P2_Sarang Kang

C L ES Miracles Miracles Miracles Miracles Miracles Miracles The Miracles of Life

I

M RA The Moracles of Life

Introduction “The Miracles of Life” was used by excerpts from the novel “Miracles of the Namiya General Store” by a Japanese author named Keigo Higashino and quotes from “Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth”. People, these days, invest a lot of time in self-development and read a lot of that kind of book. Through this project, I did this project by combining 8 actions that people can make their lives happier and more valuable with quotes from novels. I thought that Keigo Higashino’s novel was a good fit for this theme, as it was a book about people who were struggling to overcome difficulties and lead a better life through letters.

The Miracles of Life.

BOOK DESIGNED BY SARANG KANG COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO APRIL 2022

You have to be willing to grow.

Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design.

Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.

We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand.

Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.

I want you to value life. Yours and others. More than you ever have before.

-Miracles of the Namiya General Store-

Allow Events To

Change

1

You.

Be a fighter. Give it everything you’ve got. Even a losing battle is worth fighting. Go out and make your mark. -Higashino Kaigo

Begin

The aim is to stimulate discussion in all areas of visual communication – in education, in practice, in the organisations that represent design’s aspirations and aims – as well as outside design. The changing relationship of advertising, graphic design, commerce and culture poses some profound questions and dilemmas that have recently been overlooked. If anything, these developments are accepted as an unproblematic fait accompli.

In consequence, many young designers have little conception of the values, ideals and sense of responsibility that once shaped the growth and practice of design. The profession’s senior figures, who do, are for the most part quiet. Adbusters’ welcome initiative reasserts these considerations as fundamental to any sensitive interpretation of graphic design’s role and potential.

Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

Anywhere.

2

We are now left with a spiritual hollowness. The belief systems of consumption and commodity have been exposed as empty. Revolution is a distant echo lost in the white noise, and religion has been largely subsumed by globalisation. Virtual experiences have replaced human touch. Analogue culture is now the exotic.

We have managed to create for our children, perhaps for the first time in history, a future which is less hopeful than the one we live in today.

3 When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

Is More Important Than Outcome.

This generation was replaced by he Thatcher / Reagan paradigm of Culture = Money. Thinkers became earners, Creatives became entertainers, and a whole dumbed-down generation now feels entitled to success and profit without having to work or think too much

Pr Pro Proc Proces Process

_______________________.

4 Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty.

History gives growth a direction.

But a memory is never perfect.

Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself

Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life.

They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

Which is harder: devising an unsolvable problem, or solving that problem?

Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old–tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

5

Be a fighter. Give it everything you’ve got. Even a losing battle is worth fighting. Go out and make your mark.

Traveling The world is not yet clothed in garments which befit it; in architecture, furniture, clothes, we are still using and wearing things which have no real relation to the spirit which moves our life. We are wearing and using them simply because we are accustomed to them. The intellectual excitement which moves individual designers does not affect the mass of people. The majority still think Gothic architecture to be appropriate to churches, tho’ Gothic architecture is simply a method of building appropriate to stone and is not really more Christian than Hindu. We still make tables and chairs, even when we make them by machinery, with the same ornamental turnings & cornices & so forth as when furniture-making was the job o f a responsible handicraftsman. We still wear collars and ties, whether we be kings, clerks or furnace men, though there is no necessity for a collar or a tie in any of these trades. All this is merely intellectual sloth; nobody can be bothered to live according to reason; there is even a strong national feeling of distaste for any attempt to do so. Doubtless a distrust of human reason is reasonable, but few adventures are more honourable than an attempt to live by it.

Alone

Is Helpful For A New Perspective On Life

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6

There are, then, two worlds & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies.

On the one hand is the world of mechanised industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life — provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings; a world regulated by the factory whistle and the mechanical time-keeper; a world wherein no man makes the whole of anything, wherein the product is standardised and the man simply a tool, a tooth on a wheel. On the other is the languishing but indestructible world of the small shopkeeper, the small workshop, the studio and the consulting room — a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly know n and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.

It didn’t bother me. It excited my curiosity.

And I believe there is no greater sin than to leave one’s curiosity unsatisfied.

P

From Learning to earning, and now to Yearning, we have forgotten why we are here. We have lost touch with what made us tick, the fire of creative possibility that once consumed us from within. Revolutionary thought is but a distant memory. I grew up as part of a generation that thought it could help improve society; that our sole function was to be conscious and to spread that consciousness through creative awareness, exploration, observation and questioning.

The world is full of mysteries. And the joy of uncovering even the slightest mystery is incomparable to any other joy you will ever know.

Value F

7.

inding.

We are living in an age where millions of colours became 256. Difference is the enemy. Generic culture hypnotises us all into generic patterns, were control is visibly invisible. Danger is replaced by fear. New means upgrade. Risk is obsolete. Art made money stupid, and money made us fools. We welcome no_use, no_function and no_fear. Anarchy, crash and burn, the new awaits.

LAUGH

There is nothing specifically human about such things or in such beauty. They are not redolent of man’s delight in himself or of his love of God. But that is neither here nor there. We have elected to order manufacture upon inhuman lines; why should we ask for humanity in the product?

Whether the present system will or can endure is simply irrelevant to this essay.

The manifold injustices and miseries which seem to be its accompaniment may or may not be inevitable, & in any case are not here our concern; the conditions under which things are made, the material conditions, the technical conditions, are alone relevant.

We are simply concerned to discover what kind of things can be made under a system of manufacture which, whatever its ethical sanction or lack of sanction, is certainly the system we have, the system of which we are proud and the system few desire to alter.

8

People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh.

Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

Photographers Tim Swaan Alexander Schimmeck Fallon Michael Federico Beccari Andrew Riddley Andraz Lazic Carl Newton Joe Beck Nong V K8

Book Designed by Sarang Kang Columbia College Chicago April, 2022