デザインと長期的思考
This is Rainomoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Rainomoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in Nihonkan, Tokyo. When I was in elementary and middle school in
Japan, my parents would take my brothers and I to art exhibitions in Tokyo of artists such as
Picasso, Christo, Paul Klee, and Jasper Jones to name a few. As I got older, I discovered design
and I ended up pursuing that as a career. The line between art and design has always been clear.
In the past two decades, as technology made design to be dictated more and more by algorithms,
design became more about function and not beauty. Today's guest, Stefan Sagmeister, is a world
renowned graphic designer and is someone I've always looked up to since my early 20s when I
moved to New York City. He has designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO,
the Guggenheim Museum. He's a two-time Grammy's winner and also earned practically every important
international design award. Stefan talks about the large subjects of our lives like happiness or
beauty, how they connect to design, and what that actually means to our everyday lives. He spoke
five times at the official TED, making him one of the three most frequently invited TED speakers.
A native of Australia, he received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna
and as a Fulbright Scholar, a master's degree from Pratt Institute in New York.
I remember discovering Stefan's work in my early 20s when I moved to New York. He was in his early
30s, I believe, and already a published graphic designer earning a lot of different types of awards
and since then I looked up to him. In my 30s I finally got to meet him in person and stayed
in touch since then. I was ecstatic when he accepted my invitation to be on my podcast.
Our conversation turned a little philosophical but I was appreciative and impressed by the fact
that he used simple, easy to understand words to talk about difficult topics and I hope you get a
lot out of my conversation with Stefan Thagmeister. So let's get started.
All right, Stefan, good to see you.
Very good to see you, Ray. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for accepting the invitation in the first place. So where do we find you? Where are you now?
I'm in New York. I'm in the studio working away. I just came back from Korea where we
opened our last show.
Excellent, excellent. I just wanted to start off by saying that I've known you at least from afar
for the past 20, I think 25 years or so. When I first moved to New York back in like
1998 and then you've evolved from a designer, from a traditional graphic designer to a very
diverse type of designer slash artist. But to start off with, I wanted to ask you about
the most recent exhibition, Now is Better and I did a little bit of reading before this
interview and you talk about the importance and your interest in the long-term thinking,
how it's important for you to think about the long term of not just your own experience but
humanity, I would say, over the past several hundred years. And again, just for the sake of
the audience who may not have been able to see your show or have bought your book, I wanted to
ask you to start off with what piqued your interest about this idea of very long-term
thinking? And so that's question number one. And question number two is why you decided to express
in the different types of art that you produce?
Well, it really ultimately started properly when I was in Rome. I was lucky enough to be a designer
in residence at the American Academy there. And one of the lovely things there is that they have
these fantastic lunches and dinners. And because there's 80 artists, filmmakers, writers,
archaeologists, designers there, these dinners tend to be very salon-like. So you work all day
in your studio and then you have a chance to exchange thoughts over dinner. And it's a really
great program. And one night, I was sitting next to a lawyer. He was the husband of one of
the invited artists. And he basically told me that what we are seeing right now in several countries,
Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Poland at the time, really means the end of modern democracy.
He thought that they were all moving right-wing and kind of anti-democratic. And he really sort
of foresaw the end of modern democracy. And that night, I went back to my studio and looked it up,
basically just Googled it. Modern democracy, when did it start? And it turned out that 200 years ago,
there was a single democratic country. 100 years ago, there were 18. Now, we have 86 countries
that the UN thinks of being democratic. More importantly, for the first time in human history,
more than half of humanity lives in a democratic system. So it turned out that my smart lawyer,
メディアの進化と影響
dinner companion, could not have been more wrong. This educated man had a completely skewed
view of the world. And this, of course, came because he is informed 100% by short-term media,
by media that went from being monthly magazines to weekly, to daily, to hourly on X or Twitter.
And because the cycle of this media became shorter and shorter, the messages became
more and more negative by concept, because things that are negative, that are bad,
work extremely fast. So scandals, catastrophes, they all lend themselves really well to a very
short news cycle. But then there is another way to look at the world, which is from the long term.
And interestingly, you get 180 degree, truly the opposite conclusions than you get from the
short term. And that I found unbelievably juicy to explore as a communication designer, because so
many of my friends share the views of this lawyer, of my dinner companion, that basically,
you know, there is doom and gloom around many of my friends, that the problems that we faced,
which of course, I know are many, are kind of insurmountable. But if you look at the world
from the long perspective, the things that are important to most of us, as in, we would rather
be alive than dead, we would rather have foods than be hungry, we would rather live in peace
than in war, we would rather have, we would rather be healthy than sick, we would rather be
informed than ignorant. All of these things can be have can be measured. And all of these things
have been measured, there is really good data about these things for the last two centuries.
And all of these things, this is not an opinion of mine, meaning this is completely 100% provable,
have improved. And so that I just found interesting, exciting, and worthwhile to
古典的なアートと現代
really communicate. And so when I thought, how, or what is the media that I should,
on what, like, how should I communicate this? And I looked at different media, and I thought, well,
how about digital media? Well, I cannot, I can hardly open a file that's 15 years old.
It's like, it doesn't be the open on the contemporary operating systems, you know,
things that we've created beautifully, 15 years ago, don't really play anymore, I can, hopefully,
I have a video of it, or I have a photo of it. So at least I can show it. But I can't really
play the original program anymore. So the digital world, I excluded almost immediately,
almost as a first thing. But then I looked at other things. And I came across these old paintings
from my great, great granddad, who had a antique shop in Western Austria in, you know, 200 years
ago. And I talked to my brothers and sisters and just said, Yeah, yeah, you can have them.
So I thought they would be a fantastic medium to work with, because they already survived 200
years, there's a chance if I work with them, that they're going to be around for another 200 years.
Right. So I basically cut them up, you know, literally cut them up, and put new elements
into these 200 year old paintings as contrasting elements, because they were, of course, as all
18th and 19th century paintings are figurative. So I put these abstract shapes in there that at
first, at first viewing, would seem like just simple forms. But they're ultimately data
representations that show how various things improve. And when we first showed those paintings
at the Thomas Albin Gallery in New York, it seemed that other people liked them too,
and we sold out the show, all the paintings were sold. So I thought, well, I'll definitely make
some more of those. And I think that the show that you've seen in Tokyo was sort of the third
iteration of that. And the third and we are making the show that we just opened in Korea
was significantly larger, maybe double the size of the one in Tokyo. So we had some more,
we made some more paintings. And that show is going to Shanghai next. And there is some more.
I see, I see.
There's several shows. There's another show that goes through Latin America right now. So
while we were opening in Korea, we were also opening in Torrey on a city in Mexico at the
same time, but I couldn't be at both opening.
Oh, wow.
So things are working. And it also is very helpful that I love the process.
So the process of doing this work just happens to be very joyful. I like all the elements of
it. By now, of course, I ran out of paintings from my great great grandfather. So I'm buying
them at auction, at small auction houses in Central Europe. And keeping transforming,
there is lots and lots of data. So I keep getting new data. I keep getting new subjects.
And I keep getting new paintings. So I'm basically sticking with it.
視覚芸術の多様性
Yeah. So just for the sake of the listeners who can't see what we're talking about,
I'm going to do my best to try to describe the types of work that I saw.
Sure.
The largest part of the exhibition, it's multiple types of work. It's not just one type of work.
But the one that you were talking about, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is a series of
paintings. And many of them are classical paintings like portraiture or scenery paintings.
And on top of them, there are geometrical shapes placed to sort of, you know,
on, it's an arrangement between the old art and the new art. And there's many, you know,
there's a series of many paintings. So that's one type of paintings that I saw. Another one was,
in terms of the look of it, a bit more graphic and a lot more geometrical, and then using like
lenticular lenses to show like different views of one painting or an image. In addition,
you had at least this exhibition in Japan at Ginza Graphic Gallery, you had a collection of your
clothing items, which I think comes from Sagamasa 123 collection, if I understand correctly.
Yeah.
Those are mainly shirts, jackets, and again, they have these primary colored geometrical shapes
printed on top of them, right? Yeah. And then you had things like, you know, your previous films
that you've made, like Happy Film, I think was there as well. And also a few objects like glasses,
watch, and so forth. Yeah. So and I assume that those were different pieces of art that were
created at different times. Did they all have the same thought process of, hey, you know,
how do you communicate the fact that the humanity is getting better over many decades? Or are they
different aspects of your work that might touch upon different types of subject matters?
I mean, in general, all of them, the paintings, the lenticulars, the objects like the glasses,
or espresso cups, or the watch, or the clothing, they ultimately are all going into the same
direction, meaning looking at the world from the long term perspective, and seeing sometimes very
large aspects, sometimes very particular and very small aspects, how they develop. Yeah, there is a
couple of things in there that I just picked, because I found the data very interesting.
There's a couple of things that didn't develop all that fantastically. Right.
Like, for example, there is a CO2 development in there that really has gotten worse and worse and
worse for, I would say, 180 years, and only recently in the last 10 years or so has gotten better.
So there was these things too, but it still has gotten a little bit better. But ultimately,
all of that work is for long term thinking. And I would say the only thing that I would
say about that in the paintings, the pieces are not really put on top of it, they're really put
inside of it, which conceptually for me was important, so that they literally live on the
same plane, but they are through and through different. So basically, the paintings are not
overpainted, there's like new elements put inside of the painting really cut through, so you couldn't
basically take them out anymore. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, they really become one. Yeah. Right, right.
作品の経済的側面
Are you, just to ask about sort of the practical aspect of your career, your profession and your
life, the economics of it, the way you make it work is you create the work, you sell the work,
and then that becomes the funding of the next work. Is that, I'm making it kind of oversimplified,
but is that basically how it works? That's exactly how, yeah. In the case of clients of the mural,
there is a fee. Right, right, right. But in the case of all of the work that you've seen
in the Tokyo exhibition, so the paintings very, very much so, I sell them, and it's really,
I happily sell them. Or I would say that this is part of the idea why I do them in the first place.
I have to do, because as we already established, I want this, these pieces have to work. Right. So,
if they wouldn't have sold, I would have had to do, I would have had to start another strategy.
But because they did sell, and because they continue to sell, like, you know,
we sold already Berlin, Korea also, so I'm sticking with it. That's good. That's great.
Your background is graphic design, traditional graphic design. Yes, totally. Yeah. And, you know,
the first time that I came across your work was, I think, when I first moved to
New York in 1997 or 1998. And I was in my early 20s. And I think you may have been in your late
20s or early 30s. And you were designing posters and album jackets. And I remember vividly seeing
your work in magazines like, you know, ID Magazine, Communication Arts, and so forth,
those types of publications that I used to devour. And then what you do now is more,
quote unquote, art. On your website, and as I mentioned in the email previously, there's this
section called the answers. And you meticulously answer many, many questions that I assume came
over time. And in one of them, you talk about the definition of art. And you draw definitions,
one from Donald Judd, who said, design has to work, art does not. I think the one from another
デザインとアートの境界
one that you quoted was from Richard Serra. The purpose of art is to have no purpose, right?
What I find interesting in what you're doing now is that the work that you do, even the,
not the commercial ones, but the more on the fine art side of things that you do,
even though you talk about art having not to work or having no purpose, your work, your quote unquote
artwork seems to have a very deep purpose. Yeah, it seems to be doing a lot of work.
Yeah, which is why I really think it's...
I see.
Yeah, which I really think, which is why I really think it's design. So basically,
I need the market of art to sell these things, because ultimately, I really want to sell them,
because the very purpose of it is that it will wind up in somebody's living room as a reminder
that what they just saw on X or Twitter isn't all that bad, doesn't mean that it's the end of the
world. So and for that, I need the art market part to do so. But what I'm saying and what I'm
doing, even, let's say, at the Thomas Alban Gallery, which is a pure art gallery, they've
never had a designer in there before. But for our exhibition, it said so very clearly in the text
that this is a design exhibition. Yeah, unusually for this gallery, but it really is a design
exhibition. And I think that, I mean, I have many reasons for saying so. The main one,
I would say, is that I ultimately, really, I look at a very big subject, which you could say
is human development in history. I mean, that's about as big of a subject as you could possibly
choose. And I tried to make it communicatable. And you could say, that's almost the definition
of communication design. I'm meaning that's basically, you know, a communication designer
looks at a big subject and tries to communicate this. Now, of course, in many, many cases,
this would be a commercial subject. So you look at a company, and you try to make a logo for it,
you know, which is you try to communicate the essence of that company. Now, in my case,
just basically expanding that to a non-commercial subject, but there is nothing in the world of
communication design that says it has to be commercial, not at all. And so I very much see
this as communication design. But there's another couple of reasons for it. The one that you just
mentioned that I believe that this thing has a function. So from that point of view, it's what
it is anyway. I also, I really love the air. I love my profession. Like I love being a designer.
I have absolutely no reason to suddenly call myself an artist. Also, from where I come from,
my roots, of course, are still Austrian. And in Austria, these two worlds were always very
close to each other, meaning the big artists, the most famous artists of Austria, like
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, they all did posters, like it was and we're very
proud of doing posters. And they didn't just do posters for their own exhibitions, which they did
too, but they also did posters for the people because they thought it would be, it was almost
their duty to always to also be, do things for the people, not just for an art audience. So,
or let's say, I went to the university for the applied arts in Vienna. There's also a
art academy in Vienna, but somehow the applied arts academy was always somehow more prestigious
because they had the more famous professors like Lagerfeld, Saha Hadid, they all taught there.
And there was never a difference made between high and low. It would be ridiculous for me
to have been a designer all my life. And then suddenly to call myself an artist, I would find
it stupid. I see. But speaking of the differentiation between design and art, another answer
that you gave on your website was a designer works through a studio, an artist works
through a gallery. Designer would usually take on a client to make it commercially viable. An artist
would sell the art to make it commercially viable. So, and I'm guessing you're blurring the line
between the two, but where does for you, the work that you do because you're interested in a
particular subject and you want to pursue that subject versus somebody from outside is coming to
you and asking you to do a piece of work for a particular assignment. Do you still draw the
distinction between the two? Are you taking clients to do the work? And then also, are you
doing your own artwork? How do you differentiate the two? I actually don't differentiate it. So basically,
I have to say we don't do any purely commercial work anymore. Okay. Not because I hate it.
I think it's super important that people who care do commercial work because that tend to be the
most visible work that's out there. But I feel that I've done enough of it. And so we do work
for clients, but only if it makes sense to this sort of long-term thinking group. So I give you
今を大事にするデザイン
an example. We did work for a bike path for Bentonville in Arkansas. And the client said,
you could basically do whatever you want. And I thought, well, this could be nice to do another
now is better sort of work. And in that case, we created the mosaic that was inlaid into the
concrete along this bike path that goes all the way up alongside a building on a very large,
long ramp. And we designed tunnels for hospitals in Toronto, or we did six images
for an electric car company in Germany for smart. So all of the end, but it was always
Mr. Understanding that when the client came to us, they said, you know, we've seen that work
that you're doing about long-term thinking. And we believe that this would fit really well to
how they communicate. And then for me, it's fantastic, because, well, for one thing,
their budgets tend to be higher. So that's great. But also, they, of course, have distribution
channel media channels that I wouldn't have access to normally. I jump at these opportunities
and do them very, very much. But let's say, if the electric car company would have come and said,
can you do our website or our advertising, I would have said no. Or I would have recommended somebody
else. Right. Those are the clients that have most likely seen your work. The idea of this
long-term thinking and now is better resonated with them. And they would want you to recreate
that for their company or for the public space, different types of settings, so that you can
still communicate this idea of long-term thinking through whatever medium that you are creating.
Exactly. Another concept that I wanted to explore in this conversation was something
that you also mentioned in your writing. You use the term low-functioning design,
and you said that you want to dedicate yourself to the creation of low-functioning design. You
talked about your previous album covers being an example of low-functioning design. But
I'm a designer myself, and I don't think I've ever heard the term low-functioning design in
this capacity. So can you unpack that for us a little bit? Sure. And when you say you want to
dedicate yourself to creating low-functioning design. If you look at all of the applied arts,
there are examples of high functionality and low functionality. If you look at architecture,
let's say a cathedral is very low-functioning. It doesn't have toilets. It doesn't have a
kitchen. It doesn't have workspaces. It's basically one gigantic room made for contemplation.
So there is a functionality. But if you compare it to a factory that has kitchens,
mansions, toilets, manufacturing spaces, the functionality of a factory is much higher
than that of a cathedral. But we as humanity somehow rate the person who builds the cathedral
much higher than the person who builds the factory. The same is true for graphic design.
Like basically, if I tell you who is the designer who decided to set an entire article in a music
magazine all in dingbats, in unlegible dingbats, many people would recognize who that designer is,
David Carson, even though what he did has extremely low functionality. While if I ask you
who designed the United States tax forms, which is an incredible important piece of design and
should be designed by a high-end designer, but probably nobody could tell you. I don't know who
designed the United States tax forms, even though the United States tax form is so much more
important of a document than, let's say, that music magazine that David Carson designed.
And so I think that ultimately because our lives are so geared towards functionality,
we very much find the spaces in our lives that have low functionality, we value them.
It's the same with museums. I think that now that so many of us are not really involved
in any religion, it's almost that museums have replaced churches, both from a status
point of view. In New York City, the highest status you can possibly achieve is if you're
on the board of the Metropolitan Museum or of MoMA, then you've really arrived in New York.
And this used to be if you were an alderman at St. Patrick's Cathedral, but that completely changed.
But also from an experience point of view, like on Sunday, so many people go to MoMA or
the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History as a little ritual, almost what is a space for
contemplation that doesn't really have to do all that much. I think we value that.
In the world of graphic design, album covers were always low functioning because
they literally, meaning ultimately, they were there to protect the vinyl or the CD.
All that stuff that came on top of it was really an extra, meaning it had the function to show you
the direction of the band. And I think it had a very good function, but compared to the tax form,
it was pretty low functioning.
Why do you think human beings are more attracted to low functioning design?
低機能性活動の楽しさ
I think it's because our days are so busy. I'll give you another example.
If you're in the world of movement of transportation, there is let's say,
a very functioning way of to move is a commute to work, very high functioning.
You basically, you have to do it. And ultimately, it gets you from your home to your workplace.
And compare that to a stroll in Central Park, that a stroll in Central Park has really
almost no function. You're not really going from one end of Central Park to other to get there.
You're just basically strolling about. But the stroll is so much more enjoyable than the commute.
And the low functionality of it is part of the enjoyment. Like there's one of the,
if you go through Central Park, because you have to cross the park, because you need to be
on the other side of the park, you will enjoy that walk less than if you just walk through
Central Park with no aim. So there is something in that world of low functionality,
of just aimlessly walking, that is inherently enjoyable. I found that to be unbelievably true
on my scooter drive arounds in Bali. Like when I basically took the scooter, and I had to be
somewhere else in Bali, it was much less enjoyable than if I just took the scooter,
put my headphones on, and just drove around Bali aimlessly see where the streets would lead to,
which was almost always resulted in some true happy moments. Because it's just this combination
of driving around the wind in the hair, the absolutely gorgeous landscape,
and carefully curated music that would be on my headphones, just was a combination of things that
led to happiness. But a crucial ingredient in that mix was no reason to drive around,
meaning no goal. Even when we shot myself for the happy phone, and it suddenly had a function
because we needed to have those images in the shoot, I didn't have the same experience of
happiness, because it suddenly had a function. I think it comes from the business of our lives,
and from the fact that so many segments of our lives are set there to be functioning,
we do things to achieve something, that those spaces that don't have function appear to be
specifically enjoyable. Do you think that those low-functioning activities that we do,
versus high-functioning activities, and different types of designs that support those activities,
are they mutually exclusive from each other? Could they coexist? Or in your work,
do you ever try to bring those two closer to each other? I mean, I think that ultimately,
functionality sits on a sliding scale. Okay. You know, there is a German philosopher,
Georg Adorno, who wrote a beautiful essay on it. And ultimately, what he's saying is that
there is no such thing as 100% non-functionality. Because even if you decide to even the most
non-functioning walk in the park, ultimately still has a little bit of functionality in there.
And on the other side, there is no such thing as 100% functionality, because even the most
functioning engineered things might be informed by something like transparency,
that comes more from an artistic world. So basically, everything that you do,
sits somewhere in between 99% functionality and 1% functionality, because there's no zero
and no 100. And everything else is somewhere in between. And so from that point of view,
I think that also solves many questions and answers about what is art and what is design.
Everything sits on a sliding scale. So it's actually possible that you do a piece of graphic
design, that's only 20% functionality. And it's possible that you do a piece of art, something
that lives in the art world, that's actually 60% functionality. So they all sit on a sliding scale,
and sometimes overlap and sometimes even go into the other direction. You know, I would say that
an Andy Warhol album cover is now probably seen, it's definitely shown as part of the Warhol
exhibition at the Whitney Museum. But it's seen as a piece of art, even though it's clearly a
piece of graphic design, it's an album cover. And just by the fact that Warhol did it,
who started out as a commercial illustrator, doesn't really make it into a piece of art,
even though as a piece of work, it's actually much better than many of his works that are considered
pure art. You know, I think that the cover he did for The Stone Sticky Finger is just a
better piece of work than his stupid portraits of German industrialists that he made to make
money to finance his piece of graphic design, which was interview magazine. So it gets
very convoluted if you look at the fine grain of these pieces.
Another topic that came to my mind, again, I read this in your writing, was the importance of beauty.
And I was a little surprised to read that when you were in your early years in your career as a
graphic designer, you put much more emphasis on the idea and, you know, what the thought behind
美と機能性の関係
the work was. And what I remember from say, 25 years ago, your work was very conceptually driven,
but also very visually arresting and very memorable visually. So if you could talk about
what you mean by beauty, because like your previous work was beautiful in a different kind of way.
And you know, you also talk about a moment in which you had this realization that you're smoking
at an event outside and there wasn't that much beauty. Whereas in another setting, I think in
Spain, there was a lot of beauty even on say like door handles, right? So yeah, if you could talk a
little bit about this concept of beauty and why you felt that in your early part of your career,
that you didn't put that much emphasis and what it plays, what kind of role it plays in the work
that you do today. Let's say as a young designer, most people of my generation thought that it's
all about the idea and the form is a underling of the idea. Basically, it just should support,
it should be supportive of that idea as well as it can. But it could never be that the form
would be the leader and the idea would be supporting the form. And as I got older and
specifically as I had more experience, I found that whenever we took the form very seriously
and really worked very hard and considered the form extremely well, it seemed to work much better.
Like it seemed to me that the form was very much functioning by itself. So I very strangely
came to beauty through functionality. And so much at the time specifically out of modernism,
there was this big line that form follows function. That many people in modernism,
even though the guy who coined that term meant it completely differently.
But so many people in modernism meant that to understand or to be understood as
if it functions really well, it's beautiful by, it's automatically beautiful because there is
a beauty in functionality. This is not how Mr. Sullivan understood it or meant it at all.
He meant it, he was coming in from nature as in like, you know, that if you look at the eagle fly,
if you look at a Sequoia tree stand mightily, that if you look closely,
that the form follows its function. But when you looked at the book that he did, it was
unbelievably ornamental. Actually, because the work was so beautiful, it still stands in Chicago.
You can look, many of his buildings are still standing today. And they are crazy ornamental.
They don't form, the form doesn't follow any function. Those ornaments have
zero functionality. He just loved that. So in any case, I do believe now that form can be
the driver of a project. And the idea can be serving that form underneath it.
And I think many of the original modernists actually understood that.
I've seen a lecture of Max Bill, who was one of the most famous Bauhaus alumni
and the founder of the school in Ulm, which was the most narrow-minded or bound up to be
the most narrow-minded school of modernism in all of Europe, really. I mean, this is like, you know,
this was basically the extremists of modernism. And he found, he did a lecture in the 50s where
he kind of told his Swiss colleagues that they have to lift beauty up onto the same level
as function in order to do good work. Because if you concentrate on function alone,
you will not wind up with good work. And it's interesting that clearly his colleagues
couldn't hear him. And I believe the reason why they couldn't hear him was laziness.
Because the concentration on function is so extremely easy. I think that designers embraced
function because it allowed them to be unbelievably lazy. Because it's so easy.
Because this whole idea that, oh, I'm a problem solver. I don't deal with beauty.
I don't deal with aesthetics, is ultimately one that's unbelievably easy. Because the problems
that we need to solve, you know, make a reasonably comfortable chair, create an ad that sells beer,
are so easy. I mean, that's ultimately, that's such an easy task. If all that you need to do
is create that function, you just have an easy job. But if you want to create a chair
that is actually beautiful and makes sense in the 21st century, that is an unbelievably difficult
job. I mean, then you're like competing against 4,000 years of history of the chair. And if you
want to create an ad that sells beer, but also is truly delightful, you know, is basically,
is delightful for an audience to see. You and I know that's a very difficult task.
Yeah.
Because you're ultimately competing against 100 years of beer advertisement. And there was so
much good work already being done in beer advertisement and in chair design. And to
create something that is delightful as in new, surprising, maybe humorous, or maybe particularly
gorgeous. But that's fun to see for a person and sells the beer, of course, still has the
functionality.
Right.
That's a very difficult thing to do.
Stefan Sagmeisterとの対話
That was part one of my conversation with Stefan Sagmeister, a world-renowned graphic
designer originally from Austria and based in New York City. When I first met him,
I think it was more than 15 years ago. And I went to visit him in his studio. And he was
very much a practicing graphic designer, taking client work to make a living. Since then,
his work has evolved and his more recent work skews towards art than design.
Naturally, one of the questions that I asked him in my conversation was, do you consider
yourself now an artist instead of a designer? And I was struck by the fact that he was quick
to say that he sees himself as a designer.
It's the same person that I met more than 15 years ago, Stefan Sagmeister. And on the
surface, he doesn't look different. He uses similar language that he did back then. And
he approaches work in a similar, not the same, but similar fashion that he used to, but with
a very different and evolved point of view. From the outside, the work that he does now
looks more like art than design. But I appreciated the fact that he approached it as design.
And you heard us talk about the functionality of the work he does, whether it's low functionality
or high functionality. And that was a refreshing point of view that I hadn't thought about either
art or design having a certain kind of functionality. In a way, I think he may have
reached the status of being like a monk in the field of design. And the words that he uses,
as I said at the beginning, and I hope you heard in my conversation with him,
he doesn't use complicated, big words, but he talks about big, large subject matters,
yet in a very approachable and tangible way. And that may be one of the factors
that make him a designer, not a pure artist. As usual, my three key takeaways from my conversation
with Stefan Stagmeister. Takeaway number one, now is better. Takeaway number two, design has to work,
art doesn't. And takeaway number three, there is no such thing as no functionality.
今はより良い
Takeaway number one, now is better, is the name of his solo exhibition, and he explores
the importance of the long-term thinking. His argument is that the world is getting better
over time. If you look at the world in a microscopic way, in different parts of the
world, in different countries, it looks like they're falling apart. And as somebody who
lives in the United States, and the kind of anxiety that I feel as an individual, and particularly
as a foreign individual in the United States, is much more heightened than when I came to America
as a student 20, 25 years ago. So if you look at in the span of a few years, or even a decade,
maybe the world looks like it's heading towards a worse and worse state. But his argument is that
if you look at humanity across multiple decades and multiple centuries, the world is so much better
than what it used to be. So for instance, he says that 100 years ago, only one in every 10 people
was literate. But now, it's nine people out of 10 people can read and write. So if you look at
those numbers, the world is better, or now is better. And he approaches it very analytically
and scientifically. And if you don't get to go to his exhibition, there's a book with the
same title, Now is Better. And he explores the evolution of humanity and how things are getting
over time, but with statistics, data, and numbers, and then he expresses it in a very artistic and
visual way. So this notion of now is better, it's a very simple concept. It could be a difficult
デザインとアートの違い
thing to admit. But I think that is the source of his optimism as a creative individual and as a
practicing designer and artist now in his 60s. So key degree number two, design has to work,
art doesn't, is actually a quote, not from Stephan, but another American artist, one of the giants of
the 20th century, Donald Judd. He was a sculptor famous for his minimalistic sculptures. They were
simple cubes and boxes made out of different materials. And on the surface, there didn't seem
to be any meaning. And Donald Judd himself didn't try to infuse too much meaning into his work. It
was pure form. And he wanted his audience to appreciate the aesthetics of his creation.
Stephan talked about the fact that when he was actively practicing designer, the way he
made his living was through clients. He would take on client work, and that was the way he made
his living. So his studio worked with and through clients. But the difference between designers and
artists is that our artists work with galleries. The galleries become not necessarily clients,
but they become patrons. And they pay the money, they pay the fee, they pay the sponsorship for
the artists to make a living, and then do more art on behalf of their own interest, not necessarily
デザインと芸術の違い
on the interest of the client. So this notion of design has to work, art doesn't, I think it's a
very simple and clear statement. The thing is, design tries to cater to a specific client and
their needs, and sometimes a specific problem that the client or the organization or even just people
might have. Whereas art doesn't pretend, nor does it try to solve a specific problem. It would
often try to address or make a point, but it doesn't have to specifically solve a problem
and have a specific functionality. Key degree number three, there's no such thing as no
functionality. He talked about this quote that came from a German philosopher in this essay that
he read many years ago. And this philosopher said that there's no such thing as no functionality.
And now what Stefan is doing is that he's dedicating his time and life and the remainder
of his life to exploring and creating what he calls low-functioning design. As I said at the
beginning, when I asked him, do you see yourself as an artist or designer? He was very quick to say,
I see myself as a designer. And that was in a way refreshing, because I fully expected him to say,
oh that I see myself as an artist. But the fact that he sees himself still as a designer, even
though he might not be doing the kind of work that could be defined as design, but he wants to
serve a specific role as a designer, as an individual, and as a professional in society.
And even though he may not be getting paid by clients day by day, day to day, to make a living,
he's earning his living through galleries and other sponsors. But he sees that there's a piece
of functionality, or there's one type of functionality, which is to convey a message.
And now it's better. He's trying to convey a clear message based on data, based on statistics,
and to make a world a slightly better place. I felt that in his own way, in a very pure,
philosophical, but also practical way, he's serving a certain kind of functionality that
he considers low-functionality design, but still with very high calling, higher purpose,
and very deep meaning. To summarize, my three key takeaways from my conversation with Stefan were,
number one, now is better. Number two, design has to work, art doesn't. And three,
there is no such thing as no functionality. If you're listening to this on Spotify,
Stefanの役割
there's a Q&A field, so please do send us your questions and comments.
And if you like our podcast, please leave us a five-star rating. We'll be so grateful.
In the next episode, Stefan shares his lessons and tips on maintaining his motivation as a designer
and as a professional. Now at 60, he's as excited about what he does as ever and is still a
practicing designer and an artist working in his studio every day in Manhattan. Stay tuned.
I'm Rei Namoto, and this is The Creative Mindset. See you next time.
