Reflection: Dan Phillips Ted Talk

Dan Phillips builds houses for a world that isn’t afraid of waste. It’s incredible the things you can do when you don’t have a preconceived notion of how things are supposed to look. He makes a very compelling argument that we should change the way we look at the materials in our lives.

Phillips’ incorporation of the gestalt principles into his mission is really interesting. He talks about continuity and how people like to see what they have always seen. This leads to a lot of waste. He uses an example of a broken window pane. Our response to a broken window pane is to replace it and through the cracked one away. Phillips says, why not break all the windows? I think it’s really interesting that we can change the flow of continuity. If it’s possible to do this in the physical world, I want to explore the control I have over the gestalt principles within my own work.

The idea of a spectrum from apollonian to dionysian is really captivating. Phillips says that apollonian perspective requires perfection and that this perfection produces a lot of waste. I know I’ve thrown away pieces of paper because they weren’t pretty enough. On a large scale, this perspective creates a lot of waste. Phillips suggests a dionysian approach to creating instead. This is much more natural. It encompasses the organic nature of human beings and allows for a much more productive creative process.

Phillips also proposes that the vanity of human beings causes our compulsion to force environmental resources to accommodate our ideals. I agree with Phillips that more beautiful and organic work can be produced when we work with what we have, rather than forcing our materials into what we want them to be.