A Pep Talk for Myself

Never that I thought an excerpt of a book could be this powerful I made it my phone wallpaper. Pardon my face while I devour a massive Hungarian langos. — Never that I thought an excerpt of a book could be this powerful I made it my phone wallpaper. Pardon my face while I devour a massive Hungarian *langos*.

Look who’s back from a long hiatus for the sake of focusing my mind and time for the project (and 5 days worth of ‘weekend getaway’ to trans Central-East Europe).

I start to feel guilty for not writing for a while, and since it’s an amazingly peaceful Saturday (despite that Brexit protest happening in some part of London I watched on someone’s Instagram stories), I voluntarily spare some of my time doing another post of my learning log because, why not?

My early afternoon was spent trying to synthesise two articles about the creative industries that Richie gave our class (and talked about a bit) last Tuesday. The articles refer to the British Council’s Creative Economy website (I never stumbled upon their website even once before and it’s amazing), which are here and here.

One thing I get about the creative industry itself is how the nature of the term ‘creative industry’ itself always shifting. John Newbigin’s What is Creative Economy article gave us a brief tour of the evolution of the term, starting from the very first attempt to define creative industry by the labour government in 1997 to its optimistic impact to the future based on a 2015 ‘Creativity v. Robots’ research conducted by Nesta:

“Researchers at Oxford University estimate that up to 47% of jobs in the US could be replaced by machines in the course of the next 20 years, while the figure in the UK is 35%. But a 2015 study by Nesta, ‘Creativity vs. Robots’ argued that the creative sector was to some extent immune to this threat, with 86% of highly creative jobs in the US, and 87% in the UK, having no or low risk of being displaced by automation.”[1]

How wonderful isn’t it to be involved within the ever-growing creative industries? The collaboration and interdisciplinary nature of creative industries is inevitable, making it open to millions of chances and opportunities, as the article suggests in the very last paragraph:

“It is sometimes said that where oil was the primary fuel of the 20th century economy, creativity is the fuel of the 21st century. […]”

These are some powerful quotations (and of course, data) that I regard as something that could support the reasonings behind my project. Reading the whole texts also remind me of a book that I dearly love written by David B. Berman, Do Good Design [2], in which a fragment of his book is my motivation to remind me to keep going doing my work as a graphic designer and someone involved in the global creative industries:

“Designers have far more power than they realise: their creativity fuels the most efficient (and most destructive) tools of deception in human history. The largest threat to humanity’s future just may be the consumption of more than necessary. We are caught up in unsustainable frenzy, spurred by rapid advances in the sophistication, psychology, speed, and reach of visual lies designed to convince us we “need” more stuff than we really do. Human civilisation, trending toward one global civilisation, cannot afford to make even one major global goof. The same design that fuels mass overconsumption also holds the power to repair the world. We live in an unprecedented technological age, where we can each leave a larger legacy by propagating our best ideas than by propagating our chromosomes. Designers can be a model for other professionals for identifying one’s sphere of influence, and then embrace the responsibility that accompanies that power to help repair the world.
So don’t just do good design, do good.”[3]

Can I get an amen to that?

Footnotes

[1] Excerpt from here. The Nesta’s ‘Creativities vs. Robots’ itself is an amazing read that you can read yourself here.

[2] Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change The World is a book written by Canadian designer David B. Berman and co-published by AIGA, the world’s largest membership national design organisation. The book itself persuades the audience (re: designers) with their invented needs, telling the deeds and misdeeds of design with some case studies, and ends with a pledge.

[3] Berman, D. (2009). Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change The World. 1st ed. AIGA Press, p.2.

So don’t just do good design, do good.”[3]

Footnotes

Further readings