A letter to practicing designers.
An open letter by C.B.
{4th of August 2005}
Dear designer,
Let me make things clear immediately. I am not writing to you from the ‘real’ world, but I am writing to you from very nearby. As students of design, you would have spent time in my world. And some of you continue to visit, for which I am very grateful.
However, as students you always maintained my world was not real, expressing a preference for another place, which you insisted was the ‘real’ one and where at best I could only be a tourist. Now that you are there, and visit me spasmodically, you tell me my world usually appears to be a bit more real than you remember. In fact, some of you go so far as to say it provides some respite from what you believe to be the excessive reality of your world.
These days, when you tell me this, I think of you as the tourist visiting my world where, who cannot resist telling me how much better it was when you were last here. As a result, it leaves me wondering what you make of your sentimental visit when you return to your world.
So, I thought I should write this letter to you in order to make sense of our two worlds. And I have wanted to write to you because I would like to propose a way we can bring news from our two worlds, you designing from yours and me writing from mine, in order to think about what it is designers today are called upon to project.
I would like to start by presenting two ways of describing a future project we could be designing – that is, if we admit concern about the future.
Biography
Craig Bremner is Professor of Design and Head of the School of Design and Architecture at the University of Canberra. He holds a Masters in Design from Domus Academy (Milan) and a PhD (RMIT) [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] in architecture. His research has directly led to new research methods into the design of living and working scenarios. He has applied his research methods most recently to trace the experience of living in Glasgow, Scotland. The results of this research were presented at ‘Glasgow 1999: UK City of Architecture and Design’, under the patronage of the UK Ministry of the Arts. This research led to the transformation of the housing design criteria throughout Scotland, and new design guidelines for the plan of the City of Glasgow. In his private practice, he has worked as a designer in Italy, Scotland and Australia.
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© Finn 2011
(The rest of this article appears, in print, in Open Manifesto #2)