Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Catalysts for catalyst of change


My expertise in design is as limited as Steve Jobs' pancreas was to his longevity. I'm a copywriter. I wordplay for a living but every once in a while, i encounter situations where i get to peek into the epicness that is design. Well, design is nothing without words to describe it, isn't it? But that's for another blog post. As for now, let's concentrate on the non-verbal part. Think about it. Every little thing that you see or use or experience has something or the other to do with design. Basically, everybody is a blind slave to someone's design. You don't decide how your water-bottle is going to be shaped like. It could very well resemble Monica Bellucci's curves or flatter Kate Moss' waferness. Somebody else designed that bottle for you. The same principle applies to so many other things that we put to use in our day-to-day life. From the plates we eat from to the cars we drive in to the desk we spend our entire day on to the social networking sites we swear by—all of them owe their existence to designers. People we never get to know. They work quietly behind the scene with minimum fuss. But they shape our world. Just like an architect dreams of capturing a piece of sky with his buildings, these designers hope to influence the way we look at things (or better still, change the way we look at things!). What sets a designer apart from the rest is they can binge on originality without having to worry about repeating themselves. Let's call it the designer's touch. He'll go back to his designing board again and again and again, hoping to churn out something that reminds you of something else but not exactly. There's no such a thing as original idea and nobody knows that more succinctly than designers. They can't afford to live on the false premise of absolute creation. You can only push the wheel forward because the wheel is already invented. You can't claim to reinvent wheel either. I know this because of my association with some wonderful/promising designers like Akshar, Vivek, Nitish, Vishal, Jas, Bilal and Arpit. These guys are young and full of ideas. Out in the market, there are many more like them who appear careless but are fiddling with the very make-up on the face of our world. 

2 comments:

Spoof Dog said...

Loved it :)

Thanks Shakti <3

Aadii said...

Yes -- BUT (there's always a but) if a designer is focussing on shaping the world while working on his bottle, isn't he losing focus? Shouldn't he just care about perfecting the bottle and leave the rest for reviewers and analysts...