The Helsinki Bus Station Theory An Article by Arno Rafael Minkkinen www.fotocommunity.com Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus. Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference. The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest. ...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off. creativitypracticephotographyexperience
Form follows failure Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a "form follows function" argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating. What form does follow is the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do. Clever people in the past, whom today we might call inventors, designers, or engineers, observed the failure of existing things to function as well as might be imagined. By focusing on the shortcomings of things, innovators altered those items to remove the imperfections, thus producing new, improved objects. Different innovators in different places, starting with rudimentary solutions to the same basic problem, focused on different faults at different times, and so we have inherited culture-specific artifacts that are daily reminders that even so primitive a function as eating imposes no single form on the implements used to effect it. Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things Against form follows functionForm follows function evolution