VBAT MeetMarket presents:
#AskSagmeister
On the 22nd of May, VBAT Meet Market organised a Q&A session at What Design Can Do in Amsterdam together with design legend Stefan Sagmeister.
The theme of the session: Urban Issues. Running up to the actual interview there were multiple initiatives to collect crowdsourced questions.
By asking the audience to share their thoughts with us through Facebook and Twitter by using #AskSagmeister, we were able to collect a diverse range of interview questions.
Before the event took place, we made sure to dedicate our weekly blog to the topic of Urban Issues in Amsterdam. Explaining what Urban Issues are was very necessary. It turned out to be a broad topic that confuses a lot of people, making it a hard issue to tackle. In the blog post, you can find different solutions to current Urban Issues throughout the world.
And asked our office in Mexico City for a guest post on how it is to actually live in a megacity:
Presenting the event under VBAT Meet Market was important to us, and made it possible to connect to Design students from all over the country. We organised lecture sessions to explain what we do at VBAT and gave them the chance to ask a question to Stefan Sagmeister by recording a video with their question.
The best video received a ticket to What Design Can Do on Friday the 22nd May that included a guest list spot for our interview with Stefan Sagmeister.
The interview took place in De Balie. A lovely cinema venue with the charming vintage looks of Old Amsterdam. Combining the old looks with new technology was important for the interview to succeed. Projecting a live twitter feed to the sides of the venue made it possible to interact with people.
Sold out
And then the day of the event appeared. On the 22nd of May, the available tickets got quickly sold out. The sign-up forms started coming in with questions for Sagmeister, together with an option to do a Portfolio Review at VBAT on a later date. In return, the attendees received the limited edition Designer Aid Kit to kick-off all their future endeavors.
The presentation was based on creating opportunities for the attendees to ask questions, questions through #asksagmeister and by inviting people who have already started initiatives around Urban Issues to come to the session and ask their questions live.
Kick-Off
With a full house filled with design students, clients and design enthusiasts, our lovely agency friend Ron Bunzl started the event by explaining Urban Issues. What are they? What influence do they have on our future?
Right after he introduced Graham Sturt, VBAT’s Creative Director, and Stefan Sagmeister to the stage and kicked off the interview in a wonderful way.
We didn’t think it was necessary — But just to be sure, we made an introductory video about the work Stefan Sagmeister has been doing up until now:
After the introductory question Stefan wanted to make something clear — “I’m an Austrian Graphic Designer, so everything I have to say about Urban Issues take it with a grain of salt cause I am not an Architect or Urban planner, so I’m looking at that issue probably from the same point of view as many of you in the audience do, as somebody who lives in an urban space and here and there we’ve done a project that dealt with that but in general, my world comes from Graphics.”
But what he does know about Urban Issues comes from the side of his work where he needs to travel to a lot of Megacities:
“Jakarta, Mumbai & Mexico City have massive problems of inequality. Living in the US, I always thought that the US was the most un-equal country in the world.
What I learned in Mumbai was that part of the housing problem is a gigantic housing problem (…) If you want to move to Mumbai the apartments are actually more expensive than in Manhatten and that is apparently, very counter-intuitively, much driven by an incredibly rigid rent-freeze scheme.
There is a rent control that is so ridged in Mumbai, where a lot of people live in houses that they paid a dollar or 50 cents rent a month for 30 years, and that the landlords of these houses with that little rent income can not fix them up.
The renters would never move out because with that little rent they cannot even think of any equivalent and therefore you have vast parts of Mumbai literally deteriorating to that point, where I did read one Nobel Prize winning economists view on that, who wrote that the easiest way to really ruin a city is extremely stiff rent control.
His opinion was that you can ruin a city much more effectively than if you bomb it, with an extremely ridged rent control and I think that in Mumbai that’s definitely the proof of that theory.”
Time for an audience question
Stefan Sagmeister’s answer was very clear. You have to prepare when starting your own business and listen to advice from the more experienced network around you.
The wonderful city of Amsterdam
Stefan talks about the differences between living in Europe and the U.S.
Graham: “What’s your experience of being a New York Citizen and what changes have you seen over the last decades in terms of Urban Issues? — “I first came to NY in 1981, just after high school and then I moved there in ‘86, because I loved it there so much in ’81 and it was a very different place to what it is now.
I used to live on Clinton Street in Lower East Side, we had a gigantic Heroin Market on our block, where the various brand names of Heroin were shouted out loud all night long, so like the entire night was like: “Roadrunner, roadrunner, roadrunner.”
The cops didn’t do anything, or when you looked out of the window you saw these mostly 60, 70 drug dealers suddenly all disperse, you knew that in 5 minutes the cops were gonna come, so they all were informed about any wave that was happening.
That got transformed into a totally different space. Right now, I would say that in ’86 when you heard something happened to a friend, you knew the friend got mugged or assaulted or raped.
Right now if something happened to a friend, I know that friend was in a bicycle accident. That is clearly the most dangerous thing that can happen to you right now.
It’s actually strange, because I think that the bodily harm that my friends now have from bicycle accidents is more significant and more serious than the bodily harm that happened to them in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s from muggings and assaults.
In New York, unlike here, the bicycle culture is only about 5 or 10 years old. So there needs to be some adjusting. Like cars are not used to having that many bikes around, there are bike lanes in place, but they are not as massively and continuously as here, and so forth.
But I think that a good Urban Issue was at one time formulated by our previous mayor by Michael Bloomberg, who said: “Right after 9/11 I was in a taxi and he was on the radio and the interviewer asked him in the Billionaire Businessman what he’s gonna do to make sure that businesses remain in New York after 9/11, and he said nothing.
‘I’m not giving a shit. I will do nothing to keep any business here’, which caused some surprise by the interviewer and Bloomberg said; ‘The only issue he had as a mayor, is to make NYC the most livable city he can. And if he can do that then the companies won’t be able to afford not to be there because the employees would force them to remain in New York City.’
That’s exactly what happened. Exactly. It was a pro forma Republican, no Democrat who would have ever dared to say such a thing. But it’s literally what happened. +
That stupid Suisse bank, UBS, they actually did move out of the city and moved to White Plains, New York, and they had to come back with their tail between their legs because nobody wanted to work for them. Like all the really good talent, nobody wanted to move to White Plains.
So, basically after relocating their 1.000's of people up there, they actually came back to Manhattan because it just didn’t work. And I think that that thinking is really true if it’s a place where you would want to be, than anything else basically falls into place.”
What about Amsterdam?
Sagmeister: “From the outside, I mean I’ve never lived here and but I’ve come here extensively as a visitor and I’m very aware of the differences between the visitorship and staying somewhere. I mean I loved Berlin as a visitor and when I moved there I hated it, but as a visitor I think it is an extremely successful place and on my mind from a visitors point of view Amsterdam would be in my top #5 favorite cities in the world.
“Obviously they both have red and black logos on white background, one clearly being influenced by the other. I actually like both design companies and I actually do think I walked by the Rijksmuseum yesterday and I saw tourists taking foto’s of the giant type that’s in front of the museum.
That’s definitely an achievement for a fairly new brand that you are developing.
Apart from that, they have a couple of things in common, I think that Amsterdam is much more, more than any other place in Europe, a welcoming place to foreigners, so let’s say much more than Paris or London, and I feel that is very similar to New York.
I’ve been there now 25 years and I’ve not had a single case where I felt that I didn’t get a job or I didn’t get a meeting or I wasn’t invited on the count of the fact that I have an accent — and I have an accent.
Apart of that, of course there’s a big difference in scale, there’s a big difference in density but probably the second biggest thing that Amsterdam and New York have in common is that Amsterdam obviously is a bike-able and very walkable city.
By walkable I mean that if you take a walk it’s actually interesting. Like the things that you see, that you encounter, are exciting or delightful or make you do another walk. Berlin is not like that.
Berlin is boring because so many places that you walk by are just apartments and houses where nothing is happening. I walked to a record store yesterday (…) and it was extremely delightful.
I am sure that many of the people who live here will see this quite differently. And I am not really bothered by the drunken hoards of Brits who invade you every July and August.
What do you think will be the biggest issues facing city dwellers in the future? — “I think it’s non-spaces. I think for such a long time, for the last 100 years, there’s this whole idea of concentrating on functionalism, so many of the spaces that have been built in the last 80 years are really built with only one thing in mind; with function and under complete negation of other things like beauty or joy. +
I think we heard a fantastic talk yesterday by Michael (editor’s note: Michael Johnson), who talked about the dignity that this female stonemason would get out of building the hospital. That’s the dignified work as a builder but of course it would also be a completely different thing for the people who would be in there.
And I think we see a complete shift on that in the avantgarde of buildings, like for example two friends of mine, Liz Diller and Rick Scofidio were the architects of the High Line in New York, which some of might have heard of. It became a quite famous urban development, it’s a refurbishment of an old train track that is hilariously successful on all fronts.”
“Both money-wise it generated billions and billions of dollars and investments around it because people wanted to live close-by, but the most surprising fact of the High Line I found, is that it’s now been five and a half years in operation and millions and millions of people visited it and the police that surround the High Line have not had a single incident of a criminal act in since the existence of the High Line.
Isn’t that amazing? And that must have something to do with the love and the care that it has been designed. And I think the forces at hand or at work are exactly the same as the ones that are in work at the hospital that Michael was talking about or the things that Cameron (Cameron Sinclaire) was talking about.
And I’ve been thinking that for the longest time, because an Austrian, a German and a Suisse guy (I’m talking Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier) had this idea that it’s all about functionalism, that that’s what we’re about.
Sort of like investing our brains in all architecture schools around the world, and I think some of these ideas were very failable and very excusable in 1920.
By now they are just revealed as utter stupidity and you know if you say something against Mies now, you’re still left out of any room that is from architects, because they still think he’s God.
Well, if you go to the Bauhaus archive, there is a letter from Mies to Hitler offering his services, so morally.. Corbusier worked for the Vichy government, Loos, his grave was just taken away by the Viennese government because he fucked 12-year-olds.
So morally, these guys are very questionable, but I would say that many of them had really good ideas for that time. But we’ve had them for 100 years and that sort of functionalism, specifically the second and third generation that was influenced by them, who transformed their whole idea.
Because, of course, Adolf Loos was very much about beauty also, but transformed those ideas into an economic functionalism that then in the 50's built these giant swaps of social housing. +
Get as many people as efficiently housed and many of them 10 or 15 years later had to be dynamited, because the one thing they didn’t do was functioning.
And I think that this sort of thinking will probably have to be completely rethought. There are so many spaces, and it’s not just in the United Stated but in all the states. There are just vast spaces that are none spaces. You can look up and down and nothing that you see has been considered with human wellbeing in mind.
And these are spaces where it’s not worthwhile to live in. They create social problems, as we’ve seen in Baltimore, they are not fit for human living. And I think that one of the reasons that you have –and it’s connected — one of the reasons that you have mass tourism, that you have these people who live in shitty spaces, all wanna come to Amsterdam and to Venice and to Florence is, I think — this is my own theory so it’s unproven — but I think is the desire for beauty.
If their own spaces actually would be gorgeous, they might have less of a desire to flock to these little points of beauty. And, of course, the problem with that is that they diminish the beauty of these spaces.
If you go in August to Venice you still see the beauty but it’s definitely less serious by all the ‘Day Glow’ t-shirts that stay in front of the altar in St Marco.”
Question Babette Porcelijn
How do you think design can help to communicate about sustainability here with people in Amsterdam?
What we find difficult is that the reward of sustainability which is far ahead of us. It’s not instantly rewarding. It’s quite a heavy subject and people tend to turn away from it. So how would you as a designer tackle this problem? How would you make people feel the urgency of having a sustainable lifestyle?
Sagmeister: “I think it’s complex and difficult. My guess would be that I would try a two prompt approach. Both a reward and a punishment. I know that very recently there has been a very good study on what makes people stop smoking and they’ve had 500 people in a group which were rewarded and 500 people in a group that was punished, and then they had 500 people in a group that had some sort of mixture and the mixture seemed to have worked best.
Now what the reward and what the punishment would be, of course, has to be designed very specifically and very much on one level of information. From an international comparison point of view, my guess would be that the people in Amsterdam know already a lot about sustainability or know already a lot about the importance of it.
I guess — I know Germany much better and I’m Austrian — I know that the information levels in Germany are much, much higher than in the United States. And coming to think of it, I know that in Austria it’s also a mixture.
So for example my niece has just exchanged all the windows of the house against quadruple glass which are super energy efficient extreme windows, and 80% of these windows were paid for by the Austrian government, because they were in ‘that and that street’ and there’s a program that says; if you go super energy efficient, you only pay 20% of that window.
But you own the window, of course, so you’re upping the value of your house significantly, but you only pay 20%. And then of course there is punishment if you don’t put your glass in the correct container. So that would be my guess, the two front approach. Because my guess would be that stopping smoking and stopping wasting energy are sort of in the similar mindset.
If you Google the ‘Secret Story’, it’s very recent, if you Google the New York Times, studies, secret, stopping smoking, it’s in there and it seemed very authoritative.
We’ve been doing this movie on happiness and I found that I can find a study to pretty much prove pretty much anything that I want.
So any theory that I can come up with, if I look long and hard enough, I will find a study that supports that theory and I also found that among proper scientists there is a big differentiation made among studies that they believe in and studies that they don’t.
Some of it has to do with brand names, brand name scientists, brand name universities, so it’s a bit of a tricky way but this one’s seem to be proper.”
Graham: “You just talked about functionalism and how it’s time for it to die, do you have any other ism that might take over?”
Sagmeister: “ — Beauty. And I have to qualify that, I of course don’t think that functionalism should be replaced, but I really think it should be augmented.
I think that most of the things that we do, that we go after in life with a design strategy, seems to be complex and I found it through my own experience to be a mistake to use only one strategy to go behind a complex issue.
I’ve learned that from my own thing with happiness, I’ll talk about the whole thing a little later on, where I found that when I thought that I could train my mind in the same way as I could train my body and really basically pursue happiness directly, it worked punctuality in a particular strategy, but ultimately I think that, that pursuit — and it’s really like basically to increase my well-being in life — is a set of very complex issues that ‘s not pursuable with a single strategy.
It even would be the same as if I now say; let’s replace functionalism with beauty, I was joking, I didn’t mean that. The nice thing is that with beauty we have historical records, let’s say the 19th century was obsessed with beauty that so much of the Art of the 19th century is all about beauty and I recently went to the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, which is a museum that is dedicated to the 19th century, and I was sort of surprised by how much I did not like the work in it, considering how interested I am in beauty, specifically in human-made beauty.
My explanation for it is, that the artists of the 19th century went so directly after beauty, that what they wound up with is kitsch. They didn’t really reach beauty in the same way that the architects in the 50's that only went after functionalism, wound up with stuff that doesn’t work.
In the same way maybe when I went after happiness became deeply unhappy. So I think that these issues are complex, even when they are much simpler they’re complex and I’m also surprised, when I came here apparently AirBNB is a big problem in Amsterdam, where everybody rents out their apartments and now goes to Utrecht for the weekend and you have places populated by tourists that never were populated by tourists, because they were populated by people who live here.
The founder of AirBNB was a classmate of Jessica, my partner and I can guarantee you that he would have never envisioned that. That his idea, his college dorm idea to make space for people who go to a concert, would wind up being an Urban Problem of mass tourism in Amsterdam.
It’s just amazing, in a similar way that the Wright brothers couldn’t quite foresee airline membership clubs. These things developed, and these are pretty specified systems, so the bigger issues are completely unforeseeable.”
About The Bubble Project
Sagmeister: “Basically he (Ji Lee) printed 500.000 speech bubbles in different sizes and he and his friends put them all over ads that were all over New York City and other cities, and very amazingly, were filled in by passersby.
I would have thought before he did it, that most people write just whatever, like ‘Fuck Bush’ or equally inconsequential things, but some of the writing was absolutely fantastic and I do think it’s one of those projects where ultimately everybody went. Like Ji get’s to do his project, the public gets ads that are somewhat more interesting.
The advertisers get people actually to look at their ads because they’ve been interacted with from the public. It was a very successful project, a very smart man.”
Graham: “How can we use design to make city living a happier experience?
— “I think that literally everybody can contribute because obviously you live in a place like Amsterdam, your shoes, your ipad, your chair, this floor, this building, this street, this district and then the entire city including all of nature has been designed by someone and there is zero nature around in Amsterdam, it’s all been designed.
So you can very easily argue that all this design has about the same impact on us as nature would have on someone who lives in the forest in Papua-Guinea.
Having lived for 2 months in Rome last summer; if you compare how those two months went, to if I would have moved to two months to Des Moins, Iowa (not one of my favorite places on Earth), there is a significant difference there.
It’s a significant difference how I feel, how I am touched by my environment. And I mean in Rome, out of the 2.000 years that it’s old, probably 600 years of it, it was the leading city of the world, attracting the best of the best, who would work there and you see it.
And with Italian culture being there for these years that we were in charge, completely geared towards beauty, it has an effect on you. We go back to the mass tourism issue.
There is a reason why you have this problem and Des Moins, Iowa has none of those problems. Zero. There is no tourism in Des Moins, Iowa.”
Question from the public:
“Well, I myself am of that generation who loves longer stories. I read long articles in the New York Times and I do read the New Yorker, like I am more attracted there even those are often too short for me. So I very much prefer long things to short things in general. +
I much more read a novel than a collection of short stories. I think that I find a similar situation towards a direction for longness among designers who work for us and because my business partner Jessica is only 28, we have a very young group of designers also working with us and let’s say, if I look at short versus long in film, the tendency seems to be it goes towards long.
Like, I am not sure if you have that in Europe but in the States there is an incredible rise of the quality TV series, like people watching binges over a weekend the whole season and where you see people who were involved in movies switch towards TV, because they get more freedom and they can do better work, and I would say if I look at the Soprano’s it would be difficult for me to find many films of that kind of quality so it seems that in the moving picture sense there is a tendency towards the longer form.
My guess would be that, because it’s not only the newspapers that are going down, it’s also the TV news that are going down, my guess would be that at least from what I can observe among the designers who work with us, is that, that generation is less politically interested and not always in a bad way.
I’ve heard, and I’ve actually heard that from a young Dutch designer who said that the days for being against things are over and I think that it was meant as a critique of my generation of this love of critical thinking which sometimes — I was surprised that Cameron (Sinclair) put that on the thing very much, like his first question everything.
That’s one of the areas where I totally agree with Cameron. I think that questioning everything; the fear of being naïve is completely overvalued. I think naiveté would be an incredibly healthy way to be, that my generation is far too cynical, far too questioning, specifically like when I was in Art school, critical thinking was seen as the highest form of thinking, that’s when we aspired to the best.
I found that critical thinking is the stupidest kind of thinking. Like basically to sit somewhere and to say; ‘This politician is an idiot and this piece of design is shit’, that’s the easiest. And I can see it in meetings. The people always like to see the problem, they are always the idiots, they are always the most stupidest people in the meeting.
The people who actually say; ‘Yes, and couldn’t we do this’, that’s a much more sophisticated way of moving forward. Like you can actually make a suggestion.
And my feeling is that among young designers there is a discontent with my generation, with their emphasis on being involved politically and a fairly deliberate compelling out of there and seeing a circumvention like these involvements politically, and an involvement that probably goes more indirect and less through direct politics and more through other human interaction, which might be through social media, which might be through meet-ups.
And I don’t see, like neither my students nor the people who work with us, that they are any less engaged than we are, than we were. Actually almost the opposite.
I’ve recently had the pleasure of spending two days with a guy called Perry Chan, who’s one of the founders of Kickstarter, who I think is 29, and my God, I’ve never met anybody that intelligent and that smart and that wise.
Definitely when I was 29 I was not like that, I remember that much, and I didn’t know anybody who was like that, who created a serious impactful business, refuses to sell it, even though he could make millions and millions of dollars, becomes an artist instead and lets the business grow and move it at the same time. Incredible wisdom on the shoulders of someone who has only been on this earth for 29 years. Amazing for me.
I had breakfast today with a young designer from Holland, unbelievably smart. A pity she’s not here, it would be interesting to ask her talk if she actually reads the newspaper. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t, but I would also say it doesn’t matter.”
Solutions to Urban Issues:
Talking about his great pieces of work:
“Obsessions make my life worst and my work better” in Amsterdam.
“Well this is our only Amsterdam project. This was initiated by the city, the budget was 6.500 euro’s, so we got 650.000 euro coins from the Dutch Central Bank, and they nicely could give us three different types, so they gave us brand-new ones, medium used ones and fairly old ones, so we had three different color variations, and it was clear on what space we would get this, so there’s this new apartment buildings on the left, on the top and at the bottom and on the right, 7 stories high, and we used the grid of the stones that was existing there with a hundred volunteers to carefully lay out the different coins.
I think you can read it, it says ‘Obsessions make my life wors eand my work better’. It took us a week with the hundred volunteers to put it up and the idea was; We had sprayed them all in a very particular electric blue on the other side, so that we could track them as they would disperse all over Europe, obviously the coins you can use in every country, we could track them down and we had a website built up that was allowing the tracking and of course with the reason we made it pretty was that a viewer would have to make the decision. +
Would they want to keep the piece intact or do they want to take as much money as they can? It was on purpose unguarded and so what happened was, as soon as it was done, a guy came with two plastic bags to take away as many coins as he could, and then one of the neighbors who had seen us building it up got very upset about it that this guy would just take the money and she called the police.
And then Amsterdam Police in all their wisdom like came, saw this piece, said well this clearly is a piece of art and it needs saving, so they swept it all up and took the coins under protection in the police headquarters. So the whole piece literally lasted for like 4 or 5 hours and there was no tracking on any website necessary afterwards.”
Talking about ‘Unloved Spaces’ — Basically it’s an under path of the Brooklyn-Queens expressway in Dumbo in Brooklyn, in a now fairly dense fairly good, formerly very bad area.
The improvementdistrict there knew that the under path was always full of people peeing in there and they asked us to do something very cheap, in this case it was a 5.000 Dollar budget. So it was clear we couldn’t do all that much with the 5.000 dollars, but we said ‘let’s just paint it’. +
And because there is car traffic, there is bike traffic and there is foot traffic. So on one side we painted ‘Yes’ in a very elaborate squid kind of way, and on the other side we painted ‘Yes’ just in black and white, so that the cars would see a yes, that the bikes would see a yes and then the foot traffic would see a more elaborate yes.
But the idea is not bigger than the ‘Yes’, I would say. The grandmother of this project would definitely be Yoko Ono, I am not sure if you know her ‘Yes’ story. Does everybody know it? Otherwise, I’ll tell it.
There is a story, I am not 100% sure if it’s true, but definitely the story is the way John Lennon met Yoko Ono was that he went into a gallery and in the gallery there was a ladder and he went up that ladder and on the ceiling there was a little box and he opened that box and inside the box it said ‘Yes’.
And that made him feel so great that he asked the gallerist; ‘Who is that artist, who did that?’ and then she introduced him to Yoko and John said in an interview that if it would have said ‘No’ he would have never wanted to meet the artist.
So it’s basically just a positive message, but what happened is that I have now received many, many, many photos of people who are getting married in the under path of the BQE because it says ‘Yes’ big on the side. So, literally, the 5.000 dollars worth of paint transformed this from a pissoir into a wedding site.
We are obviously very happy about that. Oh, and even better for us, it turned out that the people who gave the development guys the money, the 5.000 dollars for us to do this, was a big Brooklyn developer who was very, very smart and they recently contacted us for a giant job that pays much more than 5.000 dollars and has nothing to do with this.
It’s basically a much more straight forward real estate promotional project but they were ultimately persuaded by how successful the transformation was of this thing.
I think what’s happening most of the time, if you do something that’s actually successful for the community; the success always comes back to you. That seems to be how things work, like that ultimately it’s our own advantage again. Even though clearly on this project, if I count the hours we lost quite a little bit of money on it, and we thought just it doesn’t matter, it’s worthwhile to do, but ultimately it all falls back on us again.”
Question from the audience:
“You said that functionalism does not work, but you sort of implied that beauty does work, and I was wondering if you have any theory about what makes something beautiful.”
Sagmeister: “I think there is a surprising consensus in what is beautiful. I myself am mostly interested in man-made beauty. There is a whole world out there of natural beauty, and I find man-made just more interesting because we can actually do something about it and I’m normally more impressedby it.
I’ll give you an example, let’s say I have a nice view from my roof where I live in New York City, and I look out from my roof over the Manhattan Skyline and get the same feeling of awe and wonder, not all the time but here and there, that I get when I look out over the Alpes.
And that is amazing, considering we made it. And we made it in 300 years. You know the Alpes, it took them 300 Million years to make it. So I am concentrating on man-made beauty and it seems that it’s surprising that we actually think very similar about it, and the reason I know that is because of research.
There is very little good research out there, it’s not only in Design and in Art that beauty kind of has fallen off the table as a piece of interest and discussion. Apparently the same thing is true in science. There is an institute for aesthetics and psychology that actually is headed by an Austrian guy and I talked to him, Helmut Leder, who says there’s very little good research.
But one of the guys I talked to,who I actually met in Holland, is a scientist from the UK, who took one of the pre-eminent Dutch artists, Mondrian, and basically played with it. I was at a conference, he was nice enough to give me his slides and I will use them in talks in the future.
He basically took three of the more unknown Mondrians, the more classic ones with the black stripes and the red and yellow and blue fields and faked it, just moved the lines a little bit, made the space a little bit bigger and a bit smaller and he always shows them both to an audience and says; ‘Which is the Mondrian, which is the real, which is the fake?’.
Eighty to ninety percent ofthe audience realizes which is the real Mondrian although none of them has seen the real Mondrian before, because they are not the ones that hang at the Stedelijk. And I of course thought; well it must be the Golden Means. +
Probaly Mondrian worked with the Golden Means, he is so accustomed to the Golden Means that we find this more beautiful than the other, but Mondrian did not work with the Golden Means.
We do know that he worked extremely hard to getting them right, we can now make X-Rays and you see that he moved the lines around quite a lot before he settled on his final compositions.
And apparently we agreed, and this is non-art like, I’ve done it on front of teachers, I’ve done it recently in front of a bunch of real estate sellers in Austria, 90 percent gets it. So it seems there is agreement on what is beautiful, even in abstract art.
If you look at surveys, let’s say, which is the most beautiful city, 100% agreement on Paris, not true, not 100% but it’s a very clear number 1 and it’s Paris, which by the way is the same city that Corbusier wanted to completely bulldoze and replace it with his own things.
For example in our own work, the reason that I got interested in beauty, because I used to be utterly uninterested in beauty, I didn’t hate it, it was just not of my concern. It was really only the experience that I found, that when we excellently made something look good, it seemed to work much better.
This is now in communications, as far as design, graphics, etcetera, all this worked much better to the point that we now really, really take that seriously and our stuff works much better since we do it. And we find it unbelievably difficult to find young designers that can make things look good because Art schools don’t teach it.
It’s all about concepts and good ideas, and almost nothing about the formal qualities. And it’s very interesting to me that Dutch Design always used to be heavily formal, specifically Dutch Graphic Design.
That basically was strange, you know, the strength of the form and the UK was almost heavily idea-based, conception-based, and Dutch, specifically that generation like Karel Martens and so on, were really heavy in form giving.
I went to the Stedelijk yesterday and it’s all this bullshit quotes on the wall, completely without form. So it’s interesting to see that just when I get really interested in form, Dutch design seems to be moving away from that.Who knows, but maybe I am completely wrong and the Stedelijk was just an exception.”
Question a St. Joost student, Wesley: How can I make it clear that young designers should take astand in society? —
“I don’t think there is a specific responsibility for designers to be involved in social issues, that exceeds that of other professions. What I do think is that, what it means to be human and what it means to live a full live, is also to be involved in something that’s bigger than human.
So I think even from a very selfish point of view, if I myself look at my life I should be involved in my friends and family and have good connections there, I should be involved in my job and with myself and find a good relationship there, but then I also should be involved in something that’s larger than me.
And I think for many people that could be religion, and most surveys show that religious people tend to be happier than non-religious people. It stams from that, because they are involved in something, that’s just bigger than themselves.
And for non-religious people I think that often it’s just some bigger sort of issue, be it sustainability or be it whatever. And it can be social issues that I agree with, and social issues that I completely don’t agree with.”
Wrap-Up
In the end, we didn’t get the chance to answer to the questions from Twitter but we like to take this opportunity to thank you for your unlimited enthusiasm and wonderful input to our session at What Design Can Do.
Here’s a list of the best questions we’ve seen on #AskSagmeister:
Overview WDCD
Of course, we had our colleagues attending the rest of What Design Can Do as well. Here’s a complete overview of the experience of our Creative Intern: Laura Voet.
Complete video — Don’t want to miss one bit of the actual interview? View the complete video here:
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