• noun (pl. manifestos) a public declaration of policy and aims.
— ORIGIN Italian, from Latin manifestus ‘caught in the act, flagrant’.
Compact Oxford English Dictionary http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/manifesto?view=uk
During last term, when we started to look at manifestos, I had a vague idea that manifestos were political tools used to publicise a parties beliefs. This is true, but also it seems true of any person(s) who wishes to declare their beliefs political or otherwise for public scrutiny.
Whilst thinking about what to write in my own manifesto, I had a look on the internet to see what kind of manifestos already existed, and was happy to discover that you can pretty much find a manifesto to cover every topic you can think of, of which I read about three, not including the ones which we have covered in lectures, namely Dieter Rams of Braun and Bruce Mau from Bruce Mau Design.
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.
Dieter Rams, foermer head of Design for Braun http://www.designmuseum.org/design/dieter-rams
Allow events to change you
Forget about good
Process is more important than outcome
Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child)
Go deep
Capture accidents
Study
Drift
Begin anywhere
Everyone is a leader
Harvest ideas
Keep moving
Slow down
Don't be cool
Ask stupid questions
Collaborate
_______________. Intentionally left blank
Stay up late
Work the metaphor
Be careful, take risks
Repeat yourself
Make your own tools
Stand on someones shoulders
Avoid software
Don't clean your desk
Don't enter awards competitions
Read only left hand pages
Make new words
Think with your mind
Organisation – Liberty
Don't borrow money
Listen carefully
Take field trips
Make mistakes faster
Imitate
Scat
Break it, stretch it, bend it, crack it, fold it.
Explore the other edge
Coffee breaks, cab rides and green rooms.
Avoid fields. Jump Fences
Laugh
Remember
Power to the people
Bruce Mau http://www.brucemaudesign.com/incomplete_manifesto.html
Both of these manifestos are amazing, and just reading through them it becomes apparent how complicated a manifesto can be. The idea that by stating your intention you are in fact challenging yourself to stand for your beliefs, or embody your ideas. Creating a list, from the most important through to the least important (through no other reason than it is the last in the list) seems to say that if I could just focus on the top four then the others would not matter, presents a problem in itself.
There are a couple of other manifestos which I think are really interesting. The first one is very succinct, but complicated. It seems to cover many of the issues that face designers today, and states the obvious need to think about the planet before we rush headlong into design. But not only that, it also highlights the problems which we face from 'over design', having created a world of superfluous items whose life it is only exist to fulfill our insatiable appetite of ever changing needs and wants, that is at once rendered useless and throw away. Well, not in all cases, but many things do seem over designed or badly thought out. My own example of this is my phone charger, having got the phone about two years ago, my nokia charger broke about 10 months after getting it, and now I am on my 5th, (not nokia) and it annoys me.
...designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about, this is kind of grotesque. "Consumer" isn't a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be.
It’s really good to read and totally up to date so everything that he says is relevant.
The other one I’ve looked at, but don’t claim to understand is ‘The Manifesto of Surrealism’ by Andre Breton in 1924, it goes on for a total of 14 pages, written as a rebuttal to the DaDa movement, also in response to the political unrest of the time. Many artists and avant garde thinkers were suppressed throughout Europe at this time. Andre Breton was a dadaist and then surrealist writer, who wrote poetry and philosophy, exploring ideas concerned with self expression and stretching the imagination to it’s limits – through whatever means possible.
Definition of Surrealism in Document:
Manifesto of Surrealism http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm
Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Andre Breton explored idea to do with ‘automatic writing’ as well as dream analysis, concepts first used by Freud as a tools for psychoanalysis. Both of these ideas were quite new to science at the time and so by experimenting with them Breton was actually trying to break into new territories.
The manifesto is interesting because it tries to approach it’s subject from a philosophical (and very surreal) standpoint. The thoughts suggest how to ‘proceed forward’ in their fashion, in this aspect similar to other manifestos. I find the surrealists very interesting because their work is often about distorting and rearranging normal ideas and processes to create something very different, possibly in opposition to the initial idea. A website which sets out to examine this document and others in detail is Surrealartportal.com, with pages dedicated to the Manifesto of Surrealism. http://manifesto.surrealartportal.com/passages_by_nerval.html
