Challenge Yourself to Design Better

Challenge Yourself to Design Better

Keep your passion for landscape design and consciously fuel your enthusiasm by visiting new places and cultures. You’ll see landscape design from a new perspective.

Cynthia and Gary Kinman at an ancient Egyptian temple site.

Feel like your designs are uninspired? Sometimes, our day-to-day efforts start to affect our creativity and enthusiasm for landscape design. Make a conscious effort to reverse that. If you don’t, you’ll quickly lose your enthusiasm for design and your creativity will suffer.

If you read our newsletter last month, you know we recently took a trip to several ancient areas in the Mediterranean. Why? We went partly for fun but also because we know a trip like that would renew our energy and creativity, and enthusiasm to create great designs.

Travel renews you
Experiencing new and different cultures and architecture will change your perspective dramatically. Just seeing how others approached landscape design helps us analyze why we do things the same way. By physically going to a completely new environment, you can recharge and return ready to create with more energy.

Even if you’re not travelling across the globe but across the state, you can get out of the daily grind and can indulge yourself in a creative day off. This is so important to keeping your creativity at a high level.

Travel inspires you
When you visit places with different geography and see the use of indigenous materials like stone and plants, you can get inspiration to try things differently when you get home. Anytime you experience a new climate or unique terrain, and see how spaces are used to relate to these factors, you expand your vision and your capabilities as a landscape designer.

This mosque illustrates traditional Middle Eastern use of design and stone.

This corridor illustrates modern use of natural stone in the Middle East.

We saw several ways the Mediterranean peoples adapted to their climate. Harsh sun and wind with stinging sand is the reason that Turks wear their distinctive, protective clothing. Greeks wear lightweight linens in their mild weather. Egyptians wear white shawls to drape on their backs for protection from sun and wind, and then wrap them up into turbans with cording around their heads when they’re not outside.

The architecture, too, reflects their cultures and climates, in public buildings, private homes, cafés, parking garages, plazas and parks. It’s so interesting to observe how architecture and landscape design impacts people in different places. This will change the way you think — more than you realize. When you travel, you will see how space is used so differently.  And once you experience it, you will stop accepting the ordinary!

We saw very inspiring art, too. For instance, we saw how Turkish rugs affected the flooring of courtyards and plazas. Or was it the other way? The plazas and courtyards affected the patterns of Turkish rugs. Actually, we learned that different villages have uniquely patterned crests, which are their local signatures. This is not unlike Scottish kilts, which have distinct tartan patterns per clan.  The art you will see in statues, urns, gates and columns show how it is inspired by history and how it evolves today.

The grandeur of Egypt’s past still stands tall after all these years.

Challenge yourself to design better
When you return from your travels, you’ll want to share what you have observed with your clients and explain with a new passion why you want to do your design. You will be able to take your skills to a new level. You’ll challenge yourself to try new things, and evolve beyond what you have been doing previously.

And once you see local materials, you may decide you want to use them in your projects. We found that stone from Turkey and Greece is very inexpensive, due to its abundance.

We urge you to challenge yourself to continue your growth and plan your next travel excursion now. Travel and exposure to new design concepts should become an integral part of your budget to keep your work fresh and evolving! Each time you go you will return motivated, inspired, and more knowledgeable.

For more information about the Kinman Institute and its seminars for design/build professionalism, visit www.kinmaninstitute.com or call 617-764-8733 (TREE).

A line of ancient statues shows Egyptians thought big with landscape design.