If I won the lottery the first thing I'd do is buy enough toilet rolls and enough bin liners for the rest of my life.
It's tempting to say "anyway" here and just finish the blog post but I thought I'd try and get all Matt Webb about this.
I've long held the theory that we shouldn't run out of certain things in my house. We're a stable enough household with a regular income and predictable demand cycles that some things should be automatic. Of course we're not running our house like a Foxconn warehouse but still how hard would it be to predict and estimate how many bin liners we need?
Asterisk: we live in a house with two teenagers so black swan events do occur.
Of course some people think bulk buying bin liners and toilet rolls is madness, especially beyond a month or so of demand. But the functional designer in me thinks that bin liners and toilet rolls are never going to go out of date and in fact buying them now realises a huge inflation saving! Storage space might be an issue but let's deal with that later.
First let's think about how many you'd need of the rest of of your life. I'm 47 and the average life expectancy of a UK male is 80 years old. So I've got 33 years left to live. (That doesn't sound like much tbh.)
The average UK household uses 100 toilet rolls a year so that's 3,300 more toilet rolls. A hipster toilet roll like Who Gives A Crap costs £1 a roll so that's £3,300.
I can't find stats for black bin liner usage but I reckon we use 3 a week. My 33 years equates to 1,716 weeks. Bin liners cost 60p each so that's £3,088.
£6,694 would buy you enough toilet rolls and enough bin bags to last the rest of your life.
Maybe we should bite the bullet and do that now. Storage might be a problem. Hence the lottery win and I could buy a house with a room just for bog roll and bin bags like the Kardashians or something.
Anyway.
I worked at w+k London for about 4 years. This is a collection of tributes by people I know. Storing them here for myself but I thought you might enjoy them. Trigger warning some of them are on LinkedIn.
Simon McCrudden, former Planner in w+k London
He tells a tale about the Nokia pitch "On Saturday afternoon Dan sat in silence staring at me as I presented him my terrible strategy."
Iain Tait, ECD in w+k Portland and London
"His brilliance was precisely because he was an introvert, not in spite of it." Dan. The quiet titan.
Michael Russoff, creative director working at w+k London during the Guardian and Honda days.
"I never met Dan. I was in rooms where he was. But I never met/met him."
Michael Wolff, designer and founder of Wolff Olins. It's on FaceBook so I'm not sure if you can read this.
"Like Bill Bernbach who, in his leadership of Doyle Dane Berbach, transformed advertising in his day, Dan Weiden took the baton and, with Wieden and Kennedy, continued to lead."
Creative Review
"If you talk to anyone who has passed through a W+K office, you will likely hear mention of the network’s commitment to the ‘work’ coming above all else."
In 1994, when he was Chair of the Design Council, John Sorrell was asked what design was. He published several definitions in a book released in 1995 to celebrate the Design Council's 50th anniversary. Now, over 25 years later, he has asked 100 people the same question and has published the answers in this book.
This book is a limited edition for the 100 contributors, of which I was one. Pictured below are just some of the definitions of design, including mine. It's a tough question and the answers are very varied, some quite of the moment. (I nearly wrote modish there but I don't mean it in a negative way.)
I've always really liked Ellen Lupton's 'design is art that people use'. I can't better that so I quoted it as my answer.
You can buy the book here.
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