Design, citizenship and the city
11 October 2008
Likely to say: “Enlightened design requires the synthesis of effort, desire and serendipity. Sometimes the best design is… no design.”
Previous offences: Meditation retreats in Nepal. Burning Man. Environmental activism. Wind chimes. Veganism.
Will ruin your project by: confusing spiritual development with web development.
No matter what the specification says, the Zen Master knows that your soul yearns for something more. Something profound. Something timeless. Something a damn sight more interesting than building a virtual shopfront for your bunion pad factory.
The exploratory (indeed, only) phase of his “holistic” design process is pitched somewhere between Freudian psychoanalysis and a Socratic dialogue, concentrating on uncovering your repressed traumas, existential dilemmas and psychic blocks rather than shifting boxloads of bunion pads to the world’s hobbling masses. The Zen Master, centred, tranquil and placid, will be entirely undeterred by missed deadlines and enraged clients, seeing them as an opportunity for “growth” rather than a harbinger of lawsuits to come.
In the end, but far too late, you realise that arguing with him is exactly what he wants, so you pay him to go away, write the whole project down as a loss and leave him to return to his cloud, older, wiser, poorer and considerably more traumatised than when you started.
Five years later he’s still keeping in touch.