Now the spectrum of things which one sees in design - from purely functional
design to purely what used to be called decorative' or 'ornamental' design
- also
represents a spectrum that we see throughout the whole of cultural
behaviour. One way of defining Culture, l think, is to say that it's all
the things that we don't have
to do. We have to eat, but we don't have to develop complicated cuisine.
We have to wear clothes, perhaps, hut we don't have to for instance, have
Yves Saint
Laurent or Pierre Cardin or Levis. You know the world would not be
physically worse off if nobody ever designed another pair of jeans. But
for some reason, we
do keep designing new things and we keep being very interested in that
process. I can tell from looking at this audience and from most of the
people I would meet in
the street, that most people, in some aspect of their life, are interested
in questions of style and design. It obviously is not marginal to us. Now
evidence of that is, if
you look at any other Culture, as soon as they deal with the most simple
survival problems, they start dealing with another area. People start making
their cooking
pots look different from each other. People start producing ornamentation
on their cooking pots, that is strictly not necessary for the job of cooking.
But for some
reason, people keep doing this. The question I would like to ask -
I suppose in order to give you some sense of your own value, and in order
to point out that
understanding the value of an activity is to increase that value -
the question I would like to ask is, why are we spending so much of our
time, as a Culture, involved in
non-functional behaviour?
Why do we make more and more pairs of scissors? Why do we make different
clothes all the time? Why do we keep coming up with new cuisines? Why do
we
keep coming up with new forms of music? Well, let's look at what happens
to you when you engage in what I would call a stylistic space. Now, one
stylistic space
that we're all engaged in, to a greater or lesser degree, is the stylistic
space of haircuts. Everyone here has got a haircut. Now a haircut does
not seem like an exotic
cultural object. But in fact it's one that I would say nearly everybody
here has given some attention to and some people have given a lot of attention
to. And it's a
stylistic area which is purely non-functional. The only thing we really
need to do with our hair is to keep it out of our eyes - not a problem
in my case, but some of
you may have it. So, why do we spend such a lot of time listening to
people telling us about their holidays in Ibiza while they style our hair
in different ways? I think
it's because we recognise that this thing that we carry on our head
tells us a lot. It tells us a lot about ourselves and it tells other people
something about ourselves as
well. When you have your hair cut, you make a number of decisions you
make a decision, shall I have it long or short? Now depending on which
Culture you're in,
that means, shall I be a rebel or shall I conform? It means, shall
I be more masculine or less masculine? Shall I be more feminine or less
feminine? Of course all of
these meanings are quite local. They mean something different here
than they would in San Francisco five years ago, for example.