Checkmate

The purpose of chess is checkmate. Everything else – the number of pieces taken, the clarity of the strategy, the finesse of the tactics – is just the stuff you do to get to checkmate.

Of course, for some, the game also evokes beauty and fascination for its own sake. So it’s great if you can do both – but it is critically important to be clear on your personal priorities. A successful chess game is not conducted as a compromise between elegance and winning.

Design projects, on the other hand, are often presented as a balance between time, cost and quality: design as a hostage to value engineering. But getting the balance right doesn’t mean there isn’t an endgame: design, create, checkmate.

Read more...

Tunnel Vision

The human eye is constructed in such a way that we have an inevitable ‘blind spot’. We cope with this by scanning our visual field with both eyes and by deducing what we should be seeing. We make an educated guess.

This is fine. The mistake is to assume that because we see something, then everybody else sees it the same way. One person’s educated deduction is another’s wild gamble. Couple this with every culture’s unwillingness to see things which don’t fit into our frame of reference, then we are all literally blind to some things staring us in the face.

So, the last thing we need is to exacerbate this with wilful tunnel vision. It is difficult to see things as they truly are without deciding in advance that we will refuse to look to the left or the right, but cleave only to the marked pathway. Sometimes, like Robert Frost, we need to pay more attention to ‘The Road not Taken’.

Read more...