What It Takes To Know: My Manifesto.

The term manifesto is simply defined as: a declaration of ones intentions.

What our intentions are is often governed by the beliefs and values that we already have established and pursue in our daily lives. Where do these beliefs and values come from? From things we know, what we've been taught, and how we feel.

All design, in my opinion, stems from these things and in an ever moving world, the ability to be completely and totally original has become somewhat obsolete. However, I think it is extremely important in the design process to take and apply what you already know into what you are producing. As Nigel Cross states in his, Designerly Ways of Knowing, that, "the natural intelligence in design that is possessed by good designers, in fact to some extent is possessed by all of us."

Aside from what we know, we must then understand or at least make an attempt to understand a sensible process from which the ideas go from our brain into the physical world. This can only be done, no matter what anyone tells you, through trial and error. A designer must be willing to accept failure, multiple, multiple failures before that ray of light seems to crack through the clouds of the hurricane. We learn as we go and understand more about the task at hand as it begins to unfold before us. Richard Cormac, an architect, understood this when he stated:

I don't think you can design anything just by absorbing information and then hoping to synthesise it into a solution. What you need to know about the problem only becomes apparent as you're trying to solve it.

So you see, it's quite simple but extraordinarily complicated simultaneously. It is a matter of learning how to weild the rope that will allow you to lasso an idea out of the sky, bring it down to earth, and make it something real, tangible. As a designer you have to understand that you will not catch the unruly idea the first time, maybe not even the second or third but that if you believe in yourself and your work, great things are bound to happen.