We are on one of my (then) many trips to China. My companion is Bradley, a young and impulsive Chinese man. He helps me with my work and is a sort of multi-human, acting as salesman, financial manager, translator, marketer, organizer and above all .... completely unpredictable and a joy to be with. I get to know Bradley when one day he knocks on the door of my office back home in Denmark. He is standing with a plastic bag of dollar bills. He has taken them all the way to Denmark and now they are going to be used to buy speakers at our factory. That was our first meeting. He buys a whole container of speakers, and I get into serious trouble down at the bank when I arrive with a bag of money. It could have come from anything.
1998. Festive Bradley in the purple shirt is my drinking secretary.
While travelling in China, Bradley quickly becomes my drinking secretary, tasked with drinking for me when a toast is called during the many business dinners. He arranges meetings with business associates who don't speak English, where I brew diuretic tea while they throw bundles of bills at each other in their surreal negotiations as I incessantly go to the bathroom. He arranges for me to officially open the year's big electronics fair in Shanghai and cut the red ribbon on live TV. He can't pronounce my name and introduces me for two years as "Ork Willuf". A name that all Chinese business associates use, except the closest ones who just say Ork. I drink fresh snake blood, eat the body parts of strange animals, have dinner with the local Chinese tax chief so our goods don't attract extra taxes and sell speakers in genuine Mercedes finish to wealthy Chinese. No wonder I also have my fate read by a palm reader.
Zeus, (yes and me) 1998. A speaker in true Mercedes finish for wealthy Chinese.
Back then - in 1998 - I was crazy about design. I love Walter Gropius, for example, who sees design as a union between art and craft. I'm into Charles Eames, whose simple, organic forms are great for using different materials. I like Eliot Noyes, who is the first to create coherent design programmes, in a real "corporate identity" and I like Italian design that borders on art, where form does not slavishly follow function but is expressive and ironic. I revel in expressions like "less is more" (Mies van der Rohe) and the antithesis "less is a bore" (Robert Venturi), but frankly haven't gotten anywhere myself. Neither more nor less.
Simplicity in design is hard. It can lose personality and become cliché.
Here I am on a hot summer night in Hong Kong. Bradley suggests I go over to the hand reader and get my life read. And why not? The lines in my hands should tell of my potential, past and future events, and much more. I don't believe that nonsense at all and feel 100% equipped to hear anything. The palm reader only speaks Chinese and Bradley translates. Suddenly he says, out of context, "Ork, you'll never be a designer". The words come out of nowhere and I am in no way prepared to hear them. Not until some years later.
And rarely looks the way we imagined. That's the gist of a book by Dan Gilbert, to be published in 2006. Based on scientific studies, he says that on a scale from 0 to 100, people are happy when we score 75 and above. If we lose a loved one, or if our health is threatened, for example, our sense of happiness drops to the bottom and we may score as low as 20. Dan Gilbert's studies also show that we are quick to regain our sense of happiness. We do this by changing our focus. The book has an example of a US congressman being caught for fraud and subsequently jailed. He is hung out to dry in public, loses power, gets divorced and goes personally bankrupt. Yet a few years later he says: I've never felt better. The drummer, who is sacked by The Beatles in their early years in favour of Ringo Starr, says in 1994 that he is happier than he would have been if he had played with The Beatles. Happiness is something we construct, the book says.
I needed to know Without knowing it, I was waiting - back in 1998 - to be struck by lightning. For years, I had waited for a revelation that would make me as bright as my otherworldly design idols, but nothing ever happened. The episode with the hand reader in Hong Kong makes me admit years later that I don't get the union between art and craft. I have nothing to contribute and am unable to make design expressive, ironic or anything else poetic. That's just the way it is. I don't have it in me. So I find myself making designs that borrow elements from ordinary things. A sunset. A smile. Ordinary things. Suddenly I'm seeing speakers everywhere (in a good way, of course) and happiness goes from 20 to well over 75.
Studies say that 78% of Danes think they are smarter than average. 47% of us weigh too much, but only 10% of us think we have a weight problem. 82% of Danish drivers think other drivers drive too badly. The figures are almost comical, but the misconceptions about our own superiority have consequences that limit us. The problem with overestimating yourself is that you have no reason to improve. Why drive nicer when it's the others who drive too badly? It's the others who are too fat and not as smart. Not us. But it's not always those who pat us on the back that we should listen to.
