Nick Bollen

I think that these days designers and artist in general draw their inspiration from everywhere and everyone they can. We in this design course are incouraged to. And this makes sense. In our day and age being narrow minded and stuck with tunnel vision will never get you far. You need to be open to lots, if not all the possibilities and design is one of the areas that strives in this sense. Personally I don’t believe an area such as design can be segregated into parts based on heritage. We are involved with a group of people that believe themselves to be at the forefront of our society and it seems a step back to try and keep things PC. In saying that though I think extreme care needs to be taken with cultural aspects of design. For example Im half New Zealander, half Canadian with a bit of Hawaiian tossed in. Does this give me the right to use Hawaiian designs in my work? I don’t think so. Especially with the little knowledge of Hawaiian art that I have. Maybe if I studied it more in depthly and knew what I was doing then yes but otherwise I wouldn’t feel comfortable. Even though in a genetic sense I do have the heritage. But to me I don’t think heritage and cultural background has that much effect on me and my work. To be honest I didn’t feel the desire to be a designer until recently. Ever since I was young I wanted to be a surgeon, a marine biologist and a pilot. Obviously all three would have been quite the mission however I do almost have a private pilot’s license and watch enough animal planet and discovery channel to make David Attenborough feel dumb. And while its probably obvious from my work that I am a New Zealand designer I feel more strongly that a lot of my design comes from my interests in other things as well.