The evil time sucking SM bird

A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, where I spend an inordinate amount of time absorbing the wit and wisdom dispensed in 140 characters or less and trying valiantly to throw the odd riposte back into the milieu, Veronika Miller (known to the Twitterati as @Modenus) brought up the idea of a mini-blog-off (no, no, not a diminutive Russian). She had posted an entry on her own blog about quirky design moments and objects, provoking the question: what is successful design?

A few of us took the bait she proffered and verbally batted it around a little until the joint blogging idea was suggested. So here we are, drawn like flies to –(oh never mind…): please check out Paul Anater, Veronika Miller, and the DogWalkBlog and their respective perspectives.

Wise interweb pundits

Being a researcher and the cautious type – not to mention a “wordie” – I started with looking at where the actual word “design” comes from. When you check it out in the dictionary the definition is a bit of a let-down; it comes across as rather technical, as a construct or an assembly approach e.g. if you do this and this and this, you will have a “design” – as if it can be taught or practiced. Which is often as far as it progresses, or rather, as far as it allowed to progress – becoming a sort of manipulated topiary of function; it has a certain basic appeal but it lacks oomph . And this is where the divergence begins, where the good, the bad, and the fugly begin to shake out…

The operative word would be “successful”. I would suggest that, whereas it is good and even desirable to have a basic foundation:  the brick by brick approach of knowing fundamentals such as color theory, pleasing proportion, ergonomics, and the rest of the Design 101 syllabus – excellent design cannot be taught or learnt from an instructional video, lecture, or reference book. It is absorbed, it is earned, it is basically intangible. It requires experience, sensitivity, and willingness to think outside the box of required reading materials. Design that is derived from that limiting set of approved tools might provoke the observation “… and that’s all she rote”.  It comes up short and does not satisfy.

Island by Fu Tung Cheng

I am a concrete artisan. I work with an amazingly versatile material, unrestricted in dimensional expression, as well as nearly all other physical attributes. I am privileged to be able to express myself through this medium by integrating my clients with their environments, creating functional art with cast concrete usually in the form of custom countertops, sinks, and other architectural surfaces. I came to this craft from a carpentry background, bringing the requisite manual skills, a good work ethic, and a familiarity with kitchens and bathrooms. That was it. My adopted material of choice was foreign to me – at least the high performance, high capability variety with which I fulfill my commissions. I had to learn how to “be with it”. I taught myself the basics and grew into a comfort with this very complex material we know as “concrete”. I am also completely untrained in design and have had (am continuing) to develop a “feel” and a style of expression, a design sensibility which is manifest when experienced by the user  and/or an onlooker. I have found this process to be very rewarding and am beginning to have it validated by the feedback and comments coming from my clients and other people who have seen my work. And this brings me to my very simple but very encompassing postulate concerning successful design: I know it when I see it.  I will leave it to the other, more learned practitioners to tell me exactly why this or that pushes my buttons (I bow before your wisdom) – I am learning as fast as I can, dammit! – in the meantime, I will trust my gut and the seat of my pants. How proletariat.