Last week I had the pleasure of listening to book designer Jenny Grigg at the recent AGideas forum in Melbourne. Lordy, what an excellent presentation. Jenny showcased her work on the Peter Carey wood-type and subsequent paper-cut series. A fantastic approach to the talk was that Jenny re-enacted her exact paper cutting process in a series of short films. These beautifully illustrated not only, the care and patience and attention to detail that was originally taken, but more strikingly, the pure creative brilliance of these final pieces. Yay Jenny.
And some scribbles from my notebook after 3 immersive days:
- Collaborate.
- Ideas – start stealing them.
- Cradle to cradle design – The creative collaborative power of designers can leave the planet better than how we found it.
- Quadruple bottom line design thinking – financial, environmental, social and cultural.
- Have conviction in your ideas, commit.
- Have fun.
- 3Ps Preparation, Possibility and Patience.
- Good ideas are scary, risky, expensive, outrageous, difficult and silly.
- When you can do virtually anything you don’t want to do it anymore.
- Teach.
- Inspire don't motivate.
- Listen to the end user, don’t believe them.
- We design experiences.
- When the storm comes, some people build walls, others build windmills.
- Play, share, explore.
- Fill yourself up with stuff and trust your brain to sort it out.
- What’s important is not what you control but what you can’t; room for chance.
- Explore – Comfort becomes laziness becomes mediocrity.
- With courage comes freedom.
- And from Book Artist and maker, Peter Lysiotis whose presentation I still remember from a few forums ago: making books is an antedate to our throwaway culture, pray for spillage, find something you love and let it kill you.
