People.Polhemus

I have been musing over Karen's first lecture still,and one thing that overarched my thoughts was her expression of the two potential roles design can have. I found I Identify with the second one most:

'You can analyse the cultural and social settings in which your designs will exist and predict and determine how this will evolve and consequently lead the direction.'

To be honest, which I simply must be if I am expressing my thoughts, I don't feel that I am forcing my design into being something that is 'leading the way'. This could be because of the environment I am in, that of the indulged design student that can choose to create what she wants. However is this really true?

My mentor, Liam, said that in a way you sometimes have to recreate in order to innovate. I think that this recreation could well relate to perceiving the current cultural and social climate and then recreating this in a manner that is new within the confines of a garment. I feel that design is always held accountable for at least one person in the world, and this is why I am so fascinated by society and culture itself. If I always consider things from different angles, and from a perspective that takes into account the very beings that design is responsible for, I feel that what I create will be relevant.

Source: http://static.vogue.com/voguepedia/images/9/96/Yohji-Yamamoto-hero.jpg

To quote Yohji (a designer that seems to pop up whenever people talk to me about my work, which is all of twice. Yes, I also stole this from Karen)

"If fashion is a way of looking at our daily lives then it is very important indeed.” "

So here begins my first foray into expressing (or in this case recognising) where I sit in the scheme of things. When I mentioned my interest in people, Leah directed me to the writings of Richard Florida:

This so far is a good read, if I am to use blatantly simplistic adjectives. This also came up in a research lecture in the context of people who observe trends/cultures/ philosophies to dictate and extrapolate potential future sociocultural changes (which also ties cleanly in with what Karen stated with regards to the roles of design). I have always been interested in people I suppose, how we affect the polarity of design systems simply through existing.

I have since just noticed that there is an expansion on this book called 'the flight of the creative class' which is more recent (if you can call 2006 recent) than this book, which I believe was published in 2002.

This commercial recalled me to 'the rise of the creative class' in the respect that it parallels this idea of the older generation operating on a mathematical, logical, practically led plane and the younger taking an idea and fuelling it with a creative response. The predominant contention in florida's book is that there is an entirely new subset of class which is identified as 'the creative class'. This term coins a growing subset individuals who utilise creative processes or need to harness creative attributes in various fields of work and lifestyle. Its an interesting notion that I suppose could be applied to social norms today.