Series 2 Episode 06: Less is More, More or Less

Avoiding being overwhelmed by the accumulation of stuff is the subject of this episode. From early suggestions to limit our possessions based on utility and beauty, to the beginnings of minimalism and ideas of doing more with less, the episode charts the swing from rampant consumerism to better understanding of our limited resources with concern for longevity and techniques to repair, reuse and recycle.

Transcript

Kevin 0:03

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Living Well by Design with me Kevin Drayton. Now, this week I'm looking at the, the opposite side of the coin of new things well designed that could make our lives better, and instead, I am going to look at the very popular topic nowadays of getting rid of things and how that can make your life better. The well-known architect Mies van de Rohe, or to give him his full name, Ludwig Mies van de Rohe was the last director of the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in in Germany, and he emigrated to America shortly before the rise of the Nazi party actually closed the school. So he emigrated to America and took up work there and his very modernist belief in simplicity and clarity in architecture led to his association with the phrase: Less is More. Now, it was not universally accepted and adopted as being a good thing, as they would say in 10 66 and all that. But that approach to design rapidly became labelled minimalism, whereas really more accurately, uh, perhaps it should speak of elegant simplicity. Now if we take that it does perhaps better explain another phrase for which he's famous: God is in the Details, and the elegant bit of simplicity comes from well resolved, well worked out detailing in architecture and design. However, there's no doubt that minimalism is a catchier, shorthand label than elegant simplicity. So in a way, minimalism is born, and from that, in recent years, we've seen the rise of someone like Marie Condo. The decluttering and organising expert from Japan. Famous phrase associated with her is that you should only hang on to things that Spark joy, which is a great phrase. Pick something up. Does it do that? Does it spark joy in you? No? Okay, well get rid. Done. But if it does spark joy, fine, hang on to it. And she then goes on to talk about how you can best store and retain all that stuff that does spark joy in a way that makes it easy to get at. And that phrase of sparking joy always brings to mind to me the saying of William Morris, many years before:"have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. So utility is pretty easy to sort out. Something either works for you or it doesn't. But beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder. And if you think something is beautiful regardless of what anyone else thinks, then you hang onto it. But he's again, trying to reduce the amount of stuff that we have by requiring it to be either useful. Or beautiful, or I suppose ideally both. Moving forward a little bit, we come to the company Vitsoe, uh, which is now in fact British, although it started on the continent and the German industrial designer-but interestingly, who started life training as an architect- Dieter Rams, was heavily involved in Vitsoe's products. And, uh, his and the company's philosophy was expressed in the term: Less but Better. So there we are. Less is more; God is in the details.; Spark joy; useful; beautiful; less but better. It's all pointing towards the idea of clearing away the unnecessary and redundant and reducing the amount of stuff that we keep. It is asking to look at a more considered approach to the longer term value of things. That value could be military, environmental, aesthetic, practical or just emotional. But it's why we are nowadays talking so frequently, about recycling, donating, upcycling, repairing and renovating. Thrift, darning, patching visible repairs that in some cases actually improve an otherwise holey garment, are very much the things of today. So. It is reduce the amount of stuff, make sure it really gives you pleasure, make your life better, and then look after it, hang onto it. Give it as long a life as you possibly can. So we have to think about what it is that we really need. If you take one way of looking at the question of how we live, you could say that you either take the line that you need manpower to help you- if it's beyond what you can do on your own- or if manpower is not an option, mechanical aids, and I suppose obviously I'm leading to the situation whereby many households in earlier, earlier centuries had lots of servants. Now an argument is that the first World War actually killed off large country houses that had dozens of staff, huge staffs to do with the upstairs, the downstairs, the grounds, perhaps the uh, game keeping and all sorts of other things because we lost so many young men in that war. Large country houses were no longer feasible in the way that they had been before. The flip side of that, if you can't get people to do things, you perhaps try and get help from mechanical aids. Makes me think of the explosion of consumerism in America in the 1950s and sixties. We have got vacuum cleaners, we have got washing machines, we have got spin dryers, all the sort of things that we associate with America at its consumerist peak, I suppose. And although style is not designed, there are undoubtedly styles associated with periods like that. If you think about fifties and sixties America you have to be aware of the look. Of cars, of homes, of clothes, the style of the time. Equally, I suppose you could say that the Victorian landed gentry had a clearly seen, understood style, but in many ways you simply cannot separate style from lifestyle. Large parts of the world have in the recent past, got used to the easy come accumulation of goods. So attention for a long period of time in the not so recent past was very much on what and how to accumulate. Consumerism has now to an extent, given way to a period of rather sharper thinking about what we need rather than just what we want. And so it's all about clearing out, reducing and paring back. But just imagine for a moment, being born into a world where everything, everything, and anything is available to you immediately. Click your fingers. Can be good, bad. tawdry, exquisite, shoddy and robust. It's all there, all available. So how do you go about selecting what you want from this abundance? Coming back to a subject of an earlier episode the Great Terence Conran: at one time, he made a stab at selling a complete prepackaged capsule home kit that, in theory, contained all the furniture, soft furnishings, cookware, bed linen, towels, and so on. That the design enlightened consumer of the late 1960s and early 1970s might need. You just find the accommodation and unpack the moving van of all this stuff. Well, it's no great surprise to hear that the concept, which was sound in many, many ways had no more really than fleeting success. And I think part of the reason for that is that design, much as we would like not to, is almost impossible to separate from notions of social distinction. And it's at that point that the divide between design, oh, as I think of it and style, can become absolutely paper thin. Don't get me wrong, style's got a place in my world. Stylists understand far better about trends, tribes and titillation than most designers do. And they promote, no, I'm sorry. They play a leading role in promoting must have stuff as opposed to need to have stuff. Where would theatre set design, advertising or films be without the cardboard thin, but ineluctably, seductive worlds stylists can magic up. I am not decrying the impetus to acquire things that you don't actually need. And as we've said, neither of course did William Morris or Marie Condo. Beauty and pleasure or capacity to give beauty and pleasure can be sufficient. There's a reason for acquiring, owning whatever, something. In fact, joy can be sparked like a bolt from the blue by the most unexpected encounters. And so we come to the topic of collecting. Now alongside collecting, which is seen as an admirable and laudable thing to do, you have hoarders. Obsessive hoarders, who far perhaps from looking for things specifically to bring together, just can't let go of anything. We've all seen homes that contain oh, every issue of a daily newspaper for many years; every milk bottle that was ever delivered; every child's toy ever purchased, no matter any children fled that home decades ago. So it's the indiscriminate, that's a good word, indiscriminateness of hoarders as opposed to collectors. Who, although just as obsessive, tend to obsess about just a few things and sometimes just one type of object. For no good reason whilst thinking about and writing about the business of collecting as opposed to hoarders, it took my mind back to a children's programme from my early years called Crackerjack, which one or two may remember, and Crackerjack as a children's programme included a section where, I don't know, three children perhaps- my memory isn't that good would line up and answer questions. It was a very early form of children's quiz show, I suppose. And if you got the answer right, you won a prize, something nice, but if you answered incorrectly, you were given, I can't remember if it was a cauliflower or a cabbage, which in those days were not seen as being so attractive to children. Anyway, the point was whatever you won, be it a prize or a booby prize, you had to carry in your arms for the duration of the quiz. So it made you think a bit more carefully because you didn't want to end up with an arm full of cabbages and none of those lovely seductive toys and so on that were being shown as prizes. So as a way of making you think more carefully about the answer to something, I think it had merit. But there we are. There can be guilt associated with disposing of things that we once bought or that given to us by family or good friends. But we change and we develop as we grow, or at least I hope we do. And as we change, so the things that we want around us change. Quite simply, why not let someone else have the benefit and pleasure of something that no longer sparks joy for you? And here we get into a really interesting period in recent history where from Marie Kondo, we rapidly found that we were introduced to Dawna Walter. Anybody remember Dawna Walter? She remains on my bookshelf with a couple of her tomes, which were all about getting rid of stuff that you didn't really want or need anymore, and you'll recognise then the move to something like Stacey Solomon's programme Sort Out Your Life, which was the same thing written on as big a scale as you could possibly encompass on a television screen. We got home makeover programmes by the dozen that always start, as did Marie Kondo with decluttering IE, getting rid of lots of stuff and there are more interweb gurus than you can shake a stick at telling you to how to downsize your possessions nowadays. There is of course, the other side to all this getting rid, and that's what can be generated by your unwanted stuff. We have the programmes, for example, Cash in the Attic and Flog It! Alternatively, uh, you don't want to sell it and you're not capable of renovating your wrecked memorabilia. And so we have the enormously popular, quite rightly so, fascinating programme, The Repair Shop. The skills and craftsmanship available there I think have been real eye openers to many people for the time that it's been going now. We've almost lost sight of the term minimalism, which covers a lot of ground that includes getting shot of stuff. And for a period, minimalism was about just how little you needed to live well. I mean, paring it back to the nth degree, that was the period of capsule wardrobes of half a dozen identical black t-shirts. And not much else. Paradoxically, perhaps, minimalism for me was never about that sort of reductio ad absurdum process so much as the richness and complexity that actually could still be achieved with quite minimal resources. Labels as always can be deceptive; sticking things in in boxes. Some early musical works by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and others attracted the tag of minimalism. What may have started as seeing how much you could do with less soon flowered into whole new musical genres. There's quite a section of my music library, God music library that did now sound pretentious! However, there's, there's a section of it devoted to minimalism and it's descendants as understood at the time. Terry Riley, Michael Nyman, father and son Simon and Arthur Jeffes, Richard Skelton and, and several more. But perfectly demonstrating the connections that can be drawn across time and space to show the fallacy of limiting minimalism to a mid 20th century phenomenon, on the album Discreet Music by Brian Eno, he one time of Roxy Music, we find three variations inspired by Pachelbel's infamous Canon in D. Late 17th century plugging directly into the 20th century. Minimalism? Do we need a label? Yes, oh dear. I rather got carried away there. The point is that whilst a thing of beauty is a joy forever, finding that the beauty or utility we once saw in something has faded or eroded to the extent that it no longer fulfils a purpose for it, then we should not then be ashamed to set it free. Yeah. Perhaps to go on and enchant someone else. At one point in my life, I tried to carry around everything I might possibly need in the course of a working day in my work bag or briefcase as they were called then. Over time, so that I could accommodate a growing cache of tools, I acquired bigger and bigger cases. So it came to a point where carrying this lumber was giving my shoulder real discomfort. I am sure you'll see that the problem, of course, wasn't the contents of the case. Most of the things in it were beautifully designed and worked perfectly for my needs. No the problem was not the stuff. It was my illusion that I could immunise myself against life's problems if I just had the right tools to hand. Once I was able to understand that, I was able to divest myself of most of this baggage and could carry on in comfort and never really felt the need to look back. So there we are, the getting rid of side of making life better by design. It wasn't until I started writing this episode that I realised just how big a business that has become. Uh, it was interesting watching an episode of, what's it called? Digging for Britain?, The archaeology programme on the BBC recently where they excavated what was they believed a Roman settlement where vast quantities of stuff, very interesting to archaeologists, had simply been dumped, slung in a ditch and covered over, uh, stuff that quite simply they decided they didn't want anymore. It was rubbish. Rubbish it may be and laid underground for decades and decades, but there were a lot of people today re acquainting themselves with it and getting quite excited in the process. So stuff itself in itself is really not the problem. It's usually people, human beings that put labels on those things and decide if they're good or bad. You know what makes your life better. You are in a position to help design that directly or indirectly, and that at the end of the day is what this series is really all about. So once again, if you have been, thanks very much for listening. And I very much look forward to joining you again in future episodes. Many thanks and goodbye for now.