Eva Zeisel and the Value of Beauty

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Eva Zeisel is one of my design heroes, so I was excited to find this recently posted video of her talk at the TED conference 2001.  Entitled "the Playful Search of Beauty." She's an incredibly talented designer/craftswoman.  One who has the ability to create elegant beautiful forms.  A skill that I believe many industrial designers struggle with.  Instead we focus on novelty (innovation), our abbreviated version of research, being the lackeys of marketing hacks or adding extraneous features/functionality.   Or we avoid the difficulty of creating simple beauty by complicating forms with purposeless visual elements.  I believe we should never let function be an excuse for bad form.

“Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization.”
-Rowena Reed Kostellow

Do you think industrial designers have lost the value of beauty in their work?  Or is it the opposite, too much focus on form, not enough on things that matter?  Can we have both?  Is it EITHER Karim Rashid OR Victor Papaneck?  Or can we be both at the same time?


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