GOING NOMAD

Ste­fan Stag­meis­ter, that leg­endary and polemic fig­ure of graphic design, is said to take reg­u­lar breaks from prac­tice. When I say reg­u­lar, I mean a few years on, a few years off. For the whole office. Doesn’t that sound amaz­ing? Surely the work of a (finan­cially secure) genius, right?

I have often won­dered if it is actu­ally pos­si­ble to take time “off” from design (email me if you have an opin­ion on this). As part of my think­ing on this ques­tion I’m going to try take two months off from archi­tec­ture and design to travel fol­low­ing my atten­dance at Archiprix Inter­na­tional 2011.

It will be inter­est­ing to be sep­a­rated from my stu­dio, my col­lab­o­ra­tors, my usual life for this time. I’ll have my lap­top with me, but I’ll be return­ing to my sketch­book and a 2B pen­cil to doc­u­ment what I see, rather than com­mu­ni­cate what I design. Will I really be able to stop design­ing while I am on the road? Is it pos­si­ble to switch off the urge to find a bet­ter approach to a problem?

Let me know what you think. Email me at sarosh{at}saroshmulla.com and give me the low down on your phi­los­o­phy. Stay tuned for more…