“Design” has a soul
Deane Richardson holds a special place in my heart. I started my career in the US working as an intern in the design firm he founded along with Dave Smith. Several of the veterans of design today owe their career success to the time they have spent working, playing, learning, and growing at Fitch+Richardson Smith in Worthington Ohio.
My joy knew no bounds today when I received an email from Deane in response to the book of poems I wrote. I must reproduce the entire email as a historical record.
“Uday, thank you, thank you for your “window of Poems”…… It is timely and will live in its timeliness. Your insights to wisdom from within oneself…….and opportunities for new perspectives through the window gives me much pleasure.
It reminds me of when Kenji Ekuan of Japan GK design and I from RichardsonSmith joined in a discussion at a coffee house in Stuttgart in 1989…..about the differing Eastern culture “windows” and Western culture “windows. Kenji used Seno Rikian, the 15th-century Japanese tea master, about “wisdom-from-within” as a source of design thinking processes………..while I used Leonardo di Vinci to express western culture’s “wisdom-from-without” demonstrated through his painting, sculpture, engineering designs and fortress as a process of thinking and doing….. We pinned up large brown paper roles on the walls of the coffee bar and used markers to visually express points of difference.
Frog design came en masse to offer their perspective…… This was in parallel to an ICSID regional meeting taking place in Stuttgart at the same time and Kenji and I were not asked to participate…….so we announced our own session in a nearby coffee bar. It was fun and insightful. Of course, Kenji died a few years ago, but my memory of gk’s cooperation and collaboration with RS globally was a special time. Of course, when the Eames made a series of trips to your NID in India many decades ago was also noteworthy about cultural cooperation and exchange through “windows of opportunity”…..
Thank You for your book… It is beautifully written, the photos bring your thinking processes to the surface and the “design” has a soul. And yes, the strength of design rests in its rewards as a process, a verb…. and less as an “artifact” (quote uday)……….
As the DESIGNFARM continues to evolve I will be back in columbus and would enjoy spending a lunch with you and sonicrim when you are available. enjoy…….. deane and sandra richardson in the rocky mountains…….. “
My reply to Deane,
“Dear Deane, Thank you so much for a beautiful reaction to the book. It means a lot. I started my career in the US in your company and it gives me immense joy to see someone I always looked up to with gratitude acknowledging my thesis that a poem has a place in the universe of design.
Thanks again. I moved to San Francisco 12 years ago- during the recession of 2008. Today I am flexing my muscles again to survive another challenge we face in the pandemic. I have no doubt we will come out stronger. My book of poems is an outcome of four and a half decades of designerly curiosity for life’s design and design of life. Uday”
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