bad work, just predictable. Defying the rules forces you
to stray from the path of least resistance and ultimately make work that is
more interesting, more meaningful and more fun to create.
But,
that does not mean just be a contrarian for its own sake. It does not mean ignore
any and all guidelines. It means take the requirements into consideration and
break past them with good reasons and solid ideas. Breaking the rules just to
be different is foolish, breaking the rules because you have a much better idea
is smart.
Look at everything. Dismiss nothing.
Each designer is born from a unique experience. Classmates in the same program
will have different educations depending on which teachers they have, what
field trips they take, and what books they pick up. As a designer you need to
always be looking at the world around you. You need to see everything—the kind
of detailed seeing taught in freshman drawing classes—not just looking, but
really seeing. You need to be an observer as well as a maker. You should rid
yourself of any preconceptions of what is and is not worthy of your attention.
Everything has potential to be interesting and influential. Not everything will
be, but the more you see the better your chances are at seeing something that
will be useful to you.
Be obsessive. The saying goes that
“necessity is the mother of invention.” I concur, but I think for designers the
saying should be obsession is the mother of invention. Obsession is what drives
you to explore and find out as much as possible about something that interests
you. I do not mean that being clinically obsessive/compulsive is something to
aspire to—I have been told that is neither fun or interesting—but I do mean you
need to be intensely immersed and engaged in what you are doing. This obsession
can move you past understanding and awareness into a translative process where
you will start to make things. We are usually taught that obsession is
unhealthy, and in some cases that is true. When it comes to how a designer
looks at the world, obsession can provide an incredible explosion of ideas as
you become so engrossed in something you start to reinvent it inside your head.
Obsession can often help you to move through the threshold between thinking and
making. You should never hold back your excitement about something that
interests you, and by the same token, you should not hesitate to be obsessive
about many things since you never know where your interests will lead.
Be uncomfortable. Comfort is
tremendously overrated, especially as a designer. You know you can skew some
type, add some color, toss in an image and make a decent piece of design. Maybe
it’s not great, but it’s good enough. It is easy to get into the habit of
making the kind of work you are comfortable making. Truly great, interesting,
inspiring design comes not from comfort but from discomfort. It comes from the
fear that what you are doing might really suck, but it also might just be
brilliant. Discomfort makes you reexamine what you think you know and how you
think things should work. Being uncomfortable helps you make decisions from the
gut, it makes you push harder and take more risks. Grabbing that fear, holding
onto that uncomfortable, scary place lets you push past expectations and into
the unknown—into a process of discovery as opposed to regurgitation.
Be opinionated. You should have
opinions about design and the world around you. Preferably, you should have
strong opinions. Ideally, you should have strong and informed opinions. Every
great designer I have ever met has an active stance on design, they do not
passively allow work to wash over them. They have opinions about what they see.
Having opinions means engaging in some kind of internal analysis of the work
you see and formulating a response to it. As an educator I do this constantly in
the classroom, and I try to do it constantly in the professional world as well.
Opinions about design force you to pick a side, and define what kind of
designer you are.
There
are plenty of designers out there who punch a clock in the morning, mindlessly flow
some text into InDesign all day, and then leave at five and don’t think about
design until the next morning. There are designers who casually ignore art and
design while they look for the next reality show on TV. Then there are the
other designers who make more design in their spare time. Their idea of a good
time is to look at typography or experiment with painting or photography. These
are designers who are fully immersed in working visually, designers who are
actively engaged in becoming better at what they do every day.
Be a cop. They say that when you are
a police officer you are on duty 24/7/365. Cops always look at their
surroundings from a cop’s perspective. They notice things others do not. They
act as a cop would in an emergency situation whether or not they are in
uniform. Most cops I have met and read about always carry their firearms and
badge, even while on vacation. It is not something they turn off at the end of
their shift.
A
designer needs to act like a cop. When you are a designer, you are a designer
24/7/365. Always noticing, always observing, always designing, even if only in
your head. Carrying a camera with you at all times is a good habit—capture
interesting details you come across, not just because you have an assignment
due, but because it is in your nature as a visual artist to observe and process
the world around you. Inspiration comes from everywhere and nowhere, all at the
same time.
One
of the greatest things about being a designer is that you do not finish your
design education when you leave design school. You continue learning for the
rest of you life, and you should carry these ideas with you as you develop and
mature into a creative professional.
