Essay No.5
As little as possible!
“You should perfect every object and every piece of furniture and you shouldn’t make thousands of variations. Just improve it in every way. Don’t make it fashionable, make it last until the year ... AD” - Bruno Munari
Sometimes designers get anxious and want to do too much. They feel they have to constantly increase their production of ideas in order to differentiate their work from that of other designers (who try to do the same). If designers experience their work as a way of affirming themselves as individuals, we will have many individual design experiences, all disconnected from one another. Many ideas, but also a lot of rubbish (constantly replaced by new ideas/rubbish). But if we considered the work of designers as a service to the human species designers could just do the little that is needed to improve the solution of a problem: as Lamarck would say, solutions evolve together with species!
“Do as little as possible!” is the exhortation of Vittorio Gorini, a creative, talented man from Perugia we heard about one day, by chance, on a trip. This exhortation contains an implicit invitation to enhance quality. Multiplying ideas always means reducing the value of each single idea. Cultivating a few ideas means believing in the possibility of creating meaningful, useful things for our species.
