16/03/2016

Misquoting a Quote

Reposted from DILBERT by Scott Adams - The Famous Quote I Never Said

The strap line on the header for this blog uses the quotation:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” 

it is attributed it to Scott Adams and is one of his Dilbert Principles.

I recently came across a blog post by Scott Adams in which he reports how his quote has been appropriated and misquoted, being corrupted to read:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.”

The blog article reads - You’ll see lots of versions of that quote floating around the Internet too (see a few in the image above), but many of the newer ones have been altered from “art” to “design.”

My problem with the altered quote (aside from creating a misleading history) is that design is largely rules-based. Art is not, or at least not so much. When I hire a designer, I want someone who has the training and experience to know what will work for a particular commercial purpose. They should be thinking about how the message is delivered, how the human brain processes ideas, what part of the design has the button you want users to press, and so on.

That is pretty much the direct opposite of art. So putting design in that quote is an attempt to (elevate?) design to art, as if art is somehow more important.

Personally, I think good design that affects millions of people is more important than art than hangs in one room. But I’m not trying to pick a winner. All I’m saying is that the famous quote about design, mistakenly attributed to me, doesn’t make sense.

He suggests:

"Just remember that 98% of everything you read on the Internet is bullshit. The other 2% is accurate by accident."

You can misquote me on that - Scott Adam

I am pleased to note that I managed to use the quotation correctly...

I chose the quote because it encapsulates my ethos about art precisely and I agree with Scott the misquote means something quite different...

WARNING when I last tried to access Scot Adams website I received a Malware alert

01/03/2016

What is a Blog For - Remembering?

What do you do when you have an over active, creative mind? I have always been a very practical sort of a person and an autodidact to boot. Despite my advancing years, my mind is constantly churning over ideas about anything and everything. I have been into taking things apart from a very early age, it took a bit longer to start putting them back together again and making new stuff from scratch or junk or even new stuff. I am stimulated by all sorts of triggers, newspaper articles, stuff in my inbox, Pinterest, Instructables, pod-casts of all kinds. These sources are a cornucopia of ideas and a springboard for my rather over-fertile mind. No, that does not mean it is a compost heap or has dirty thoughts, well only occasionally. Although, mentioning compost heaps, does remind me of a great paper about the neuroscience of memory, where the compost heap is used as a metaphor for how memory works. See what I mean about one thing leading to another. Anyway, what is all this babble leading to?

Digi-Blog was started so that I had somewhere to park useful information, and some of the mad ideas I come across or think up. The Blog has proved to be a great way of keeping track of all this sort of stuff, so I can find it again. See we are back to memory, its a bit of a preoccupation with me. If you have a brows through the other posts you will find stuff about fixing, doing ,making and vaguely interesting, maybe sometime in the future. Get to the point - I have decided to start posting a lot more stuff about the the things that I find interesting, en passant but, which immediately disappear from my memory (sorry, I mentioned it again).

Current areas of interest are ceramics, particularly Raku. This morning my attention has been grabbed by casting clay in plaster moulds, slip moulding. I have looked up lots of info, I just need to store it somewhere until I need it. What better place than Digi-Blog. Of course In the process of browsing stuff about ceramics, other stuff attracts ones attention. I spotted an interesting piece about repairing ceramics. Rather than try for an invisible repair this technique emphasises the repair, a very Wabi Sabi thing to do. I have a quite valuable piece of ceramic that I treated myself to after I sold some artwork, unfortunately the window blind caught it on a windy day and it ended up in pieces. I have been going to repair it, and haven't, maybe this is the way to go.

So you can see my mind flips from one thing to another, very difficult to keep track of the interesting stuff. The Blog is one way to keep track of my volatile mind.