The Shape of Design

by Frank Chimero

  Every untruth forks reality and opens up a gap between what is imagined to exist and what actually does. Each fabrication creates a second version of the world where the untruth is true. Consider an entrepreneur standing before a few investors describing a technology she’s developing. She is speculating about the potential applications of her research. The work, at this point, hasn’t been applied in the market, and all she has are promising lab tests. Her proposal forks reality: we live in a world where the technology hasn’t been applied yet, but the vision that the entrepreneur weaves about potential opportunity and profit determines whether or not the investors choose to risk their money. They invest if they perceive she can close the gap between the world as it is that day, and the world she wants it to be.

  In an ideal situation, all fiction would improve our collective condition, but as we know, not everyone is interested in making good on their promises. Fiction can also be corrosive and deteriorate the foundations of what’s already been built, undermining the stability of our arrangements rather than helping to build new things or strengthen existing structures. Lies corrode our understanding of reality by misrepresenting it, like a snake-oil salesman that goes from town to town promising medicine, but selling swill. Snake-oil salesmen fork reality just like the visionary, but they have no intention of closing the gap that opens up with their lie.

  The salesman doesn’t tell an untruth in order to get us to work towards it. Instead, he misrepresents what is in front of us so that we buy into a mirage. It’s a messy distinction, and it’s why design, rhetoric, and politics are so sticky and often mistrusted: the language we use to build the world is so close to what can be used to undermine it. Design and persuasion are manipulative, and if we have the skills to seduce others toward green pastures, we can also lead them off a cliff.

  But the threat of a cliff is the cost of the pasture. The world swells, pivots, and grows when we close the gaps of our untruths. A willingness to imagine things differently and suspend our disbelief for one another are the interfaces we create to shape the world. Every time we tell an untruth, we confess that the world is not yet done. We have a hunger for a better condition, and we are, if nothing else, optimistic. The only way forward is through something we’ve never done, so we run full speed into the great imagined unknown to make this world for one another.

  Chapter Six

  Context and Response

  “We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us.”

  Blaise Pascal

  The tightrope walker finds his balance by keeping his momentum. If he stands still, he will fall; if he locks up his limbs, he will throw his balance off. He stays on the wire by moving in response, swinging his arms up and down, and steadily setting one foot in front of the other. Like him, there are no fixed points in our design work, no opportunities to stop and hold still. We must respond and move, simply because the work moves and the space around design shifts as culture changes and the adjacent possible grows. Design is always in motion; we either sway with it or we get thrown off the line.

  The responsive creativity that design requires is similar to what installation artist Robert Irwin started to do with his art in the 1970s. Irwin would make no formal plans before arriving at the gallery where his work was to be shown. Instead, he’d walk into the room and spend a great deal of time observing the qualities of the space, assessing the shape of the room, and judging its light. He would then devise a plan and conceptualize the art based on his observations. The art he produced was a direct response to the context of his work. The space became his material; each piece was an ad hoc exploration.

  Sometimes the space would suggest more grandiose pieces, like his installation at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, where Irwin filled a large wall with fluorescent lights organized into interlocking modules shaped like Tetris pieces. Other rooms called for more minimal tactics, like his piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he merely changed the fluorescent lighting by alternating cool and warm bulbs, stretching a piece of scrim below the lights like a second ceiling, and stringing wire across the length of the room at eye level to prevent the viewer’s eyes from focusing.

  In either case, Irwin’s process is to show up and let the context speak what it requires to him. The relationship Irwin has with the space reminds me of a few conversations I’ve had with portrait photographers about their work. One of the points that frequently comes up is that the majority of their job is to wait for the person to reveal their true self so that they can make an accurate portrait of their subject. The process is mostly waiting, more like listening than speaking, and most photographers say that the best shots come at the end of the session, because earlier exposures always feel rigid and false. The subject’s guard is still up, but eventually, their true face emerges for the camera.

  The necessities and influence of subject and context, whether in portraiture, installation, or design, take time to unfold. It is the designer’s job to figure out a way to have a problem show its actual self so that he can respond to the truth that has emerged. Getting to know a problem is a bit like getting to know a person: it’s a gradual process that requires patience, and there is no state of completion. You can never know the full of a problem, because there is never comprehensive information available. You have to simply draw the line somewhere and make up the rest as you go along. Irwin describes his process, saying, “I took to waiting for the world to tell me so that I could respond.… Intuition replaced logic. I just attended to the circumstances, and after weeks and weeks of observation, of hairline readjustments, the right solution would presently announce itself.”

  In other words, Irwin’s process begins by listening: to the room, his intuition, and the work as he is making it. He then enters a dialogue with the space, going near and far just like the painter in the studio. Irwin’s gaze, however, also contains the space around his work and how his piece relates to its context. His process favors field-testing on-site by improvising in response to the context. He summons a more human metric to forecast decisions by using instinct instead of logic. Logical thinking has a tendency to break when all the parts are moving, so Irwin speculates with his gut, makes a modification, then tests it with his eyes.

  The physical forms of Irwin’s work are not the emphasis of his practice. They are only meant to collaborate with the space and not intended to have any sort of significance themselves. I think this pattern also fits with the way that design operates: the products of design are just the means to an end. They are objects whose existence is rooted in the need that they serve. The primary purpose of the design is to have it do something particular, not be any particular thing. All of this implies that design is a field of outcomes and consequences more than one of artifacts. The forms that designers produce are flexible, so long as the results serve the need.

  Let me give an example. Suppose I sent a design brief to a few designers asking them to design a chair. What might I get back?

  Left: Traditional Shaker Chair, 1860s

  Center: Molded Plywood Lounge Chair, lcw, The Eames Office, 1946

  Right: Wiggle Chair, Frank Gehry, 1972

  We have a multiplicity of chairs from three different designers: a tall rocking chair from the Shakers, a bent plywood seat from the Eames Office, and a curved chair made of cardboard by Frank Gehry. There are certain similarities and patterns in the chairs, because the objectives of the work act as a constraint on the process. They guide the designer to certain inevitable conclusions which are necessary to have the design fill the need it seeks to serve. Each chair has a seat, all form a cradle for the sitter, and all the chairs are of similar size that is based on the proportions of the human body. The constants of the designs are determined by the unavoidable logistical issues that must be addresse
d to make the design useful. A chair, for instance, must follow certain proportions to comfortably hold a human body.

  But the three chairs clearly have differences in structure and style. Multiplicity will always crop up with design, even in spite of constraints, because the work is subjective and without fixed solutions. The products of design are more negotiations of issues and responses to problems than absolute, fixed solutions, and this provides plenty of space for different takes and perspectives. Grouping the chairs together makes it evident that each design is an attempt to fill the need of sitting seen through the lens of each designer’s disposition. Their responses are a negotiation of the problem with its context, and the designers are a part of that context.

  The success of one design, however, does not suggest that the others are less useful or not as good. Design can have diversity in its solutions to problems without compromising the success of any of them. One approach does not negate the quality of another, so the comfort of a Shaker chair does not imply that the other two are uncomfortable simply because they are different. Gehry’s cardboard chair, for instance, has no legs, but legs are only necessary to support the seat at a proper height. Gehry was able to scrap them because he found a different way to lift the seat.

  Our chairs differ because of the dispositions of their makers, but also because they were made at various times in different cultures. Time and place have a large impact on the products of design, because they dictate what is possible. A Shaker, for instance, could not have created the Eames’ chair, because plywood did not exist, never mind the technology to bend the wood. The adjacent possible had expanded in the one hundred years between the first Shaker chair and the Eames’ chair, which opened up new opportunities to rethink how chairs were made.

  Culture also has an effect on the products of design. There is no guarantee that the Shakers would have found the Eames’ chair desirable to make, even if they had the technology needed to produce it. The relationship of design and culture presents another two-way bridge where influence goes both ways: culture creates design’s target by defining what is desirable. Simultaneously, the best design recalibrates what we think and how we feel about what surrounds us. The two shine on one another: culture changes what it expects from design after design changes culture, meaning that when our work hits the target, that target moves out from underneath it.

  The shifting bullseye suggests that we should reconsider our conception of design as a problem-solving endeavor. Hitting the bullseye is only ever a temporary state, and rather than seeing that as a problem, we should pull another arrow from our quiver and celebrate the moving target as the way we inch toward better circumstances. We should embrace the subjective nature of what we do and allow for the multiplicity of responses to thrive, because the mixed pool represents the diversity of human perspective. That diversity fortifies us, makes us strong. Most of all, we should build movement into our definition of the craft and its successful outcomes. The best design acts as a form of loosely composed, responsive movement, and seeks to have all the adjacent elements sway together.

  This is a generous definition, much greater than just problem solving, because the best design has to offer much more than making problems go away. Design can also build up good, desirable artifacts, experiences, and situations that are additive forces in this world. It helps us live well by producing and elevating new kinds of value, such as engagement, participation, and happiness. These are design’s true outcomes, because the practice, at its root, is simply people making useful things for other people. It’s life-enhancement, and we can make it for one another, so long as we act responsively and keep our momentum moving forward, just like the man on the tightrope.

  Part III

  The Opening

  Chapter Seven

  Stories and Voids

  “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Great design moves. In the first part of the book, the internal movements of the maker were assessed as an opportunity for improvisation by using the affordances of formal structures like the three levers as a framework. The next portion looked at motion through the lens of the work’s cultural context. It explained how the world advances by expanding the adjacent possible and shifting culture, and how the motion that surrounds the work should be incorporated into the designer’s decisions through a responsiveness that sways with the work’s context. The motion continues once the work leaves the hands of its creator and moves to the audience. After publication, there is an opportunity to achieve a resonance that emotionally moves the audience, and if successful, the work continues its movement by being passed around and shared. If we’re interested in having the work resonate and propagate, narrative becomes an essential component to design, because nothing moves as quickly and spreads so far as a good story.

  Stories are a given – they permeate all cultures and interpretations of life. Narrative is such a fundamental way of thinking that there are even theories that say that stories are how we construct reality for ourselves. We use them to describe who we are, what we believe, where we are going, and where we came from. We create myths about our own origins, such as the Iroquois story of how the earth came to be on the back of a turtle, or the ancient Greek tale of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to man, or the Egyptian Hapi bringing fertility to the land by flooding the Nile.

  The scope of these tales is daunting, but the stories we weave need not be grand. A myth about how Helen of Troy’s face launched a thousand ships is just as much a story as a coworker’s tale about their shoelace snapping on their lunch break. A story is simply change over time, and the scale and scope of that change doesn’t matter so long as it has momentum. A story, in fact, doesn’t even need to go anywhere, as long as it feels like it is about to head somewhere good.

  My favorite example of a dead-end story is Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks. I have a print of it that sits in the drawer of my desk. It’s become an object of habitual storytelling for me, because it feels like it has an inert potential to go somewhere, but it thwarts my efforts to figure out exactly where. All Americans are familiar with Nighthawks, whether they know the painting’s title or not: it depicts a few people sitting in a nearly empty 1940s New York diner at night. Few pieces of art have the level of recognition that it enjoys, and even fewer achieve the painting’s cultural resonance as to be able to be spoofed as often as it has since it was made seventy years ago. Why has it risen to such stature in our collective consciousness? What is it about this painting that makes it so sticky?

  We’re attracted to the painting because it is not finished. All of the paint has been applied, but there’s a gap that frustrates the viewer from deducing what is happening in the picture. Nighthawks is a detective story, and like most of Hopper’s work, it concerns a void. What is absent matters just as much as what is present, creating a tension between what is said and what is implied. It’s a framework for a story where everything has been established save the plot itself. The painting is lacking; it requires us to contribute something of ourselves in order to fill the void and finish it.

  Many have created their own stories about Nighthawks: Joyce Carol Oates wrote monologues for each of the characters; the magazine Der Spiegel commissioned five different dramatizations of the painting; and Tom Waits made a whole album about it. No matter who is finishing the painting for Hopper, viewers project themselves into Nighthawks and read the image depending on how they see themselves. There are a few touchstones that guide our stories, but so many details are up for grabs. The quality of the painting pulls us in and requires us to complete it, and what we say suggests something about us.

  I think about how the painting was made shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack. I see four individuals with the wind knocked out of them by catastrophic events. I see eyes glazed by the uncertainty of what the future holds. I see a woman whose relationship may collaps
e and a group of men who may have to go to war. I imagine mouths unable to develop their feelings into words. They all sit in silence, staring off into some void, lumbering into some unknown future. I divine all of this from a painting, and I think to myself how I would kill to have this sort of rapt attention on anything that I’ve ever made.

  Hopper’s lure is that the painting lacks a story. He sets the table for us, but we must serve ourselves. The reason Nighthawks has such a compelling hook is because it raises an interesting question with so many clues, but never answers it. Yet the quality of the painting makes us perceive the answer must lie within. Those questions will be answered, even if we have to do it ourselves. Narrative is a device we use to make sense of unfamiliar or unresolved things.

  In my first few years teaching graphic design, I instructed a class called Graphic Design Systems. Our tools were color, form, and composition, and we practiced methods of using those building blocks to emotively communicate ideas. All work was to be abstract and nonrepresentational, and students were forced to explore the potential of purely visual communication without the additional complications of meaning that come with typography, photographs, and illustrations. How would one create a composition to describe dissonance? How can color and line be used to make something look joyful? After a few weeks, I began noticing a pattern in how the students discussed the work. On critique days, when we were all faced with a wall of red circles, blue squiggles, and clusters of lines, students would provide feedback through stories.

  “This one seems to work really well. It makes me dizzy, because it feels like I’m being sucked down into a vortex, like I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole like Alice.”

  “I’m not sure that this composition feels joyful, because it seems that this triangle is too aggressive, almost like it’s angry at the squares.”