The Shape of Design

by Frank Chimero

  Copyright © 2012 Frank Chimero

  Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 Unported License

  Editor: Mandy Brown

  Copyeditor: Allen Tan

  Designer: Frank Chimero

  ISBN 978-0-9854722-1-4

  http://shapeofdesignbook.com

  http://frankchimero.com

  For all those on the road —

  Contents

  Front Matter

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part I: The Song

  1. How and Why

  2. Craft and Beauty

  3. Improvisation and Limitations

  4. Form and Magic

  Part II: In-Between Spaces

  5. Fiction and Bridges

  6. Context and Response

  Part III: The Opening

  7. Stories and Voids

  8. Frameworks and Etiquette

  9. Delight and Accommodation

  10. Gifts and Giving

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Liz Danzico

  Frank Chimero and I came together over a shared commitment to jazz. But not only exchanges of music. We emulated the form. He would write a blog post. I would respond. I would improvise one of his hunches. He would iterate one of my posts. A call-and-response approach to a developing friendship.

  We wrote like this alongside one another without ever meeting or speaking directly – much like many of us: we never meet the people we admire from afar. We read their stories. We watch their videos. We inspect their work. We make up the in-between parts. We improvise. Frank’s stories became my stories, our stories. This book is, partly, about making things out of stories, and using them to help us live well.

  Without warning one day, a mail from Frank appeared in my inbox, introducing himself:

  You know what I love about jazz and improvisation? It’s all process. 100%. The essence of it is the process, every time is different, and to truly partake in it, you have to visit a place to see it in progress. Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is the assembly, not the product. Jazz is more verb than noun. And in a world riddled with a feeling of inertia, I want to find a verb and hold on to it for dear life.

  My conversations with Frank began to draw a line between the adjacent systems in the world and our own design process. Jazz. Tools. Art. Pizza. Announce a noun, and Frank helps trace its mutable shape to something more active. A verb! The adjacent process.

  Deciphering and designing these systems is hard work. Done well, and one gets there “the long, hard, stupid way,” as Frank frames it in the pages to come, nodding to the gap between efficiency and the extra effort that compels us to make things with pride and compassion. Our process will vary, but steeling ourselves to persist is what Frank gives us the tools to do.

  In that way, this book is not unlike a more ubiquitous tool and platform, the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Today, we take it for granted, mostly, but its numbering system at one point had to be designed. At a time when telephone poles lined dirt trails, Bureau of Public Roads employee Edwin W. James and committee were asked to come up with a more expandable system as roads were growing in the 1920s. They designed what we know today as the Interstate Numbering System. Prior to that, people relied on color codes for direction. Telephone poles ringed with color bands lined highways, corresponding to individual dirt trails across the country. As trails expanded, telephone poles became painted from the ground up, sometimes fifteen feet high, so trying to distinguish among colors became dangerous.

  E. W. James changed that. He decided that motorists would be able to figure out where they were at any time given the intersection of any two highways. North / south highways would be numbered with odd numbers; east / west with even numbers; and numbers would increase as you go east and north. The Interstate Numbering System was designed for expansion, anticipating the future contributions of people, cities, unexpectedness. It’s a tool. It’s a platform. And it’s still not done nearly 100 years later.

  If you wish to use this book as a tool, by all means, put it down at any time. Leave the road. You will find your way back as the intersection of two points will serve as your guide. Then wander back. This is the point of any road or system after all: to take you to a destination in a time in need. Or, consider the book as a platform and musical score: respond to a passage, to a chapter. Consider Frank’s call your opportunity to respond, and each sentence your opportunity to create. That is the reason they were written.

  I’m honored to say that since that original mail, there have been many Frank mails in my inbox. Later:

  I see a platform and it tells me two things: first, other people’s contributions are important. Second, the world is not done. Wow. If I want to believe anything, it’s that.

  Start improvising.

  Introduction

  What is the marker of good design? It moves. The story of a successful piece of design begins with the movement of its maker while it is being made, and amplifies by its publishing, moving the work out and around. It then continues in the feeling the work stirs in the audience when they see, use, or contribute to the work, and intensifies as the audience passes it on to others. Design gains value as it moves from hand to hand; context to context; need to need. If all of this movement harmonizes, the work gains a life of its own, and turns into a shared experience that enhances life and inches the world closer to its full potential.

  The designer is tasked to loosely organize and arrange this movement. She is the one who works to ensure this motion is pointed in a direction that leads us toward a desirable future. Marshall McLuhan said that, “we look at the present through a rear-view mirror,” and we “march backwards into the future.” Invention becomes our lens to imagine what is possible, and design is the road we follow to reach it. But, there is a snag in McLuhan’s view, because marching is no way to go into the future. It is too methodical and restricted. The world often subverts our best laid plans, so our road calls for a way to move that is messier, bolder, more responsive. The lightness and joy afforded by creating suggests that we instead dance.

  Dancing requires music, and we each have our own song. These songs are the culmination of our individual dispositions. It is a product of our lines of inquiry about the work that we do, and a demonstration of the lens we use to see the world. The first portion of this book concerns itself with these inner movements. We each carry our own tune, and if we listen to ourselves, the song that emerges is composed of the questions that we ask while working, the methods we choose to employ in our practice, and the bias we show by favoring certain responses over others. Each song is the origin of the individual’s creativity; it is a personal tune that compels us to make things, and feel obligated to do so in a way specific to ourselves.

  The second part of the book looks at the milieu of design: the cultural context of the work we create, the parties involved in its making, those groups’ relationships to one another, and the expected outcomes of the designer’s efforts. Design has a tendency to live between things to connect them, so this is analyzed in more detail to find patterns. It looks to weigh the value of fiction, the mutability of artifacts, and the multiplicity of responses available in design. The purpose of all of these assessments is to look at the space around design to identify the moving parts, so one can begin to strategize how to make this movement sway together and respond accordingly as things change.

  The last part of the book focuses on the primacy of the audience in design. It assesses methods to create more meaningful connections with them to unlock the great opp
ortunity of this fortuitous arrangement. What can be done if we speak truly and honestly to the audience of our work? Perhaps this changes the success metrics of design to more soft, meaningful qualities, like enthusiasm, engagement, and resonance. Reframing the practice as something more than commerce and problem-solving lets us focus on fundamental issues about utility. It requires us to raise simple, difficult questions about our work, such as, “Does this help us to live well?”

  The Shape of Design is a map of the road where we dance rather than a blueprint of it. It strives to investigate the opportunities of exploring the terrain, and it values stepping back from the everyday concerns of designing. It attempts to impose a meaningful distance in order to find patterns in the work and assess the practice as a whole. One can observe, from this distance, two very fundamental things about design that are easy to miss in the midst of all of this movement.

  First, design is imagining a future and working toward it with intelligence and cleverness. We use design to close the gap between the situation we have and the one we desire. Second, design is a practice built upon making things for other people. We are all on the road together. These two things dictate our relationship to the world and our bond to one another. They form the foundations of the design practice, so our work should revolve around these truths.

  The practice, simply, is a way of thinking and moving that we use to enhance life. It is available to anyone. We listen to our song, watch how things move, imagine the arrangement, then act. We dance together backwards into the future, giving influence and taking it, forming and being formed. This is dance of eternity, and the shape of design. I hope to see you singing on the road.

  Part I

  The Song

  Chapter One

  How and Why

  “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”

  E.E. Cummings

  If in the spring of 2003 a nightwalker found himself passing by North Spaulding Road, and  –  despite the hour  –  had the presence of mind to look up, he would find a light ablaze on the second floor. He would see me in profile, seated at my drafting table, kneading my face like a thick pile of dough. As I looked out the window, we would nod knowingly at one another, as if to say, “Yes, four in the morning is both too early and too late. Anyone awake must be up to no good, so let’s not ask any questions.” The nightwalker would continue down the street, weaving between the rows of parked cars and the sweetgum trees that bordered the sidewalk. I’d go back to kneading my face.

  I remember one specific night where I found myself on the tail end of a long, fruitless stretch. I took to gazing out the window to search for inspiration, to rest my eyes, to devise a plan to fake my death for forty-eight hours while my deadline whooshed past. I looked at the tree before my window and heard a sound rise from the leaves. It seemed misplaced, more likely to come from the cars than one of the trees next to them.

  “Weee-oooh, wooop, wwwrrrlll. Weee-oooh, wooop!”

  You don’t expect to hear the din of the city coming from the leaves of a sweetgum tree, but there it was. I scoured the leaves, and found myself trading glances with a mockingbird, each of us sizing the other up from our perches. He was plump in stature, clothed in brown and white feathers with black eyes that jumped from place to place. He had an almost indistinguishable neck to separate his head from his body, which I took as a reminder of the potential effects of my own poor posture. The leaves on the branch rustled as he leaned back to belt his chirps and chimes. Burrs fell from the tree, thwapped the ground, and rolled downhill on the sidewalk, eventually getting caught in the tiny crevasse between two blocks of cement, lining themselves up neatly like little spiked soldiers. Then, a suspenseful pause. We both held our breath. Finally, his call:

  “Weee-oooh, wooop, wwwrrrlll. Weee-oooh, wooop!”

  This was not the song of a bird, but the sound of a car alarm. He mimicked the medley of sounds with skill, always pausing for just the right amount of time to be in sync with the familiar tempo of the alarms that occasionally sounded on the block. Mockingbirds, as their name would suggest, have a reputation for stealing the songs of other birds, and my feathered friend was doing so quite convincingly, despite his poor choice of source material. But the bird didn’t understand the purpose of the sounds he imitated. I remember distinctly saying to myself that a bird’s gotta sing, but not like this. And in that moment, a brief little glimmer of insight came to me from the bird’s song: his efforts were futile, and to a large extent, mine were too. We were blindly imitating rather than singing a song of our own.

  Our mistake was the same as that of the creative person who places too much focus on How to create her work, while ignoring Why she is creating it. Questions about How to do things improves craft and elevates form, but asking Why unearths a purpose and develops a point of view. We need to do more than hit the right note.

  Imagine an artist working on a painting in his studio. You probably see him at his easel, maulstick in hand, beret on head, diligently mixing colors on his palette or gingerly applying paint to the canvas, working from dark to light to recreate what is before him. You may see him judging the light, or speaking to his model, or loading his brush with a slated green to block in the leaves in his muse’s hair. This is a classical way to imagine a painter at work, and it’s fittingly represented by Vermeer in The Art of Painting.

  But, if you have ever painted, you know that this image is not a full picture of the process. There is a second part where the artist steps back from the easel to gain a new perspective on the work. Painting is equal parts near and far: when near, the artist works to make his mark; when far, he assesses the work in order to analyze its qualities. He steps back to let the work speak to him. The second part of painting is captured in Rembrandt’s The Artist in His Studio.

  The creative process, in essence, is an individual in dialogue with themselves and the work. The painter, when at a distance from the easel, can assess and analyze the whole of the work from this vantage. He scrutinizes and listens, chooses the next stroke to make, then approaches the canvas to do it. Then, he steps back again to see what he’s done in relation to the whole. It is a dance of switching contexts, a pitter-patter pacing across the studio floor that produces a tight feedback loop between mark-making and mark-assessing. The artist, when near, is concerned with production; when far, he enters a mode of criticism where he judges the degree of benefit (or detriment) the previous choice has had on the full arrangement.

  Painting’s near and far states are akin to How and Why: the artist, when close to the canvas, is asking How questions related to craft; when he steps back, he raises Why questions concerned with the whole of the work and its purpose. Near and Far may be rephrased as Craft and Analysis, which describe the kinds of questions the artist asks while in each mode. This relationship can be restated in many different ways, each addressing a necessary balance:

  How & Why

  Near & Far

  Making & Thinking

  Execution & Strategy

  Craft & Analysis

  The relationship between form and purpose  –  How and Why  –  is symbiotic. But despite this link, Why is usually neglected, because How is more easily framed. It is easier to recognize failures of technique than those of strategy or purpose, and simpler to ask “How do I paint this tree?” than to answer “Why does this painting need a tree in it?” The How question is about a task, while the Why question regards the objective of the work. If an artist or designer understands the objective, he can move in the right direction, even if there are missteps along the way. But if those objectives are left unaddressed, he may find himself chasing his own tail, even if the craft of the final work is extraordinary.

  How do you work? How do you choose typefaces for each project? How do you use this particular software? These questions may have valuable answers, but their application is stunted, because each project has different object
ives. Moreover, every individual is in a different situation. Many How questions, much to the frustration of novices, can’t be answered fully. Ask an experienced designer about How they work and you may hear, “It’s more complicated than that,” or “It depends.” Experience is to understand the importance of context, and to know which methods work in which contexts. These contexts are always shifting, both because requirements vary from job to job, but also because ability and tendency vary from individual to individual. We each have our own song to sing, and similarly, we each have a store of songs we can sing well.

  Variation in context implies that it is just as important to discuss Why decisions are being made as to How they are executed. If we wish to learn from the experience of others, we should acknowledge that making something is more than how the brush meets the canvas or the fingers sit on the fret. A process includes all of the reasons behind the decisions that are made while the brush or fingers move. We can get closer to the wisdom of other people by having them explain their decisions – not just in How they were executed, but Why they were made. This is a higher level of research, one that follows the brush up the hand and to the mind to investigate the motivations and thought processes used so that they can be applied in our own situations.

  The finished piece on its own, however, frequently acts as a seductive screen that distracts us from this higher level of investigation. The allure of the veneer hides many of the choices (good and bad) that were a part of the construction; the seams are sanded out and all the lines made smooth. We are tempted by the quality of the work to ask how to reproduce its beauty. And how can you blame us? Beauty is palpable, while intentions and objectives are largely invisible. This leads us to ask How more frequently, as if the tangibility of these characteristics were to somehow make them superior. But asking Why unlocks a new form of beauty by making choices observable so they can be discussed and considered.