You must change your life

Henry Miller

Unfold

Inspiration of the day, by Sabrina Ward Harrison, posted by Christine Castro, see the original here!

Wednesday Inspire

Le Slow Design

J’ajoute cette semaine le manifeste du Slow Design aux manifestes présentés sur Vu d’ici.

Guylaine en a parlé ce week-end, et je crois qu’il sera des plus inspirant pour vous tous de découvrir quelles sont les principales notions qui caractérisent le Slow Design. À garder tout près!

Slow design sur Treehugger:

(…) Slow Design, much like its gastronomic predecessor, is all about pulling back on the reins and taking time to do things well, do them responsibly, and do them in a way that allows the designer, the artisan and the end user to derive pleasure from it.

Just like Slow Food, it’s all about using local ingredients, harvested and put together in a socially and environmentally responsible way. Above all, it emphasizes thoughtful, methodical, slow creation and consumption of products as a way to combat the sometimes overwhelming pace of life in the bigger-faster-now 21st century. (…)

Slow design sur Wikipedia:

Slow Design is a relatively new concept of design thinking, a derivative of the slow food movement. Slow Design’s implications are vast and yet to be fully explored. It could mean any of the following:

• Longer design processes with more time for research, contemplation, real life impact tests and fine tuning;
• Design for manufacturing with local/regional materials and technologies or Design that supports local industries, workshops and craftspeople;
• Design that takes into account local/regional culture both as a source of inspiration and as an important consideration for the design outcome;
• Design that studies the concept of natural timecycles and incorporates them into design and manufacturing processes;
• Design that looks at longer cycles of human behavior and sustainability.

Bientôt Demain est une des sources d’information principale en ce qui a trait aux projets inspirés par les thèmes du Slow Design, c’est d’ailleurs sur ce site que nous avons déniché ce manifeste:

Concept du Slow Design
Le processus du Slow Design est complet, détaillé, holistique, poussé, respecté et mûrement réfléchi. Il permet l’évolution et le développement des résultats de la conception. Il appartient aux domaines public et professionnel et insiste sur l’importance de démocratiser le processus de conception en englobant un grand nombre de participants.

Résultats
Le Slow Design se manifeste dans chaque objet, espace ou image encourageant la diminution des ressources humaines, économiques, industrielles et urbaines en :

• concevant des espaces propres à la méditation, aux actions et aux rêves
• concevant d’abord pour les gens, puis pour l’argent
• concevant d’abord pour la communauté locale, puis pour la communauté internationale
• produisant des avantages socioculturels et du bien-être
• produisant des avantages environnementaux régénérateurs et du bien-être
• démocratisant la conception en encourageant la conception auto-initiée
• catalysant les changements de comportement et la transformation socioculturelle
• créant de nouveaux modèles économiques et d’entreprises ainsi que des opportunités
• présentant ces résultats sous forme de huit thèmes étroitement liés : Tradition / Rituel / Empirisme / Lenteur / Open source / Technologie / Eco-efficacité / Évolution

Il y a aussi le site officiel du Slow Design, par ici, et un manifesto détaillé fesant 27 pages ici.

Et vous me demanderez, comment on intègre ça dans notre vie de tout les jours? Et bien je crois que l’on a tous déjà un peu commencé à ralentir nos mouvements et notre manière de consommer, et ce après avoir abusé de nos aptitudes physiques et mentales ainsi que celles de la nature au cours des dernières années.

Je crois qu’il faut continuer à diminuer, à ralentir, à reprendre le plaisir du temps dédié à chaque tâche, et surtout, faire les bons choix dans tout ce que l’on entreprend, dans la manière dont on fait les choses, et dans la manière dont on consomme.

Bonne chance, et je vous souhaite l’inspiration nécessaire pour mieux ralentir en allant droit devant vers la réalisation de vos rêves!

Steve Jobs

3 intense and authentic short stories about and by Steve Jobs,
almost nothing about Apple:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your god, destiny, life, karma, or whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Found on Marie-Claude’s blog.

The science of enjoying life

“Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered “useless,” will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life.”

John Maeda

Shirley MacLaine

“We are revolving around religions instead of revolving around expanding our own consciousness.”

Shirley MacLaine in a interview with Whitley Strieber.

Opening

We should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business

Guylaine pointe vers cette édition du Iconeye qui rassemble les manifestes de quelques personnalités influentes du monde du design : Peter Saville, Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, John Maeda, Stefan Sagmeister.

Le premier manifeste est de Peter Saville, qui porte un regard pessimiste et critique sur les fondements du monde du design, et qui à mes yeux a su mettre des mots sur le flou et le sentiment grandissant de répugnance que j’ai face à l’industrie du Marketing, que ce soit dans l’imprimé ou dans le web.

Morals
The cultural adventure has been consumed by business. Making things better is a moral issue, but morality and business don’t go together – business is, if not immoral, then amoral. We know we should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business. It can’t really be all about idealism and altruism.

Where are the NGOs?
Everyone does their best but you have to pay the rent. Even hospitals have to run to profit. You can’t avoid the issue merely by working for an NGO – even Amnesty and Greenpeace have to be “business facing”. The only bastion of free speech could be the art world, but even that is a preciously engineered marketplace with its own complexities.

Value finding
Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything – designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

Post-war socio-cultural democratisation
It’s a long term, but broken down it’s simple. Over the last 50 years culture has been disseminated to the wider public rather than being the domain of the privileged. There is an inevitable loss of substance in the process of becoming a culture of entertainment. If it’s not popular, it’s not happening.

Design as drugs
Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

The new cause
I was part of a system that wanted to change the look of the everyday world. That ideal, manifest through consumerism, doesn’t sit well with me now. I am not wealthy and completely understand how we all have to pay our way.

David Lynch

Slowing down

How to be creative

How to be creative, a manifesto by Hugh MacLeod. Download the manifesto here.

Found on Guylaine’s blog.