This Guy, Mr. Pye, He Knows His Stuff

Our inspirational reading for this project was by the late and great, David Pye. Pye was a professor of furniture design at Royal College of Art starting in 1948 through 1974. Our reading was from his 1978 acclaimed book, The Nature and Aestetics of Design.

Here are some quick notes that I gained from his words along with my witty analyses:

According to Pye, there are two kinds of limitations in this world:
  1. Limitations set by the unwillingness to incur work (in essence, you're bad because you're lazy)
  2. Limitations set by the inability as workmen on the other (we don't have the knowledge or tools to produce what we've thought up in our head)

"The sense of beauty and art is a sense of close repport with our environment and our sense of that intimacy with it." So in those terms, how we determine what is beautiful has a lot to do with our connection with nature. Understanding natural beauty (like the purple spring buds on the trees here on campus) helps us identify what is beautiful in man-made objects as well as art.

"The aim of design is to promote human happiness." Why yes hello, my name is Katie Whiteman, I'm majoring in graphic design, with a minor in optimism.

Before tackling a design discussion, we need to distinguish our needs from our wants. Why take the time to design something that we don't really need. We need to create objects that contain solutions to big problems. We already have way too much stuff in this world. Why waste our time creating more "stuff"?

Each generation makes a large contribution to the environment in which the next will grow up. Show Mother Earth some respect, we all know she deserves it.

"Crisis or not, while there is life, there is hope. And as long as there is hope, there will be art." I know a lot of hopeful artists out there (me included). We have dreams for the future. Big dreams and Pye sure knew what he was talking about. We're going to make this world a better place; for ourselves, our world, and for the future generations. Watch out, we're about to do some remarkable things.