Noise

I recall my acoustics Professor defining noise as unwanted sound. Which is which depends on your viewpoint. It is not obvious. Contexts change and lives change. My introduction to jazz was painful: my preferred music these days is jazz.

The same applies to design. One person’s classical perfection is another’s post modern nightmare. It is not the case that an opinion can only be voiced if it is professionally qualified. The truth about design may be out there, but it is not the same for everybody, everywhere, at all times – it is not an immutable, universal truth.

Paloma Faith’s song Do you want the truth or something beautiful? is inescapable background noise/sound at the moment. Listening to debates about design, you could be misled into thinking that the choice is that simple: truth versus beauty. Since the next line in the song is I am happy to deceive you, we should be careful about setting up either/or absolute choices.

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Slow

The Slow Food movement describes itself as an organisation that brings together pleasure and responsibility and makes them inseparable. It is an alternative to a life lived too fast.

Irrespective of how one chooses to eat, combining responsibility and pleasure underlines the importance of thinking first about the impact on the quality of our lives and on those around us of the decisions we make.

Design needs to be responsible. Design should be pleasurable. Do we design too fast? Maybe. But I suspect that the most important issue is that of imagination. The slow food movement dares to imagine another way of living. Good design springs from the same leap of faith that things can be different: that the irreconcilable can be resolved.

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Snow

Snow has a way of revealing both hidden beauty and hidden weakness. Even unprepossessing buildings can look radiant clothed in glistening layers of white water. And some snowclad buildings can assume an unlikely fairytale stature in the transformed landscape.

But snow is also insiduous in seeking out detailed flaws and thwarted assumptions – that water normally runs downhill, or that roofs can support the weather. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – invasive and innocent in equal measure.

Snow reminds us that we are not designing for a set of meteorological parameters but for difficult days in everybody’s lives when walking becomes an adventure and getting to work becomes a nightmare. Snow reminds us that design is not a fair weather activity.

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