WHEELING AROUND

To see a circle where none exists is an act of creative will.

This wheely move of the mind is pure design of the highest order.

In fact, encircling thoughts are so powerful that throughout the centuries, a number of innovations have resulted from seeing circles where none exist in nature.  Innovators going round and round are essentially bending the world to fit their vision.  

All very high-falutin praise for a rather simple idea but, to put it plainly, shoving things into a circle that do not appear that way to the eye is a revolutionary move.  In both senses of that word.

A case in point is the color wheel.

The color wheel is so essential to our understanding of color that it is hard to believe it was actually invented.  But it was.  The Spectrum Wheel, as the inventor called it, was created by none other than Isaac Newton while still in his early twenties, around the same time that he started the science of Optics and described a theory of gravity. 

Newton was exploring the use of a prism to break up light into component wavelengths when he noticed that the colors at the far ends of the spectrum were similar.  From this simple observation came the idea of putting these rainbow hues into a circular pattern.  The spectrum does not present itself that way, but it in Newton's mind's eye.  The light, of course, is also continuous, subtly shifting from one color to the next but for the purposes of his circular diagram, Newton settled on seven distinct colors.  This was another artificial construction, like the circle itself; being a bit of a mystic, he settled on seven because that number related to the seven spheres of the heavens and to the seven notes on a diatonic scale.

This wheel pattern led to new insights about the relationships of the colors.  From this simple circle emerged the idea of primary and secondary colors, supplementary and complementary colors, and above all a magical sense that the hues of the world have an order, a structure.

Over the centuries other systems have competed with or amended the original color wheel...Goethe’s Color Triangle, the color circles of Chevreul and Blanc, the color spheres of Munsell and Ostwald, and many others.  But it is Newton’s insight that a circular arrangement might prove useful, that has been the basis and inspiration for modern color theory, color printing, and for all industrial paint and ink production.

Similarly in music, the creation of the Circle of Fifths as a design insight revealed the hidden structure of tones.  And in organic chemistry, the circular diagram of atoms first visualized by Kekule in a daydream, explained the connection of hidden bonds.

With this in mind, given the power of seeing a circle where none exists, there ought to be a rule of design that says...when the ends of a linear set of things call out to each other, bend them into a circle and see what develops.

Logicians can be chided for circular reasoning, but designers should whirl and twirl in it.