DESIGN PROVENANCE

Where does the true value of a design lie?  What constitutes the cultural value of a design?  It is the Design Provenance.

Provenance.

That’s the best word I can come up with that quantifies the origin of our design solutions. The more unique the provenance, the greater value of the design. The more unique the inspiration, the higher the provenance quotient.  See METAPHOR QUOTIENT.

When we think of design provenance, think of it in terms of DNA.  What is the base origin of the design?  What is the molecular construct of the idea?  What is the root?  How original is it really?  How was the design derived?

What then yields a high provenance quotient?  It’s how you generated your idea.  It’s how your enclosure came to be.  The quotient is derived from which base references you selected, and then how you used / modified / expanded upon those sources.

If, for example, the locus of a design is generated via a Pinterest search, then the design has a very low cultural value.  Any fool can do a Pinterest image search and then get back pleasing images. Or if you leafed thru architecture magazines or books and then used an architect’s design as a jumping off point for yours, your provenance quotient is very low.

Whereas if the design concept is generated from, for example, a drawing that you did based on a photograph that you took in Morocco, that has a very high cultural content.  Or you might have made an arrangement of flower petals, and then made a base drawing and projection from that.  Or you might have made a paper sculpture, projected a light on that sculpture, and then developed a form from the shadow of your sculpture.  Any of these examples has a high provenance quotient.  The possibilities, of course, are only limited by your imagination.

A favorite example in these pages is PICASSO AND THE CHICKEN.  Picasso’s process, by putting in the effort to fully understand how a chicken works before he even put pencil to paper, has high provenance.

The unstoppable conflation of our culture is due, to a large degree, to copying / duplication.  The uniqueness of your ideas will be the only distinguishing attribute left standing.

A high design provenance will the the only thing worth paying for.  Anything else is simply scooped up from the homogenized sludge of our cultural dross.  And nobody will pay for that.

The provenance is the message.