Wisdom from Winnie the Pooh

Milne’s 'Winnie the Pooh' is very wise. My last post was a bit heavy so I thought I would share these pleasant quotations. I found most of these from a forgotten source. The first one I added and is my favorite, although I changed it slightly so it could be one sentence. I’m not a purist about such things.

1. “My favorite part of the day is when you and me become we.” (Winnie the Pooh to Christopher Robin)
2. ’’No one can be sad when they have a balloon!’’
3. ’’The things that make me different are the things that make me.’’
4. ’’If the person you are talking to does not appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in this ear.’’
5. Piglet: ’’How do you spell ’love’?’’ Pooh: ’’You don’t spell it...you feel it.’’
6. ’’You are braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.’’
7. ’’Sometimes the smallest things take the most room in your heart.’’
8. ’’Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.’’
9. ’’If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.’’
10. ’’As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was going to happen.’’
11. ’’A day spent with you is my favourite day. So today is my new favourite day.’’
12. ’’Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.’’
13. ’’Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.’’
14. ’’If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.’’
15. ’’I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.’’
16. ’’Promise me you’ll never forget me because if I thought you would, I’d never leave.’’
17. ’’A little consideration, a little thought for others, makes all the difference.’’
18. ’’Love is taking a few steps backward, maybe even more... to give way to the happiness of the person you love.’’

The Newer School

Industrial design as we know it has ended. Industrial design was the world of stylists who did important work in bringing art and emotion to product design. Now this is only one part of our profession. Maintaining a death grip on the cloistered world of colored markers and beautifully contrived ideation sketches diminishes the power of design.

Are we a profession that makes beautiful objet d’art with a principal aspiration to have curators of the Cooper-Hewitt and Vitra give us top billing in their ‘radical design’ exhibits? Or are we trying to make the world around us a more pleasant, joyful and wonderful place?  All the while earning money for our paying clients?

We are now a discipline that uses material science, engineering, psychology, ethnography, and data science with the same steady hand skills as compressed charcoal. The new generation of designers must reject one hundred ideation sketches as the benchmark for exploration. They must reject overwrought drawings that falsely project a progression from basic forms to finished product. This is old school.

The new school needs to execute designs that perform beautifully and embrace interdisciplinary collaboration with alacrity. We must make designs that don’t bleed a connoisseur’s watermark. Designs that surprise and instill wonder. Designs that satiate aesthetic needs, societal wants, and reflect an individual designer’s passion.

We live in a world of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, networked data and international communications. We must adjust radically while remembering our important legacy of creative exploration, visualization, communal work, critiques, and introspection.

In the new school of design, we need to richly engage emerging technology and sit at the feet of emerging industries. How many more toaster and desk lamp designs do we need? It is much more fun to develop attractive radii than read a paper on neural networks. But hard work and learning beyond the stylus is vital for professional designers.

Those who blend art and other disciplines advance evocative design expressions. They blend the sublime with the scream and the whimsical with the wonderful. There’s a lot more out there, let’s start exploring.