Dwell Wins!
Congratulations to one of my favorite magazines - Dwell!
Dwell won the 2005 National Magazine Award for General Excellence in its circulation category.
Just so happens I was reading the April/May issue in bed last night and marked a page for a quote I wanted to share. The article is titled Live/Work and is a conversation with designer Bill Stumpf to evaluate five newly designed desks for the home (none of them his designs). Stumpf is an accomplished designer and an authority on workplace environments. Some designs of his - you may have heard of them - are Herman Miller’s Ergon, Equa and Aeron chairs. Commenting on a desk design he considers clean-lined but unoriginal Stumpf says,
“I believe in advancing the arts of daily living, and design should tag along behind that. I think the notion that all our nerve bundles are tied to our eyes is really stupid. I know the visual arts are an important thing, but to me design is a much more layered process. Things that look simple can have a depth to them that goes beyond one’s eyeballs”
There’s a there there I definitely agree with.
Keep up the good work Dwell!
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June 18th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
Great quote and insight. Stumpf’s view of design echoes that of George Nelson:
“He fought the prejudice of a population he termed “visual illiterates,” people who confused design with style, who hadn’t developed any critical visual faculty, who didn’t understand that the immediately apparent “look” of something was not design at all; that design was, to the contrary, an internal, necessary, and ineradicable logic inherent in the fabricated, synthetic world. Design, for Nelson, made the mind’s eye visible, tangible, comprehensible in the language of materials of the physical world.” http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm?contentalias=georgenelson
Great design seems to reveal itself gradually. You notice over time that carefully thought out objects outperform the merely visually pleasing. The right choice is hard to make at the time of buying, tho. Maybe that is reason enough to opt for time-tested classics.