Hjalti Karlsson: What role does doubt play in your life as a designer?
Dana Arnett: I think companies are struggling right now because they’re not able to position themselves in a credible way. Consequently the media is doing this for them.
Richard Hart: In our world you have to be quite chameleon-like because of the client.
Fernando Gutierrez: The idea of a good client is that he is smarter than you.
Jens Martin Skibsted: Well, first I have the lobola, which is basically paying the dowry and how you get married in a lot of Southern African countries.
Yves Béhar: You’re getting married? Alright, I’m putting it down in my diary right now. Yeah! Wow! Congratulations!
Hella Jongerius: Within boundaries you need your creativity because you know where you are headed and how small your pocket is.
Simon Sankarayya: If you weren’t a designer, would you be a failed guitarist? Would you be busking outside Pentagram?
Jurgen Bey: I am a designer. An artist works differently to a designer in that designers always pose two questions.
Heath Nash: What is your opinion on the differences between art and design?
Massimo Vignelli: I say design is utilitarian; art is useful and non-utilitarian.
Paula Scher: But don’t they know that something that is unpolished can be just as big a lie?
Jan Wilker: We do make things before thinking, which is often not very effective, but it does surprise us.
Stefan Sagmeister: Hobbies are for people who hate their jobs.
Harry Pearce: It made me realise that you get close to the people that count for you. I didn’t ever go and look to be friends with Alan Fletcher.
Ross Lovegrove: Unless there’s enough debate, you’re never going to come up with some sort of treatise of observation that can ever move anything.
Fernando Campana: I had to walk through four feet of water in Venice every morning to go to work at Venini. It was a nightmare, every day until noon this deep freezing water, so cold that even with the right boots your feet freeze.
Massimo Morozzi: These are the perils of design. It’s a very dangerous profession.
Milton Glaser: Every once in a while though, somebody who thought they were doing design, does enter into the realm of art.
19 designers. 9 conversations. 128 pages. 10 years of Design Indaba magazine.
Design Indaba Q111 “Conversations” is on sale now. It’s available at selected Exclusive Books, Woolworths and other stockists, or online.
