Design from Without

When I hear “Design from Without,” I immediately think of getting inspiration from an outside source.  Whether it is someone else’s work or an idea from nature, designers must pull ideas from every aspect of life.  The perfect example that I can think of for pulling ideas from outside sources is the photographer Sir Cecil Beaton, who used a Jackson Pollock painting as inspiration for his vogue photo shoot in 1951.  Beaton was an interior designer, photographer, fashion designer, and style icon from England.  As an artist, designer, and creative mind, Beaton looked outside himself to find the next trend and search for new beauty.  Even the painting that Beaton found inspiration from was created by design from without.  Jackson Pollock painted many pictures, but not in the usual sense of painting.  He used the flow of the paint and the movement of his body to form lines and splatters on a canvas.  His outside source was the natural movement of liquid, the actually physics of viscosity.  

 Cecil Beaton for Vogue, The New Soft Look, 1951

Sure, everyone has great ideas, but as “Stone Soup” day (talked about in my previous post) showed, collaboration is the key to design success.  A design must use other ideas to truly make something amazing.  This just emphasizes more on how important communication is; talking a plan or idea out with a peer or mentor could lead to huge new ideas.  Even if there is no one to speak with, go out, look around, the world is filled with objects and things that will spark some imagination when you as a designer are stuck in a rut.