Instant Hero

In twenty minutes Ross Lovegrove has become one of my new heroes. His approach to life and design reminds me of Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard who, in his book Let My People Go Surfing, describes his approach to designing rock climbing hardware for his company Black Diamond. Chouinard's primary focus in designing climbing hardware is to simplify, simplify, simplify. He believed that the strongest and most functional designs were also the simplest and most elegant. While other designers were adding features and gussets for strength, Chouinard was removing material that did not contribute a specific purpose. The result: the stongest, simplest, most elegant climbing hardware available. (Photo is of a typical piece of Black Diamond gear from their website. Notice the beautiful organic design).



Enter Lovegrove who, in his incredibly motivating presentation at TED, applies the same principles to his organic designs. Lovegrove's presentation is incredibly inspirational as it draws on the best source in the universe for efficient, beautiful optimized design: God's own handiwork.

I have no idea about Lovegrove's spiritual leanings, so what follows is not a commentary about him, but it is amazing to me how a typical naturalist - one who does not believe that the universe is designed by a personal God - can work feverishly for months, years, decades on developing a style or a paradigm or a method of interpreting the world, drawing on the abundance of design that occurs in nature, and still deny that it required a designer. Designers themselves create things that required intelligent input and effort yet they deny that the designed universe and everything in it that contain design and information required a designer, and instead has come about strictly through chance.

How could science, design and life in general advance if we all focused on God as the ultimate scientist/designer/author and emulated his methods and styles?