Don't drop the Clangers

Clanger creator Oliver Postgate's wonderful autobiography 'Seeing Things' contains many interesting insights. One that struck me forcibly was what he said after talking to animation students at the Royal College of Art, 'They taught me more than I realy wanted to know about how our simple direct craft had been inflated into a manic pretentious pseudo-art....They wanted me to see how visually stunning their work was and how well it fitted into the current state-of-the-art fashion, in fact how 'good' it was....[But] you can't really ask how 'good' a piece of work is by itself. You can only ask how well it does what it is setting out to do.'

I meet people all the time obsessed with whether their work is 'good' enough. Instead they would be far more productive by asking the simple question: does it achieve what it sets out to do? And, therefore, what is it setting out to achieve?