Expansive play

April 13, 2016

I try to be expansive whenever I’m going to make design choices. It’s probably because I’ve seen exploration open people’s lives to a multitude of possibilities and usually for the better. Yet I contemplate often how we bring new ideas forward when we have few and are ready to explore?

For me, there is a character that most items possess. When I want to elaborate or imagine a chair’s possibilities, or how the lampshade relates to the lamp or the shape of the room to the furniture placement; I put myself into a playful kind of mood. The best solutions are the easiest when I can do this. Remember the primarily and secondary colors in elementary school? If you want to know what is a complementary color, it’s across the chart, remember? It’s doing what you wouldn’t think to do, but instinctively you feel and sometimes using systems that work easily for you as the designer.

I often remember the story of Picasso keeping his writing implements under the bed. When he woke up in the night he had ideas he wanted to explore so he wanted his sketchpad or his miniature canvases right there. He was the vessel and the ideas flowed through him. To me, this is the way good ideas come….closer to the dream than the reality of what some people say: ‘This is the way it’s usually done.”