dave doesn't wanna be like Madonna.
The line between appreciation of appealing industrial design and the aching desire to possess such design is but a whisper of an impulse apart.
Prior to exploring the need angle, I must tread into the waters of appreciation. In the last two years I've read extensively on the topic of design. Perhaps because I am a relative newbie to this right-brain world, I have yet to understand why some people who choose to express appreciation of a person or their work, do so in the language of tongues. If they were able to tone down the references to movements in gone-by eras, the invocations of people's names who are only familiar to scholars and the excessive use of plain old gobbledy-gook language, they could increase their audience threefold. (Unless of course their desire is to only speak to a small circle of people). Listen to what this person wrote in the forward of a designer's book:
Half a century ago, Raymond Loewy pioneered a methodological axiom he termed MAYA. It was much maligned by modernists purists as a cynical strategy meant to appease the public with designs that proceeded toward the "most advanced" possible but willfully stopped at the threshold of local market acceptability, and he was criticized for believing that in order to maximize market potential, one must target the lowest common denominator.
Perhaps I am not educated enough to understand this or perhaps I do not fit into the author's targeted readership. It's a shame though. Because I am eager to learn and I'm the kind of person who talks (or writes) to folks who have HUGE networks. As I become more educated in the various fields of design I refuse to engage in this type of rhetoric.
It's amazing what you see when you really look. What is that that the biz folks say about creating a business plan? The process of putting one together is of equal if not more importance than the outcome. I believe if we focus on the hunt, on the search for stuff that we like, documenting and chronicling these adventures as we go, our need to possess would lessen. Of course this plan might work in reverse and actually increase our desire. Note to self - "place a hold on any adventures involving above referenced example."
Perhaps if we insert cognition between the acts of appreciating and possessing, we can get things under control.
My daughter needs to go to college. I do not need that Rolex.
We need to pay off the truck. I do not need that Corvette.
We need to eat. I do not need that rich, leather briefcase.
We need clothes. Honey, you do not need the diamonds.
Hopefully the process of writing and thinking about the need to possess, will squelch and tone down that need.
"Honey, I need an economic method of transportation. Preferably one that has two wheels and rumbles a tad."
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