Reading.

I've just devoured a fabulous book that I heartily recommend to you if you're interested at all in design. It's Chasing The Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time, by Natalia Ilyin. Ms. Ilyin addresses some of the topics I've talked about a bit on here regarding organic information systems and mess, and how these ideas sit rather uncomfortably on our notions of clarity, compartmentalisation and structure.

It would be fine to base design on a great quest for perfection if Web design and sofas and buildings were bounded by a large chain-link fence that divided designed objects from people. But in our world, people and objects are all jumbled together. People, ugly and fat and appalling as they can be, are going to sit on the sofa you make. They are a necessary component of the design process, and the design that ignores them and their real lives is not design but fetishism.

Go mess, go!