Alan Moore - Do Design - Why beauty is key to everything

Alan Moore

Published by The Do Book Company 2016
Works in Progress Publishing Ltd
thedobook.co

Text copyright Alan Moore 2016

Photography copyright: see individual photographs

The right of Alan Moore to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-907974-29-8

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For all the people who have designed and created beauty in this world.

For those striving to bring beauty into this world.

For those who will create beauty and share it with the world.

Marzena Skubatz

I have always been fascinated by beautiful things: architecture, furniture, books. Beautiful things are prepared with love. The act of creating something of beauty is a way of bringing good into the world. Infused with optimism, it says simply: Life is worthwhile.

The effort to create enduring beauty is not dependent on style but truth. Beauty is what lends things their immortality.

These objects outlive their creators. They are a gift their creators give to the world. Beauty is resilient, it is life-afirming, it gives back to create more life.

We were all born inherently creative. We all have the capacity to bring beautiful things into this world and should be unapologetic about wanting to create them, whatever they are.

Ask yourself this simple question: Do I want a beautiful meal or a dreary one? A beautiful relationship or an ugly one? To live a beautiful life or an average one? Work for, or create, a remarkable business, product or service, or mediocre ones? There is of course range in what we call beauty, but in the end the truth is that beautiful things endure.

Whether you are an artisan, an entrepreneur, or a CEO searching for some homespun hard-won wisdom, Do Design hopes to inspire, guide and show how we might so elegantly create for enduring beauty.

I would like to invite you to journey with me to explore how we can design and create beautiful products, services, art and culture, stuff filled with so much optimism that it lifts us up.

When astronauts go into space and look down at the earth they find themselves having a deep spiritual connection with it that is both shocking and beautiful. Theirs is a profound epiphany a realisation of the inseparable relationship between the cosmos, the earth and humanity. It is a moment of transformation, of catharsis, an irreversible cognitive shift.

This experience is called the overview effect the moment of seeing at first hand the reality of the earth in space. It is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper- thin atmosphere. Again and again astronauts talk about the overwhelming, almost indescribable beauty, and an awareness that the sun, the moon and the earth, our universe, us, are all made from the same atomic stuff.

We are all interconnected at the level of atoms. The earth is one system, we are all part of that system and there is a certain unity to it, which also has implications for us all.

Edgar Mitchell, scientist, astronaut and lunar pilot from the third lunar landing, experienced this transcendental moment. He wanted to understand it better, more deeply. Returning to earth, Mitchell sought out literature that might explain what was to him a profound, life-changing, even sacred encounter. He found an explanation not in modern religious or scientific texts, but in ancient literature. The term used was salve corpus amanti, literally translated as save the lovers body. This is Mitchells interpretation of this phrase:

You see things as you see them with your eyes but you experience them emotionally and viscerally as if it was ecstasy and a sense of total unity and oneness. The molecules in my body and the molecules in my partners bodies, and in the spacecraft had been prototyped in some ancient generations stars. In other words, it was pretty obvious were all stardust.

From space, the astronauts tell us, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and they feel an overwhelming need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect. This becomes both blindingly obvious and imperative. They speak of unity, rather than discord. They speak about humanity rather than nationality, acquiring a deeper insight into what unity really means.

Many astronauts come home with the purpose and conviction that they must contribute to the future of both the natural world and humanity. They have a calling, an incessant striving for a better way to live, to exist.

Julian Calverley

Theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner Frank Wilczek is fascinated with the symmetries and harmonies that at their most fundamental level are the DNA to natures design model. He asks the question: Is the world a work of art?

Albert Einstein and physicist Paul Dirac both generated theories about our universe that are often described as so beautiful that they are great works of art. Einsteins was the theory of relativity, a beautiful description of how the universe works symmetrically. The Dirac equation is the symmetrical relationship of electrons to the natural world. Harmony, symmetry and maths all point to this atomic elegance.

In understanding the design of our world, there is a gravitational pull towards beautiful theories to describe its inner workings. Long ago, we intuited beauty as a key to natures foundational design model.

Today we explore supersymmetry when searching for the Higgs Boson. Supersymmetry is often described as being too beautiful to be entirely wrong. This elegant theory suggests every elementary type of particle we know of in nature has superpartners, which dance interactively with each other; but for some reason nature has hidden these beautiful exchanges from view. Many believe supersymmetry takes us towards a fully uni ed description of nature at the deepest level. Several of the worlds leading theoretical physicists draw encouragement from its surpassing mathematical beauty and the fact that, for the first time, it explains the very existence of gravity.

How beautiful is that?