high five

It’s very common for designers and people in the visual arts to feel that we’re not contributing enough or worse: that all we’re doing is contributing to landfill … but I’ve come to believe that truly imaginative visual work is extremely important in society. Just in the way that I am inspired by books and magazines, conversations I have, movies, I also think that when I put work out there in the mass media—work that is interesting unusual intriguing, work that opens up that sense of inquiry in the mind—that I’m seeding the imagination of the populous. You never know who is going to take something from that and turn it into something else; information is cross pollinating. A piece of mine might inspire a playwright or a novelist or a scientist; and that in turn may be the seed that inspired a doctor, philanthropist, or babysitter. This isn’t something that you can quantify or track—we tend to under value things in society that we can’t measure but I believe that a fully operating, rich society needs these seeds coming from all directions and all disciplines in order to keep the gears of inspiration and imagination flowing, cycling, growing.