As mature adults know, language matters.
The question is: c an you be
a designer wanting to create beautiful things, and ye t
use crude language
? Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think so.
I bring this up because of today’s talk by Richard Seymour at the Intersections Conference.
As reported by core77.com, Mr. Seymour urges that you “get the best design brains on the hardest problems–no more f***ing cruets for Italian luxury goods companies, get off your arse”, and that “if you’re not an optimistic futurist in design, f*** off and do things a lot less damaging”.
I’m not a professional designer — merely a chap trying to figure out how to design better products — so I had to look up who Richard Seymour is.
One site describes him and Dick Powell as “Europe’s best-known product design duo”. Great, so there are exceptions to every rule.
But I still think that you cannot think crude, talk crude, then design not-so-crude.
Or if you can, then at the very least you are making things more difficult for yourself.
Mr. Seymour aside, I have always wondered about the use of crude language by creative types such as painters, programmers, and architects.
If a creative type person cannot come up with a non-crude expression, is he really creative? Or this is a warning flag that perhaps he is not happy in the current job or caree
r?
Just wondering aloud…
The actor, Will Smith, agrees. It takes more intelligence and creativity to express your feelings without profanity. As a rapper, he never used profanity.