Is it work, even if it's fun? What do you do when others' good moods annoy you? Where does your future self live? Are you only free in your head? In "worklove", Joni Mayer and Birte Spreuer ask questions about work, life, dreams and goals and how to get there. This is not an esoteric guide to self-discovery, but an experiment - developed by communication designers for all the other creative people who are also looking for answers and often don't even know exactly what the question is.
Sometimes you are amazed at how much energy and stamina some designers bring to freelance projects. Joni Mayer and Birte Spreuer pursued the worklove project for four years. A long time in which the two designers not only exchanged ideas across their desks every day between commissions, but also met up weekly to talk about their work, motivation, goals and hurdles.
The great advantage of worklove was probably that the project had no goal or plan. "Everything can, nothing must", say the designers, "that applied from the first meeting to the final print release". Despite all the freedom, Mayer and Spreuer remained consistent and not only met regularly, but also documented every thought on countless pieces of paper. The book was ultimately created from this material.
The project has brought Joni Mayer and Birte Spreuer together and put them on the right track in many respects. "First it was a project", they say, "now we are worklove, an artist duo". They also found it interesting that after the initial purely intellectual work, a desire to explore new levels of design suddenly emerged. "We allowed ourselves to design with feeling, instead of following a strict layout or presenting concrete ideas as usual."
Joni Mayer and Birte Spreuer have done some great groundwork here. You don't have to invest four years yourself, but thanks to "worklove" you can jump straight into self-exploration and either work through all 1264 questions in detail or read across and go on a journey of discovery. Presumably this is also a question of your own personality. But regardless of whether you are the linear type or the intuitive-spontaneous type, this book makes you want to go into yourself. It is therefore perhaps just the right thing for the turn of the year, so that your New Year's resolutions have a solid basis ...
"worklove"by Joni Mayer and Birte Spreuer is available from Verlag Hermann Schmidt and costs 35 euros.
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