Obsessive. Delightful. Inspiring.
A mantra? An ethos? The work I aspire to create.
This is an evolving piece, created at #writeshopweds. It will change and evolve each Wednesday. Sorry it’s unfinished. It really falls apart towards the end and it pains me to publish this. Ah well, enjoy!
Obsessive
Regardless of how I feel about the work, I can always appreciate a work of art that required a substantial amount of time or detail to put together. Obsessive work consumes it’s creator. It pushes an idea or a concept to its limit.
My favourite obsessive work:
The obsessive work of Ai Wei Wei
Feltron Annual Report by Nicholas Feltron
The colourful obsessions of Maya Hayuk or Jen Stark
CUT maps of Toronto by Rebecca Thorpe
Recommendations from others (please add yours!)
Hans Obrist
My obsessive projects:
Ongoing: Park Planet City
A collage of tine planets, one from each of Toronto’s 1600+ parks.
Progress so far: 143/~1646
Incomplete: Radiohead stage
Illustrations of the various Radiohead stage set-ups for different songs. The same stage set-up that collapsed before their Toronto concert in 2012. Built and shared with the hopes of encouraging another Toronto performance from the band.
I share these publicly with the same purpose I share anything, to explore interest from my community to help guide which projects I’ll take to completion.
Delightful
Delightful work is far less tangible, and completely subjective. Every time I encounter something I am completely delighted by, I wonder if others would think the same. More often than not the answer is no. Finding work with broad delightful appeal has become a new obsession. Wasting time on imgur can be useful for finding which r/AdviceAnimal memes resonate well with their audience, and
Regardless, we need more unexpected, delightful encounters in our daily lives.
My favourite delightful work:
My delightful projects:
Inspiring
Perhaps the least tangible. I worry I include inspiration as a category simply to be a catch-all of the work I really like. It’s also the least-populated collection of the three. Perhaps this is because it’s the hardest type of work to attain? My biggest aspirations are to create work and communities that inspire those that experience them.
Inspiration also plays a large role in my experience as a non-profit designer. I’ve spent my entire professional life with limited budgets and resources, but a constant need to reach the maximum amount of people. This has made me extremely critical of anything I produce (and anything that any charity puts out), creating an extremely high bar for anything that deserves the resources that were spent putting it together.
My favourite inspiring work:
My inspiring projects:
