Born Shouting

I enjoy a certain degree of irreverence to my superiors, keeps us all on our toes. I like this view of the class system from a character from the most recent work of one of my favourite authors…

Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being an inferior…

Choubris, Matter, Iain M. Banks

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To paraphrase Sly, who infamously never said ‘Don’t push me‘ in First Blood (he said ‘Don’t push it‘ in various ways)…

Don’t count me!

As a person in a generation that has so many numbers surrounding and defining us (NHS number, National Insurance number, bank account number, annual income amount, number of shares this and that bank …) I fear that those numbers begin to become me.

I feel I need to heed the warnings of those who came before…(here comes Tamkin again…)

The money. They make a killing by fantasy. Now, counting any number is always a sadistic activity. Like Hitting. In the bible, the Jews wouldn’t allow you to count them. They knew it was sadistic.

Dr Tamkin in ‘Seize the Day (Penguin Modern Classics)‘ by Saul Bellow.

“You are Number Six.”
“I am not a number — I am a free man!”

The Prisoner

Just heard the following quote on the Antiques Roadshow and have to say it strikes a chord…

Not What I Have But What I Do Is My Kingdom

The words were engraved on a box made by an old ladies’ mother in the early 1900’s with some connection to the suffragette movement. Wonderful…

I think that the concept of automation taking over routine tasks to the degree envisioned by Papanek in this piece is still a utopian dream (those children stitching footballs in Asia are still a long way from becoming designers) but the description of design as meaningful and crucial is one I wholly agree with.

I’ve hopefully tidied up some of Papanek’s tangled wording at the start of this quotation.

In a world in which [...] work [will] increasingly [...] be done through automation and in which most routine supervision, quality control, and computation are performed by word and data processors, the work of the design team (research, social planning, creative innovation) is one of the few meaningful and crucial activities left to man. Inescapably, designers will be needed to help set goals for all of society.

Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, Victor Papanek