Showing only Notes & Links tagged empathy on art, design, creativity and, technology by Casey A. Gollan

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Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy

Fact:

As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.

In other words, the iPad is (once the geeks get over it) the computer for people who don’t really care about computers. It sounds kind of antithetical because the device has caused such strong reactions among nerdy-types, but in the long term it opens the door for designers to create mind-blowingly intuitive, user-friendly* interfaces to accomplish simple real-world tasks (think reading, drawing, organizing; not hacking).

(via jenbee, who must’ve been reading my mind about what I was about to post)

* Where have we all heard that term before? It was, forever—and maybe still is—how most people describe the difference between Macs and PCs. Now “more user friendly” is the reason to switch from laptop to iPad.

Photographer Sam Falls on conceptual art:

More and more I think that the only art that really sticks with me is art that I have an emotional connection with. I really dig conceptual art that requests time and mental processing, but this usually ends up in a sort of “knowing” that doesn’t necessarily drive me back to the artwork. The pieces I always return to and can look at over and over in a museum’s permanent collection are works that make me feel and not think, where there’s no pedagogy but just empathy.

As an artist I definitely fall on the side of pedagogy, but I know exactly what Falls is talking about in regards to empathy, because those are the pieces that I return to as a viewer.

An artist friend told me a couple years ago that his goal was to make people cry, and that has always seemed to me like a very worthy endeavor and the reaction I have with my favorite pieces of art, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, or Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy—I don’t know why. I don’t care if an artwork makes me really sad or elated, so much that I really feel something. I like Romanticism and the old notions of the Sublime, thinking about Melancholy and the huge role it’s been playing for centuries in western culture. I don’t think these concepts are passé and the individual’s flux in emotion relative to nature is still a very real and worthy endeavor in the arts.

I tend not to think about being attracted to art because it makes me feel, because I’m not really sure what that specific feeling is most of the time. Some art is just magnetic.

Definitely worth checking out the interview and Falls work, his descriptions of how he approaches creating his work reminds me of what I love about photography.

(via jenbee)