In this blog, I am just trying to understand what Philippe Starck is trying to say in terms of life, our role in life and design.
Here is the ted video of that talk -
Mainly, he talks about 4 things
Here is the ted video of that talk -
Mainly, he talks about 4 things
- continuous evolution - some billions years ago we were just single celled bacteria who didn't know what the future will hold. The cycle continued and it brought us to where we are today. The evolution will keep on continuing. What we were not able to do in the past we can do today and similarly what we are not able to do today, we will be able to do in the future. Every small improvement that we do today in terms of a better design or better thinking is a step towards that future. That's why even if he is designing a toothbrush or toilet brush he is thinking of how it will be used and what problem it solves so that we can solve that problem and move on to the next step in this evolution process.
- vision - if we look straight down we can't see what is ahead of us and we fall. If we look a little up, we just see our selfish path and nothing else. If we look further up and up we see the society and the more up we look (i.e the more societal problems we solve) the more importance we have. if we look straight up, we look at the god and according to him god is the answer when you don't know the answer.
- civilization vs barbarism - human progress has been like a wave. With our highs being that of civilization and our lows being that of wars and crimes and barbarism. Things like art, design, thinking, research (which are the building blocks of our evolution) can only happen when we are in civilization because otherwise the priorities change to just survival.
- giving the best tools to next generation - so what is our purpose in life? Our purpose is to resolve our pieces of this evolution puzzle to the best we can and give those solutions/tools to the next generation so that they can understand the next puzzle and they have the best tools (even if it is a toothbrush or a toilet brush) to resolve their part of the puzzle.
So in my opinion, the moral of the story is that whatever small or big, trivial or important problems we try to solve, we should try to solve them to the best of our ability so that the next pieces of puzzles can be identified and worked upon either by us or by our future generations.