Technology has no point unless it subtly awakens and activates the senses of its recipients. Looking around, I notice that on the contrary, people today have been gradually developing thick skins because of technology. They wear elasticized or fleece clothing, sit on comfortable sofas and eat potato chips while watching large-screen TVs. They don’t take lessons in cooking or the tea ceremony. They can’t even be bothered to arrange flowers in a vase. Thanks to the calculator, they’ve ceased doing match in their heads or on paper, and are losing the ability to think quickly […]. Because there’s e-mail, they’ve stopped writing letters by hand. Common greetings used in written correspondance slip their minds. Losing these phrases means they also lose compassion for others. Even the skill of peeling an apple in one long strip, once common prooof of dexterity in Japan, has deteriored because it’s such a nuisance to use a knife.[…] In the past, graphic designers had to aquire the skill of drawing ten lines in between two lines one millimietrer apart, as training for writing the kanji characters. not long ago, we practiced this skill using a bow pen or drafting pen.[…] Today, thanks to the computer, in theory we can draw a hundred lines, or a thousand in between those two lines. And so we can laugh off as nonsense the training of the old designers. But it isn’t a matter of skill. It’s a matter of sensory sophistication, or enhancement.

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Kenya Hara (born 1958) is a Japanese graphic designer and curator. Hara is art director of Muji since 2001 and designed the opening and closing ceremony programs of the Nagano Winter Olympic Games 1998. Kenya Hara has published “Designing Design”, in which he elaborates on the importance of “emptiness” in both the visual and philosophical traditions of Japan, and its application to design. In 2008, Hara partnered with fashion label Kenzo for the launch of its men’s fragrance Kenzo Power. Kenya Hara is considered a leading design personality in Japan.
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» MK works in 2 design books : MyOwnBusinessCard DesignersOnly + DESIGN AND DESIGN book of the year Vol.3

TheThirdTeacher
79 ways you can use design to transform teaching and learning.

“Children will always learn. (…) They learn to compete or cooperate, fear or trust, join or isolate, but they will learn — it’s in their genes.

Children will create as well. Whether order or disorder, chaos or harmony, beauty or ugliness, accord or violence, they will create. We all begin life with a will to leave a mark that no one else has left. Creativity, too, is in our genes.

(…)

The best learning often occurs when children spend unplanned and uncounted hours outdoors, investigating, experimenting, exploring, and playing — which is to say spontaneously and delightfully designing their own curriculum.

In the right circumstances, the result is a lifelong love affair with birds, bugs, fish, plants, trees, water, seashore, and landscapes, a love affair that is the foundation for an imaginative life rich in possibilities.

I count it as one of the great tragedies of the modern world that sprawl and industrialization of landscapes have ruined many of the places that once nourished the minds, imagination, and souls of previous generations. Without much forethought or foresight we have designed a world convenient for commerce, speed, and violence, not one for children. As a consequence, most children grow up in sterile world of freeways, concrete, steel, suburbs, shopping malls, television, iPods, and computer screens. The sum total of that is told in statistics about poverty, hunger, the spread of preventable disease, loneliness (…).

Had we loved our children better, we would not have done so much so carelessly.

H.G. Wells once said that we are in a race between catastrophe on one side and education on the other. The dimensions of the possible catastrophe ahead are well documented. On the other side there is a worldwide movement to remake the human presence on Earth by designing with, not against, nature. Ecological design involves the calibration of human intentions with the knowledge of how the world works as a physical system and the use of that knowledge to inform and discipline our intentions.

(…)

Imagine schools as incubators for a new generation of designers that will remake human presence on Earth in ways that regenerate ecologies and create the foundation for a fair, decent, and prosperous post-carbon economy. Imagine schools that foster the kind of thinking that bridges the chasms of ethnicity, nationality, religion, species, and time. (…) Imagine schools that draw forth the very best from each child.”

David W. ORR