Zen as a design style?

Fragmenten uit een e-mail uitwisseling, oktober 2013

Met zijn ‘zen als leefwijze’ nodigde Maarten Houtman ons uit in ons volle, gehaaste leven ruimte te maken voor het ‘overal aanwezige’...
Is zo’n leefwijze van invloed op de kwaliteit van je leven, op wat je maakt?
Bevan D. Suits, designer en publicist uit Atlanta, Georgia, (USA), stelde ons via www.taozen.nl de vraag, hoe Tao-zen zich verhoudt tot de Nederlandse design cultuur.

Grafisch ontwerper Peter van Balgooi, ontwerper van het drukwerk van stichting ‘Zen als Leefwijze’, en Hein Zeillemaker, maker van de website, gingen met hem in gesprek en wisselden de volgende berichten uit.

Bevan Suits wrote:

Thank you for a unique and valuable website, quite lacking in ‘extras’. An authentic and home-grown practice and method you are presenting. One question: How does the Tao-zen approach fit with Dutch culture of design, such as the work of Gerrit Rietveld.

Hein Zeillemaker wrote:

Dear sir,


Thank you for visiting our website, and for your kind opinion about it's style.

You are quite right, the Tao-zen website is just a home-grown product, a result of many years of rebuilding and restyling. A great help for me were the instructions in lay-out I received from our Tao-zen teacher Maarten Houtman, who himself was a graphic designer and teacher.

What you say about the lack of extras in the website appeals to me.
 I recently edited one of Maarten Houtman’s speeches (from April, 1992). Speaking about the intensity necessary for meditation – and as a way of life - he said the following:

“That intensity is located in the plain, in the simplicity, in the parsimony, in the undecorated.”

As Maarten Houtman was a person who fully embraced life, this should not be misunderstood as Calvinist austerity. He was always emphasizing that you can meet the Oneness within your daily life – not in the so-called ‘great things’, ‘important things’, ‘exalted things’, but just in the simple things of life.

Thank you for making me happy in recognizing some of this in the design of the Tao-zen website.