A designer is simply someone who is good at problem solving.

A designer is someone who takes in as much relevant information as possible and then processes that to make a better world.

If you’re a designer and not doing this you are failing us all.

An architect does this in relation to the built world. This is what makes it such a cool profession, you need to analyse pretty much everything there is to know at the human scale; construction, climate, psychology, history and more. They then need to apply that knowledge to design a piece of earth varying in size from one room to an entire city.

I dwelled on these things after watching a very good TED presentation by Dan Phillips.
Phillips is not an architect himself, but he gets it. He understands that to be a good architect you must understand a lot about the way the world works, and this man clearly does.


http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_phillips_creative_houses_from_reclaimed_stuff.html

Some of my favorite quotes from the video

“Here come the marketers and advertisers... We buy stuff we didn’t know we needed.”

“I’m fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life. I’m living my life according to how you expect me to.”

The above comments I find very interesting as they say a lot about the social psychology that pervade our society. As much as I like the point he's making, that we are all sheep in ways we don't even realise, I have to disagree with some of what he says. He speaks in the video about how we behave differently when we are with others and states that this is because we are " fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life", but really are we not just being polite?

There is a difference, albeit perhaps only a small one, between censuring ourselves to be accepted and censuring ourselves simply as to not to be rude or obnoxious.

Another comment;

“Our housing has become a commodity.”

Yes, very true and unfortunate. But this is not as bad as he makes it out to be. There is a degree of efficiency about commodification. This has to do with the fact that most people have the same needs and most builders are trained to do things a certain way. Now perhaps the world could be a better place if people thought more about the way they live and why, but the fact is that most don't. And most are happy to live in their horrible Mcmasions. This is their prerogative. If they're happy with that crap, who am I to say they shouldn't be?

A house by Dan Phillips. Image from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/garden/03recycle.html?_r=1

The problem as I see it is that we don’t have the efficiency of mass produced housing and yet we still waste the opportunity to be original and creative with the parts we have because we are all happy to get what we're given if it's what everyone else is getting. It is so rare that someone actually questions the norm, and this is what makes Phillips such a breathe of fresh air. We are eager to live in houses that ‘fit-in’ because we ourselves are scared of standing out. Phillips is not. Perhaps he is a bit of an eccentric hippy, but is that really that bad? He seems like a pretty switched on guy, he does a lot of good for the world AND he seems like a pretty happy guy. If only there were more people like him.

The problem at the end of the day is that people are stupid.

We are all ungrateful.

We are all easily manipulated.

The world is not as complicated as it seems these days.

In the words of Dan Phillips “Here come the marketers and advertisers... We buy stuff we didn’t know we needed.”