Everyone in my design class seemed to come from some kind of art background. I did not. So I started to study other creative fields to learn their theories, issues, and conversations. My conclusion is that there’s been a massive creative party going on for years, decades and millenia, but Design is so late to the party that everyone else has already gotten piss wasted, passed out, woken up, and is sobering up cooking brunch. The other creative fields are MILES ahead of design.

Food
The man who brought food to my attention was the great food writer and critic Michael Nagrant. His passion for food and talking about food was contagious. We’d sit at lunch and he’d talk about restaurants and delicious foodie topics and I’d listen. The parallels between cooking and design was obvious except that cooking had been evolving since the invention of humans. The food industry has been doing “experience design” since thousands of years ago. The food recombination process incorporates ALL of the senses, considers things in context, and deveoped the theories of great service “design” to near perfection. They have mastered all of the trendy design aspirations. And it’s STILL evolving. The restaurant experience has evolved to the point where there is so much accumulation fo experience and knowledge, that it’s not enough to go to school for four years, but you have to devote and commit to this artform for your entire life if you want to succeed. Design in its infancy has ALOT to learn from the food industry. When I blogged for Core77, one of the things I brought to awareness to the design scene was a special treat revealed to me by M. Nagrant, the one and only Alinea. This was before they had even opened their doors. They were still in their prototyping phase. From first glance it looks like it’s almost a year of prototyping, but in fact, it’s actually thousands of years of prototyping. Design has to respect and learn the process of a great chef if we want to be as great as the food industry in a thousand years.

Fashion
The Design world needs its version of Haute Couture. The concept cars or products produced by Droog are the closest to Haute Couture but diluted about a thousand fold. The fashion world, another industry that’s thousands of years old slowly evolved their aesthetics and experimented in countless changes. Some of their work is so ingrained in our culture that we don’t think twice about it. What is the designed use of a necktie, except for our cultural notion of professionalism? The fashion world now produces so fast that it releases works at a furious pace unmatched by any other industry. There’s a lot to be learned form the evolution of practically every piece of clothing in every culture.

Comic Books/Manga
Anime and comic books fulfilled the underground-nerd’s fantasies. But when the rest of America, the quarterbacks and cheerleaders also needed some fantasies to turn to, in times of war and recession with a high degree of uncertainty, where did they turn to? The fantasy and escape of DC and Marvel movies. The matured and saturated manga market in Asia where comic books have gained wider adoption as a story telling tool has influenced the style of almost every major US comic. The proportion of the faces and the body is starting to resemble the Anime and manga proportions. The rising world of 2-D graffiti is also taking quite a que from the Anime scene as well. Design can learn a lot from the style and storytelling of comic books to improve their own presentations as well as bringing some excitement and fantasies back into boring old designs.

Art
George Nelson’s “Learning to See” was what opened my eyes to art. One story is about man in a museum who is shouting loudly about a piece of art that is painted all white and how it’s worthless and he doesn’t understand it at all. Another man tells him to basically shut the hell up and that just because he’s ignorant doesn’t mean it’s not significant. I didn’t understand art until then. I was the ignorant man. Ignorance will not make you a good designer and will not help you evolve. Understanding art seems to be one of the keys to becoming a great conceptual representer.

I’m only beginning to scratch the understandings of other creative fields. Next up on my list are things like architecture, interiors, and poetry.