#HTE

The Jeff Goldblum Speech from “Jurassic Park” That Can Be Applied to Industrial Designers

We used to be limited by drafting technology and production technology. There was a point where if you couldn’t sketch something and/or make it with human hands, it would never see the light of day. And those limitations provided a convenient boundary between designing for reality and designing for IDGAF*.

The advent of CAD and digital fabrication began erasing that boundary, and for the most part we as a society have used it to good effect. But every once in a while you’ll see some designer pull a Gehry, where they design some functionless, absurdly arbitrary shape that came from a combination of sheer whimsy and randomly pulling splines around in CAD. Previously, abominations like these were impossible to produce, but with digital fabrication people can bring even the most inadvisable shapes into the real world.

The other night I was re-watching Jurassic Park, and it struck me how applicable the speech uttered by Dr. Ian Malcolm, the chaos theorist played by Jeff Goldblum, is to the type of designer mentioned in the paragraph above. Admittedly it’s not a perfect fit, but if you swap the words “genetic power” and “scientific power” with “CAD” and “digital fabrication,” you’ve got something a professor might chastise you with in a design crit:

*I Don’t Give A…