Leonardo Da Vinci: Design Maven part 2

Perspective, as we have discovered, seems to include and exude an essence of allowing the sense of the facts or truth to be evident in our lives. As we are willing to look at the facts of something, then in a sense things are not personal because facts do not center in personal opinions or concepts or ideas, facts are well, facts…interesting. 

A book is a book, a desk is a desk, etc., these are facts that let us see without it being personal. When we include the fact that the book was handed down from our mother and that it was written by her mother then one could possibly have an attachment to that so that now the value of this book has changed in our mind and in fact our heart!

What the description here is alluding to is that by looking deeper into those ordinary things in our daily lives we seem to begin to realize that there are elements that actually shift the way we see things. It is of course what makes life interesting because as our ideas and concepts change so do the things around us! If we are happy guess what? If we are sad, guess what?

So Leonardo, I sense, had a perspective on his work and his life in a way that he was extremely interested and had a passion to discover how things were put together, in essence how was life formed, and in his search he was willing and needed to forego a lot of what was the conceptual and abiding ideas of the time.  Most of which ideas were promulgated by the church and its views at the time, and more than likely because it desired the influence over people’s lives so that it could build an empire of its own making.

Hmmm. This sounds a bit like today’s world! So, how is it that we can begin to see more clearly, or in other terms, to begin to put together the interrelated elements that are working at this time so that the answers to certain questions can come for us to solve our design questions, or in fact our life questions if we want to move in that direction?

What questions did Leonardo want to find answers to? What questions do we want to find answers to?

Stay tuned, I do believe that we are still attempting to discover something more about design!

The Luring of Leonardo Da Vinci: ADHD Syndrome or Design Maven?

One of the things about Leonard DaVinci was that while he was a great painter, he was also an architect, a civil engineer, an astrologer, geologist, zoologist, an evolutionary biologist and a paleontologist just to name a few of his many talents! (http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/vinci.html)

How could one person move so fluidly between so many genres of Design?

What did he know that we do not? Or was he just an anomaly, a forerunner of the first marks of an ADHD, taken in with this or that muse and n’er completing a one?

By today’s standards, here was a candidate for the label known as ADHD or Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  His forays into the unknown were vast and quick, with little time for what we might call a full thesis today...and well OK, according to the real definition of ADHD he would not fit the overall description, but he did leave in his short lifespan of 67 years a lot of unfinished work. Wonder why!

What are the connecting factors that allow someone to not just study a group of intensely deep and complicated subjects but come to a point of discovering, as in some cases, what would not be able to be understood for several hundreds of years? Do we yet understand the implications of what he brought to the world?

This was a gifted and talented man who seemingly had to center on something more than just one aspect of design. One could reasonably gather that his motivation was to discover something more about the Design of the Whole in his passionate pursuit in lieu of being entertained by just a slice of it.

Sometimes in the seeking of an answer we come to a realization of a method of questioning, an approach you might say that begins to serve us in how to uncover a particular truth about something.

One idea is that with a certain amount of perspective one can begin to see certain things a bit more clearly, as when, after a certain point in time, we might realize something that we said set the seed for another event or a sequence of events. We can look back in our lives and  relate, how because we took one step, other steps followed.

I took the opportunity to look up perspective in the dictionary, and it has a number of definitions, but two of which that pertain to our interest in this discussion are:

A: the state of one's ideas, the facts known to one, etc., in having a meaningful interrelationship: You have to live here a few years to see local conditions in perspective.

B. the faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship: Your data is admirably detailed but it lacks perspective.

The state of one’s ideas and the facts known to one brings to mind a sense of centering on what one actually knows, not one’s opinion of something, or what another one thinks but the taking of an inventory of what is known to one. Facts are another way of thinking about truth not imagination.

How helpful would it be to have the ability to see relevant data in a meaningful relationship if we were to study any genre of design? This sounds to me like it would be a useful tool!

Interesting to note here is that sometimes we think that experience gives us perspective and sometimes one could say that is true, though it is not necessary to have gained experience to have a perspective. By definition it is the faculty or ability to see, to have a vista, the basis of which is in fact independent of experience.

Wow, I wonder what Leonardo’s perspective would be of today’s world?  Stay tuned!

The Mystery of Design. How did Michelangelo do it?

A wonderful and fascinating teacher once said, That to allow a form to come into being as Michelangelo, would be true craft and true creation. 

Maybe it would be, and maybe not! How would we know?  Why don’t we investigate those words a bit and look to see if we can discover something more?

If we were to explore the richness of the essence of what he produced we would see the evidence of a man who was moved to understand the medium of marble, the elegance of the form of the human body and to create a prodigious sensitivity to the individual parts that make up the whole.

How did Michelangelo work?  Is it not said that that he saw the design from within, and he moved to free the image from within by his chisel from without?

How then would we proceed if we were let the design (of anything) unfold from within? We can be sure that Michelangelo studied his piece of marble carefully, noting the flow of the formation of the material. And then knowing as well as he might, he would probably at some point begin to see that there was the possibility of a specific form within, because if he arbitrarily chose his own form, the pattern would not work with the flow of the material and the sculpture would probably end up breaking apart as he put the chisel to his work.

If we were to aspire to understand something from our point of perspective utilizing the principal of seeing something from within before using our “tools” to let unfold those things without, it would seem that we might began by studying those things that begin from within! Easy for you to say! It does make sense that anything that Nature creates and grows does so according to the description of the core within.  That would be true creation.  

The essence of growth in Nature seems to happen from a pattern or a specific core that can only produce a unique answer to the core…hmmm that’s interesting! An authentic blade of grass!

What then is the core of design for a space such as a kitchen? What would be a starting point from which we can begin to see a beginning pattern to a solution that would be that unique place to allow the unfolding of the flow of materials, the function, the aesthetics, and the people who would use that space?

Stay tuned! Let's see if we can uncover something more about this!