The Shape of Design

by Frank Chimero

  We should look to jazz and improvisational theater  –  the two formalized creative pursuits that use improvisation  – for guidance. Both have developed common rules that are meant to ensure a fruitful process. The first maxim of improv is “Yes and….” This rule is easy to understand, but like most cardinal virtues, it is much more difficult to execute than to grasp.

  “Yes” dictates that each contribution is valid and accepted. The rules of the game, the whims of others, and indeed our own, preserve momentum and keep us from self-editing too early. Momentum is the most important aspect of starting, and rejecting and editing too soon has a tendency to stifle that movement. For instance, if you and I are improvising a scene on stage, and you say something I wasn’t expecting, I can’t pull you aside and ask you to change your line. The continuity would be broken, so I must accept what you offer, and then build on top of it. It’s the same whether we are working collaboratively in a group, or if I am simply in dialogue with the work like the painter at his easel.

  The “and” part of the “Yes, and…” maxim dictates that improvising is an additive process that builds itself up with each choice like a snowball rolling downhill. The back-and-forth dialog that happens from these contributions in jazz and improvisational theater resembles the structure of renga. The renga master Basho described the spirit of collaborative poetry as transformation: the poem achieves a newness when it changes hands, has new words added, and cumulatively builds up.

  That newness only worked, in Basho’s words, by “refraining from stepping back.” To steal from our old analogy of stepping back from the easel as a way to analyze the work, judgment is an important part of the creative process, but when improvising, self-criticism and evaluation from others must be avoided in order to let ideas develop from their delicate state. Criticism has a crucial role in the creative process, but its rigor should match the heartiness of the ideas, which become stronger as they develop. The more real an idea becomes, the less suspension of disbelief is required, and the more criticism it should withstand. But all ideas, both good and bad, start young and fragile.

  This delicacy requires acceptance, but rules need to be set before starting so the work has a more focused direction to travel. Saying no beforehand allows yes to be said unequivocally while working. These limitations are the fuel for improvisation, becoming the barriers that hold the sand in the sandbox so that we can play. The promise of a smaller scope makes us forget our fear, and the limitations become a starting point for ideas. An improvisational structure allows us to get to work, because we no longer need to know precisely where we are going –  just choose a direction and trust the momentum. All we need to know are the rules of the game.

  A framework for improvisation allows us to get into the process of making things more easily. Perhaps the most famous example of an imposed framework was created by jazz musician Miles Davis during the recording of his album, Kind of Blue. Davis, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley packed into a CBS recording studio in New York in March of 1959 without any songs pre-written. Jazz musicians routinely tolerated this sort of ambiguity, because they made their living by winging it. But it’s unlikely that any of them predicted that jazz would be reinvented that day.

  The predominant style of jazz at the time, called Bebop, was frenetic and lively, but had a tendency to overstuff songs with notes. The abundance sometimes hindered the musicians’ melodic expression by occupying all the space in the song. Bebop has been described as musical gymnastics, because the style’s flourishes and showmanship forced musicians to negotiate complex structures. In spite of the artistry necessary to maneuver in the Bebop style, it can become too large a load to carry. It’s hard to swing if there’s no room to move. Davis wanted to let the air back into the songs, to give the musicians more space to play. They were asked to improvise with simple scales and modes rather than Bebop’s chord progressions.

  The recording session began with Davis handing each of the seven men a small slip of paper where he had written down a description of their part. None of them had seen any of the songs before coming to the studio, but with the guidance of the slips of paper, they recorded the whole day, and booked a second day a few weeks later. After two sessions, the album was finished.

  Kind of Blue is unequivocally a masterpiece, a cornerstone to jazz music created in just a few short hours by altering the structure of the performance. The musicians accepted the contributions of one another, and ventured out into a new frontier, using their intuitions as their guides. Davis amassed a stellar group of musicians, and with a loose framework of limitations to focus them but plenty of space for exploration, he knew they would wander with skill and play beyond themselves.

  Davis’ example is a bit misleading though, if only for its efficiency. Improvisation is a messy ordeal, wasteful in its output, and it should be accepted as such. The key is to generate many ideas, lay them out, and try to recognize their potential. Don’t be concerned if you improvise and don’t use most of the ideas. There’s always a significant amount of waste when mining for gold. (Unless you’re Miles Davis, apparently.)

  Limitations and frameworks, however, need not be given to us only by someone else; they can also be a self-initiated set of rules that open the door to improvisation. Many of the greats have used limitations to encourage their work: Vivaldi wrote four violin concertos, one for each season. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow a specific rhyming scheme and are always fourteen lines. Picasso, during his Blue Period, painted only monochromatically. Limitations allow us to get to work without having to wait for a muse to show up. Instead, the process and the limitations suggest the first few steps; after that, the motion of making carries us forward.

  The restrictions of a framework take many shapes. They may be conceptual and based on the content, where the limitations determine the subject matter of the work:

  Write a song for each one of the muses.

  Create an illustration for each letter of the alphabet.

  Write a short story inspired by each of the astrological signs.

  Restrictions can also be structural and create compositional limitations:

  Paint on surfaces that are three inches wide and twenty inches tall.

  Write a sonnet or a haiku.

  Choreograph a dance contained in a six-foot square.

  Self-imposed limitations might also be related to the tone of the work, where the inflection of communication is deliberately restricted:

  Paint monochromatically.

  Create a song using a mistuned guitar.

  Draw with your opposite hand.

  Once some restrictions are set, it’s helpful to take a step back and assess how the qualities of the limitations are interrelated, because they may offer some suggestions about where to begin. For instance, a restriction in the tone of the work can provide guidance for deciding what sort of content is best, like how only painting in blue might suggest sad scenes or places bathed in cavernous light.

  Limitations narrow a big process into a smaller, more understandable space to explore. It’s the difference between swimming in a pool and being dropped off in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight. Those limitations also become the basis for the crucial first steps in improvisation. After those, the momentum of making accelerates as ideas are quickly generated without judgment. New ideas interact with the old, and spur off into unexpected places. Each decision is a response to the last and an opportunity to pivot in a new direction, so the process imposes a beneficial near-sightedness, an inability to see anything clearly other than the next step. But like driving a car at night, a little bit at a time is enough to finish the trip.

  Chapter Four

  Form and Magic

  “Design is the method of putting form and content together.”

  Paul Rand

  My body and mind are linked. This is hardly a ground-breaking discovery, but for the longest time, it was a bit of knowled
ge that never changed my behavior. If my mind needed to wander to think about a project, I’d typically sit in a chair, furrow my brow, sip my coffee, and scribble a few things into my sketchbook. That’s no good, though: if the mind needs to wander, best let the body do the same. A short walk is more effective in coming up with an idea than pouring all the coffee in the world down your gullet.

  If I can’t get out of the studio and into the city, I’ve taken to letting my hand wander on a pad of paper by drawing spindly, loopy, mindless marks. I make the sorts of drawings people produce on the backs of envelopes while on hold with the gas company. There is no subject, just as a good walk has no destination; their purpose is movement. My pencil cuts across the paper like a figure skater zipping around her rink, overlapping, skipping, and spinning. The skater ignores the mark that comes in the wake of her movement, and I do the same. This drawing isn’t aesthetic, it is kinetic  –  more like dancing than drawing.

  I’ve noticed that as I draw these knots on the page, the hitches in my mind begin to unravel. I love my trick in spite of its spotty rate of success, because it is the minimum amount of effort and thought I can put into working. Scribbling’s efficiency is a golden ticket for someone prone to creative block; the scrawl is an easy, mindless task which looks like work, and can sometimes turn productive. The drawn knots are no consequential thing themselves, but they do seem to eventually lead to something else that is useful.

  A few months ago, I found myself drawing my tangles onto tiny napkins while on a flight from the west coast to Chicago. I had a pressing project that needed attention, and I wanted to have a clear direction by the time the flight landed. So, obviously, I spent most of the flight looking out the oval window instead of working. I could see Illinois in all of its flat, tiled splendor: farm after farm, as far as the eye could see, a tight grid of wheat browns and cornstalk greens. Two plots merged to make a rectangle, four merged to make a square, and a circularly tilled plot interrupted the quilted arrangement. I couldn’t see everything from up here, so I imagined the other parts. I filled in the gaps by remembering my drives to Chicago, and pretended that the plane cabin had the smell of soy and corn permeating through as my car had when I took road trips along I-55 years ago.

  My pen continued gliding over the napkin. I could see through my window how the terrain fit together and how the crops were planted. My pen zipped back. I imagined the names of the streets in an imagined sleepy Illinois town with a biblical name. My mark doubled over itself. I pictured how the blocks shrunk in size as they approached the center of town, then looped around the city square. My pen gained momentum. I thought about how there must be a Lincoln High somewhere down there, with its champion Cardinals that won the state football title this past year. My pen whipped back around and ripped the napkin, now thin from the flood of ink it had absorbed.

  How nice it would be to get into a plane and fly over our work. Maybe we’d see some patterns and be able to deduce a structure that would let us improvise. We could see some fields and a few roads, and riff our way to a bunch of kids in Cardinal uniforms running through a banner at a pep rally. I spent the rest of the flight thinking about how helpful it is to have an understanding of the work’s structure, and decided that the best way to see the work’s larger patterns was with a vantage similar to my seat in the sky.

  All design work seems to have three common traits: there is a message to the work, the tone of that message, and the format that the work takes. Successful design has all three elements working in co-dependence to achieve a whole greater than the sum of the individual parts.

  The message is what is being said, the kernel of information to be communicated, or the idea trying to be expressed through the work. If the work of design is to be a tool, the message is the utility of the tool. The message speaks to the objectives of the work, and is the promise that the work makes. The value of the work is defined by the usefulness of that promise, and the work’s ability to make good on it.

  The tone is the domain of design, the arrangement the message takes and the inflection with which it is said. Tone expresses sentiment and endears the audience to the work. It is often mistaken for style, but the two should not be confused: style is a formal device used on the surface to establish the tone of the work. Successful projects choose a tone that fits the message appropriately.

  The format is the artifact, the thing being produced. It is often a physical form, such as a poster, brochure, pottery, painting, or sonnet, but also includes the choices that alter a work’s context and placement. Increasingly, these “artifacts” are becoming less physical, and may take the form of an application, website, or even an experience.

  The relationship between the three characteristics could be thought of as levers on a machine: different settings can be chosen and adjusted to yield different outcomes. Specific settings have emerged by imitating the success of others, and, through trial and error, produce well-established couplings, much like food and wine. We frequently return to these settings because of their effectiveness.

  Consider the typical promotional poster for a concert. The work’s message is “attend this event,” and it provides relevant information, such as the performing artists, time and date, venue, and cost to attend. The tone for the design would be dictated by the sound of the music being performed, and the designer works to produce a fit between the two. Posters for metal bands should look different than those for classical performances. In this example, all possible aesthetic outcomes are unified by the format: ink on paper as a poster. The format, however, still has variables. For instance, what will be the size of the poster and where will it hang? No matter what the settings for the levers are, all choices are subservient to the objective.

  The promotional poster is a standard, tried-and-true setting for the three levers, but we must be willing to consider new opportunities and different settings for the levers. Creative breakthroughs often occur when fresh configurations are ex­plored in the message, tone, and format. The interplay of the three levers becomes a framework for improvisation by providing enough structure to guide exploration, but enough freedom to end up in unexpected and fresh places.

  Suppose the designer realized that most of the promotion for a classical concert should occur online, because tickets were being sold through their website, and the information could spread more easily between friends on the web. She could use the potential of screens, rather than spending time on ideas limited by the restrictions of printing. A new format has different affordances and opportunities, so rather than recreating a static design that works on paper, she could produce something native to the web and build motion and sound into the solution. Perhaps the design could have videos of the musicians discussing certain parts of the symphony to be performed, working as an educational resource that connects the musicians to the audience in addition to promoting the show. Escaping paper means that the music could be closer to the message, and the tone of the promotion can directly relate to the sound of the music. A change of format opens new doors.

  This example isn’t intended to imply a superiority of screens to paper. Instead, it’s meant to show that our assumptions can easily fall out of step with the context of our work. We ignore the new opportunities before us when we take the common settings of the levers as givens. It’s wise to step back and reassess all of the assumptions being made at the start of each project in order to define the root objective of the work, reevaluate circumstances, and maximize the opportunities of the current situation.

  Questioning convention can lead to new opportunities by making good on the potential of fresh configurations of the three levers. These explorations, however, should come from a designer’s experience in manipulating content and format. New configurations are judged by the designer’s knowledge of the qualities, necessities, and opportunities of all three levers and an appreciation for how they are interrelated. Fortunately, skilled designers frequently have an understanding of the whole machine from thei
r experiences, and that knowledge can lead to interesting, unprecedented outcomes that teach us how to reconsider our world in a different and novel ways.

  One such laboratory that experimented in reconfiguring our expectations was nestled into the craggy coast of Catalonia. Maybe you know something of the restaurant elBulli and its former chef Ferran Adrià. Perhaps you have heard of his invention: molecular gastronomy, a kind of cooking that merges the kitchen with the chemistry lab. Molecular gastronomy has been used to serve hard-boiled eggs with the yolk on the outside and white on the inside, champagne solidified into a gelatinous cube, meringue made from rose petals, and avocado turned to puree, then put through a “spherification” process to turn it to a kind of caviar.

  elBulli was the laboratory of a mad man who undermined the foundations of traditional cuisine, but Adrià’s work provided an interesting contribution to the food world. It presented a unique reassessment of the cooking process for a time when technological advances in equipment and various natural gums, extracts, and additives produced by the commercial food industry could be used in the kitchen. Adrià’s desire to question everything can even be seen in how he describes his craft, rejecting the name molecular gastronomy, and instead favoring the title “deconstructivist.”