An Interesting Question

Since I’m going to be a design­er in Cana­da, I was curi­ous to see some­thing writ­ten on a web site for a design local design shop that I had not known of until recent­ly, Indus­tri­al Brand Cre­ative.

The ques­tion was: Is There Any­thing Cana­di­an About Our Design? It was raised dur­ing a Design Com­pe­ti­tion that was held here in Novem­ber (and I was unfor­tu­nate­ly igno­rant of that as well, not because I want­ed to enter, but I feel that I haven’t yet learned enough about the design com­mu­ni­ty here. I do know there is a lot of tal­ent here. That’s pret­ty evi­dent wher­ev­er you look.)

The dis­cus­sion includ­ed some obser­va­tions that could apply to a num­ber of dis­ci­plines, design just being one of them:

Cana­da is a very big coun­try, but our pop­u­la­tion, just twice the size of most of the world’s major cities, is con­cen­trat­ed pri­mar­i­ly in three urban cen­tres with vast bod­ies of water, prairies and moun­tain ranges sep­a­rat­ing them. Added to these fac­tors are the dizzy­ing array of cul­tures, reli­gions and lan­guages our most­ly immi­grant pop­u­lace brought with them, it would be eas­i­er to argue that these geo­graph­ic fac­tors would lead to region­al­ism with­in Cana­da more than pro­duc­ing any com­mon style. Per­haps any “Cana­di­an style” is a direct result of post mod­ernism and the mix of these many back­grounds, per­spec­tives and cul­tur­al predilec­tion for trav­el and explo­ration which makes us flex­i­ble, skilled (if not rather under­paid) pro­duc­ers of high qual­i­ty design. This cel­e­bra­tion of diver­si­ty is our key strength, and is arguably the only real Cana­di­an truism.

I guess I like every­thing about that quote, except for the word ‘under­paid’.
writ­ten while lis­ten­ing to: Carl Nielsen — Wind Quin­tet — iii. Prae­ludi­um: Ada­gio — Tema con variazioni’