At Least 3 Things Wrong With The Guardian’s Recent Article on Philippe Starck
1. Starck: “I have always drawn and always been good at it.”
Actually no you draw like a 5 year-old:

2. Starck: “My thing is replacement. You propose an object. If it’s right, it works and the previous object vanishes. ”
Actually no it’s called a landfill.
3. Starck: “I have no idea how much money I earn. It’s not because I’ve lost track, I just never knew….earning money doesn’t stop me taking an interest in others.”
Tell that to the Steve Jobs estate who you’re trying to sue for 3 million euros in unpaid fees: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20815910
(original Guardian story here)
Design Glossary (work in progress)
Collaborate: “I don’t have the skills to do this on my own nor can I pay for it, so let’s collaborate.”
Brainstorm: An opiate-like feel good love-in where there are no stupid ideas, except for the stupid ones. Also a gateway drug to “collaborations”.
Design: An additive that increases sales. eg - “We need to add some design to this”
Eco: see “Green”
Green: see “Sustainable”
Sustainable: see “Eco”
Rendering: Photorealism that is often mistaken as a real photo. Also the desired form of design-to-marketing communication since the early 00’s. Also good for when sketches require too high a level of abstract thought to understand (i.e. always)
Sleek: Default descriptor when fumbling for design-savvy words. Frequently paired with bad grammar: “It has a real sleek look to it.”
Innovation: The ability to make a profit and win awards by rethinking things that needn’t have been rethought.
Design Thinking: When you sit around thinking about where it all went wrong, but look good doing it.
Impossible Story
It took me many months to write this. My life would not be what it is without Imre Molnar. Friend, leader, and inspiration to many. I hope my small part of his story does some justice to his legacy.
Website update
A little bit of a long time coming, but just added some info about what I’ve been doing for the past year
It’s time for us as designers to step up and take responsibility for what we’ve done, to be open, critical and constructive about the state of a truly unsustainable industry. Forget about design festivals and conferences, awards and praise that simply perpetuate the same cycle. Let’s take a radical departure and engage the issue on a higher level; government, policy and education. The future demands that those who know have a responsibility to do something, now, instead of looking back at what could have been done differently. Compassion and optimism will be valuable tools in the fight against apathetic consumerism.
Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts.
The first part is called The Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary; A block of metal, plastic and glass. Perhaps he asks you to inspect this thing to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course, it probably isn’t. You’ve seen objects like this before and at first it’s the same as any other. Everyone else is craning their necks to get a closer look, and whisperings of ‘gorilla glass’ and ‘machined stainless steel’ start making you curious as to if this is as ordinary as it once appeared.
The second part is called The Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Look at how it glows, how beautiful the interface is and how many apps you can fill it with. Look how it replaces a hundred other things you didn’t know you needed but now can’t live without. Look at how much better it is than the one the year before. Marvel at how productive you can be with all these new features that magically float above the the circuit boards. How can something so perfect come into being? Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t want to find out. You want to be…fooled.
That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call The Prestige.
Until now, The Prestige has been a metaphor for bringing some kind of ‘newness’ to an already saturated market under the term ‘innovation’. Innovation is the ability to deceive and embellish, pulled from a short but grossly overused list of marketing jargon where we find such terms as ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘game changing’. What we praise, drool over and lust after as a consumer driven society is an illusion that comes at a very high human and environmental cost. The real Prestige, the real magic, would be to break away from this. To build and contribute to a society that is beyond obscene levels of profit and exclusivity, and to take risks and reward leadership that is about truly leading, not fueling the artificial fires of supply and demand that are causing irreparable damage to the very world we live in.
