I am a very big fan of Thomas Heatherwick. This evening, after writing some posts for the blog, I decided to watch a couple of videos on Youtube about his projects. Two videos in, I came across a video in which he talks about the relevance of scale & proportion, as well as the way in which his studio applies critical thinking. Seeing as the blog posts I have just been writing are on these subjects, I feel that I should without doubt share this video. It is fate after all!
ABOVE: Thomas Heatherwick on his studio's approach to critical thinking - 00:00 "We kind of crunch through things and gradually things emerge. But often from quite negative — it is not very romantic to say. But you start to think, what don’t you want to do and why don’t you want to do that and whats wrong? And so theres this critical analysis, reworking, rethinking in your own process. And its like putting something in a washing machine, pulling it out, and its still got the stain in, putting it back in the washing machine until hopefully it won’t wear out completely. But you eventually come to something where you think that’s — that is what we should do.” - Thomas Heatherwick. | ABOVE: Thomas Heatherwick on his studio's use of scale & proportion - 13:20 “[…] to get everything we wanted into it [talking about the new London bus design], it meant it was going to be almost 3 meters longer than the existing bus that people are romantic about in London. And that means it’s starting to become the size of a Euro coach brick, and London’s little street felt that just having this big box moving through our streets, part of our work as designers was to try and minimise that impact, try to make that be as sensitive to the scale of London as possible.” - Thomas Heatherwick. |
Thomas Heatherwick and his studio have a generally different approach to design. This is certainly my view of their work. This video shows prime examples of where my opinion comes from. I own his book 'Thomas Heatherwick: Making' and it is perhaps my favourite book on design, even architecture. It is a continuous source of inspiration for me, as is the man himself, and his studio too. To hear him talk about the subjects which I have just been researching and writing about is inspiring. Earlier I wrote about how I will apply critical thinking in more depth and better consider how I use it. This was entirely true and I maintain full intent on that following that statement. But now that I have heard about it's use in a studio which I have so much passion for, I actually feel excited about analysing the world around me in enhanced detail and taking more inspiration from it.