Routine is really important. However late you went to bed the night before, or however much you had to drink, get up at the same time each day and get on with it. When I was composing [the opera] Anna Nicole, I was up at 5 or 6am, and worked through until lunch. The afternoon is the worst time for creativity.
Source : The Guardian
Our consciousness is so subjective that our own experience of sentience is all we have to rely on to tell us that we exist. Any apparent modification of this – or even the possibility of something that might affect it negatively – challenges us to face who and what we are. And so, as Bell pointed out in parliament, new technologies get to the very heart of us. How we adapt to the new thing reminds us of our limitations as human beings.
It’s important to separate the web and technology from the way that we use it. Our literacy around technology is very limited so we use it like a hammer instead of a chisel. The web has only been main stream for the last 10 years. Such a short period of time to judge the effects and the value of something. Humans are addictive, just look at alcohol, drugs, smoking all bad for us and yet it as taken hundreds of years for us to adapt to a somewhat more moderate use of all of them. In small dosses that can all be great for us, just like the web.
KP
Source : The guardian
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success.
– Oscar Wilde
I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it;
– by Benjamin Franklin
If you ask me why I am willing to give away the valuable formula of this discovery I will confide to you that experience has taught me two things about it: First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it.
– by James Young
Design can be seen as a method: a method to join together separate ideas, information, emotions and organize them to develop a thought. None of the books listed below have any real examples of what is traditionally thought of as design. There are no glossy photos, models or “concepts”. Instead they are books which develop a way of thinking, a method which realizes that what is made is only as good as the way an idea is framed. There is no style, no “big idea”, just different ways to help you see the world you live in and how to rearrange the complexity of that world in a way that makes sense of things.
-KP
Alessi knows that if all his new products are successful, the company has been too conservative and has stayed away from the borderline. This is not good, because it opens the field to competitors. So the company periodically pursues more-radical projects. And even when these efforts apparently fail (proposing products that are too extreme-beyond the borderline), that failure is the revealing moment in which the firm finally sees where the borderline was and is in the best position to make a breakthrough with the next project, before and better than its competitors.
Classifying design by its end product seems to be rather putting the cart before the horse, for the solution is something which is formed by the design process and has not existed in advance of it. The real reason for classifying design in this way has less to do with the design process but instead a reflection on out increases specialized technologies. Engineers are different from architects not just because they may use a different design process but more importantly because they understand about different materials and requirements. Unfortunately this sort of specialization can easily become a strait jacket for designers, directing their metal process toward a predefined goal. It is thus to easy for architects to assume that the solution to a clients problem is a new building. Often it is not!
To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determining elements and combining them. – Karl Gerstner
Collected Reading 