Sunday Quotation: adding and substracting

"Perfection is reached, not when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there

is nothing left to take away, when a body has been stripped to its essence.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

This sentence reminded me of that other very famous one by Michelangelo. The Italian master said, that  in order to reveal the hidden form within a block of stone, one had to remove what was not necessary. Michelangelo thought that he could reach perfection by substraction.   Which made remember the design method by Birsel+Seck called "Destruction Reconstruction". 

I found the quotation by the author of "The Little Prince" hopping  from one link to another in my personal enquiry about the category and the practice of prototyping. More precisely, about prototyping as a method of designing and co-designing. 

I have the impression that a prototype is something far removed from the idea of a complete, perfect thing. That's why a prototype is valuable. Perfection leaves little room for ambiguity. Maybe it stops our imagination. I closes any dialogue. Contemplating perfection leaves us ecstatic but also unable to speak.

Maybe that the cultural matrix where Saint-Exupery live in his time operated in completely different spaces to the one where prototyping is. In Saint-Exupery's  very personal idea of aristocracy, probably, there was little room for the craftman's wisom that is hidden ... within prototypes. 

What would Saint-Exupery had thought about the idea of prototyping culture that Adolfo Estalella and Alberto Corsín have been exploring recently in a Madrid conference?-