I love reading books. And most often I read books which contain some knowledge about whatever. A Designer should be interested in everything, as I am used to tell my students. And the question which makes me really tick since a while, is: is it us who makes our world or is it the world, which makes us? The answer seems to be quite obvious, but it isn’t at all!
Of course we are trained and educated in a certain environment and society. And this training gave us a certain way to think, to think using certain strategies or in certain ways. And these ways of thinking make, how we perceive our world. And how we perceive our world makes how we act in our world. And the feedback on how we act in the world makes once again our perception. The image of what humans are like, differs from era to era. Sometimes the heart is the home of the soul, than we are compared to machines and nowadays to computers which work using a certain software. The future of this might be, that we loose ourselves and become part of something bigger than us. But this is not, what I wanted to say.
I wanted to say, that each culture, era and society develops their own thinking tools. And these thinking tools define how we see the world and how the world sees us. The big question is, when are we able to develop these thinking tools? And with thinking tools I also mean the emotinal aspects like empathy. I suppose that we learn these tools during our childhood. This question is especially interesting for Designers or other people, which need the ability to think creative and to understand needs and wants. And the other question is, how to raise this ability in countrys with a very special structure of education and government, like Egypt and also somehow like China. Means in countrys, where certain decisions are most often not done by the individuals but by an authority on the next level. And the decisions are often not discussed but very emotinal and based on a very personal point of view. So the lower level has no chance to understand the decision and therefore it makes no sense to think about it or to plan something. And because it is as it is some people are not in need to learn to think and to come to own decision on a higher level. And this is a big bug in every society.
We can only think, what we are able to think. So we can only see, what we are able to see. Together this leads to the idea, that we can only imagine, what we can think and see. We really create ourselves through our storys and through our imagination. We create ourselves every day using the thinking tools we once learned. And without these tools the storys we can create stay on a quite low level.