I’m often asked how I stepped away from design consultancy, the city and proximity of everything I took for granted and choose a life as a designer maker?
The courage came from the desire to be…to be me, to be a contributor to a community, to be present and to be settled with all I have done, do today and will be in the future. I believe that consultancy based commercial design is conflicted with pressures of budgets, greed and self gratifying opinions from contributors. As much as I touted my values I was overwhelmed by comments like “don’t worry about the dolphins, just get on with it”. I couldn’t design without embodying values in my work that I didn’t agree with.
For me, design is about an expression of beliefs in the journey to create an object that will be ultimately held and appreciated for what it is, nothing more. A spoon is a spoon, it’s designed to be used. Design makes it good to use and worthy of the materials that are expended on it. Every hand made object has the makers energy in it, every aspect of the object is considered, touched and scrutinised. It’s a level of design that can’t be achieved with commercial imperatives. When and designer makes something they have designed good enough just won’t do.
I have attached two links that were shared with me. They speak for creatives and express the reasons why we have chosen a hard but rewarding path. It also shows that the art of making can be scaled and shared.
http://www.marthastewart.com/926570/toshio-odate-handcrafted-shoji-screen#926570