Humans have stark and urgent material needs, and they’re right in front of us. Why should most people examine and scrub each situation down to its philosophical foundations, looking for consistent rules?
The ideas do matter. A strong design education should have philosophical and historical training at its non-negotiable core. But instead of a linear model where we assume that ideas always manifest themselves downstream in tangible design, we might take seriously that the causality runs both ways—that design with a demonstrated commitment to sacred humanness is itself a form of argument. Both neuroscience and environmental psychology show that our behavior is shaped in part by our designed surroundings. So we might set out to start with design—with a come-and-see invitation to the designed spaces and places where humans thrive. We might put forth a more sturdy anthropology by example, an irresistibly beautiful and consistent life ethic—an ethic that comes alive in the attentive structural details and material choices of our spaces and in the activities they envelop—rather than waiting around for a proper rationale to always lead the way. We might build the kinds of settings that signal the strong worth of the people inside them.
Leopold Staff:
Foundations
I built on the sand
And it tumbled down,
I built on the rock
And it tumbled down.
Now when I build, I shall begin
with smoke from the chimney.Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz
(Milosz said that this is a poem of “naked faith,” written in the immediate ashes of World War II. “What was left was to do what a child does, who when trying to draw a house often starts with the smoke from the chimney, then draws a chimney, and then the rest.”