Design Rockism

[imomus]

My latest article for AIGA Voice magazine is Design Rockism. Trace design's topsy-turvy path from Josef Muller-Brockmann's 'Grid Systems' to the Groovisions Brockmann doll!

Comments

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

"You're a Platonist, and I'm not. It's really as simple as that."

This is really a brilliant rebuttal to most any religionist assertions about "reality." The person above seems to be obsessed with the "purpose" of various objects and/or features found in nature -- ignoring that the random processes which manifest to us as apparent "order" are simply reflections of our own desire to seek patterns in the chaos.

It's like when people look at a power outlet and see a human face.

[(Anonymous)]

"...ignoring that the random processes which manifest to us as apparent "order" are simply reflections of our own desire to seek patterns in the chaos"

How did you work out that these processes which appear ordered are random?

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

How did you work out that they're not?

If you read carefully, what I'm saying here is that the order we perceive is reliant on our perceptive ability. This is actually a "randomness agnostic," relativistic view, in spite of my clumsy phrasing. Events may well not be random, but lacking a workable epistimology to the contrary, that is the shorthand we use to describe their progression. It would seem that concepts such as "meaning" require a base set of assumptions to work from. Without that, chaos can only be chaos.

To posit some objective "order" begs that you can provide empirical support for your assumptions. So where do we start? What are the First Principles?

[(Anonymous)]

The first principle which shows that the world is ordered is the fact that when you were born you didn't have to dig for you lunch or make it out of some super-duper chemical but you could get it from your mother's breast. A newborn child, left to its own devices, will actually *crawl* up his mother's tummy and find the nipple himself. If that is not a demonstration of the ordered nature of the world then I don't know what is.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

"If that is not a demonstration of the ordered nature of the world then I don't know what is."

Oh, I would concur.