Design is what you do to mess with functionality

This seems to be turning into a series… good practice and all.    The one above obviously (obviously)   deals with people who tend to over design for the sake of designing and forget that most things also have a function to perform. Evidence is all around you.

Fonts used: Lowdown & Yanone Kafeesatz (thin)

OK, I normally wouldn’t be doing this but… I am. For some reason.
So, joining the ranks of Flickr pool and people who started the whole deal (Jon, Shaun, Veerle et al) here’s my contribution:

As you can see, I drew my inspiration during recent visits (in a bike messenger role) to design heaven – kindergardens.

I would have used Comic Sans (as the most widespread font in such design hostile environments) but I felt it would be to obvious (besides, someone else beat me to it).

The other day I took a walk through the section of the city park in Maribor where Matjaž Krivic relocated his excellent exhibition called Earth Temples after two months on display in Ljubljana.
I’ve seen it all about six times already but I just can’t get enough of it for some reason. But that’s beside the point.

I noticed a girl, probably in 6th grade or thereabout, stopping at each photo and taking notes in her notebook. Then I realized there were some 20 more up and down the exhibit, all doing pretty much the same thing.

I got curious what was going on, specifically because of the notebook and the odd way she was looking at the photos, so I approached and asked what the deal was.
She told me it was a school assignment. Apparently they were told to have a look at the photos and write a report. Naturally I took a peek at what she had taken down in her notebook and then it hit me! I realised what was odd about the way she was looking at photos.

She obviously found a way to structure art, at least thats what it looked like in her notebook. For each and every photo she wrote down where it was taken, probably time and date, the subject of the photograph, positioning of subjects etc.  in other words pure technicalities that don’t really have anything to do with the message Matjaž was trying to forward.

I’m betting she went home and opened up Excel or (if she’s trendy) maybe even Google Spreadsheet and started entering the “raw data” collected on site.   
She probably copied the official introduction and wrote a short conclusion marking the exact position of the stars and planets in the solar system at the time she was looking at the exhibition.      Knowing teachers, she’ll probably even get a good grade for it…

To each his/her own I guess, but IMO the feeling of those marvelous places in photographs was completely lost on her and others doing the same thing. Tragic innit?