This riff is reserved for folks who take the time to visit and explore this website. I guess my underlying assumption is that it is you folks who are truly interested in my thoughts about "newminimalism". And perhaps therefore you are also interested in why and how I came to invent this way of thinking.
When I was around 12 years old I was struck by my ability to dramatically change my perception of reality. I did it a lot back then but no so much today. Anyhow. I was convinced that a new model of the most popular car of the day was truly ugly. It was an Ugly Duckling and so I wondered how it could be perceived by all its buyers as an elegant and beautiful Swan. People were buying these cars and driving them around without knowing [or caring] that they looked really foolish to me.
One day my uncle and I were following one of these ugly cars and so I began to focus in on it with the sole intent of finding the secret to its success. Almost immediately the back of this car appeared to me in a way that I had not seen before and indeed never saw again. It was thin, elegant, and slim. It was so much more pleasing to my eye in that moment than I felt was even possible. And this vision of it lasted until we pull on past it. Perhaps I had gained a real insight into what others saw when they looked at this car. But. The next time I saw this model of car it was back to being ugly. However, even though it was ugly to me I knew that there was an alternate version of that image locked away somewhere in my mind. And perhaps that other vision was the common, and generally accepted, view of this car. So I began to accept that this car was something that I did not like because I was weird rather than the car was somehow weird.
As a "newminimalist" I now would accept that this car sat on the boundary between my personal needs [in this case my design requirements for a car] and other people's wants [the collective wants of car design for most people].
Richard
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