MAKE A THING

Over the years I have tried many cures for my depression.

Medical ones, questionable ones, spiritual ones, therapeutic ones.  Sometimes these have worked and sometimes not. 

But there is one approach that always works, if only I can remember to do it.  Most artists and designers know this and, for some of us, it is one of the driving forces behind our creative impulse. 

The solution to despair is to make a thing.

Any thing.

To make a thing is to step out of the trap of your own self-awareness and focus your energy on the steps, materials, and rules of the wider world.  Depression cannot flourish without obsessive attention and making a thing diverts this from yourself to the thing itself.

Example: a few years ago, during a particularly bad bout of gloom, I got a crazy idea.  I had been listening to some of my favorite albums to cheer myself up.  This tends to work for the time I am listening but vanishes like dust in the wind when the music ends.  This time, it was the music of Cal Tjader, a famous jazz vibraphonist who joined Latin rhythms with Bossa Nova beats to produce wonderfully rich and resonant sounds. 

A vibraphone, if you do not know it, is a large keyboard made of metal bars that you hit with mallets.  I had never played it myself, not even the little plinky toy some kids have.  But the idea of immersing myself in the music I loved to hear by actually playing it, suddenly seemed like a kind of escape hatch and I decided to learn how to play the vibraphone.

But vibraphones are expensive.  A big investment for such a flimsy whim.  That is when the idea hit me to make my own instrument.  That, at least, was something I knew I could do.  As an artist and designer, I had been making things my whole life.  So I did some research, got some pictures, made some sketches.  In other words, I did my design thing.

I built the frame of the vibraphone out of poplar that smells sweet when cut.  I made the holders of cotter pins and tiny brass rings.  I bought the bars online from a guy in Westchester who had no idea what to do with them.  When I told him my plan, I could not tell whether he laughed at me for the idea or at himself for not thinking of it.  I made the mallets from dowels and yarn.

It took a few months to do it but in the end, I had a playable instrument and was no longer brooding over my own life.  I began to practice scales and intervals and chord structures and eventually even to play along with Cal Tjader…in a tiny way, of course.  It was the kind of sleight of hand – switching joy for gloom while no one is looking – that makes design so powerful.

Music is sensational in the sense that it overwhelms your senses.  So does making a thing.  And if you see it through, you have a new thing that never existed before.  No matter how it looks, it is a beautiful thing because you made it and that changes you.

This did not, of course, silence my depression.  But it drowned it out for a good long time.  

AND PER SE AND

The word “and” is defined this way in the dictionary:
conj. [ME. and, an; AS. and, ond], also; in addition; moreover; as well as.  2. plus; added to; as, 6 and 2 makes 8.  3. as a consequence or result; as, he told her and she knew.

Pretty dry stuff.

Luckily we have a much more luscious way to represent all that.  A sign, in fact, that has enamored designers ever since its creation way back when.  I am referring to the familiar symbol…&.

Officially called an ampersand, it is a lovely curlique of lines unlike any other member of the keyboard and may the most charming of our typographic marks.  The graceful curves of the symbol come from combining the letters in the Latin word et., which meant “and.”  The name of the symbol – ampersand – is derived from the expression “and per se and”, which simply meant that the symbol by itself stood for the word “and.”

It is amazing how all that dull back story could lead to such a cool design because as a matter of fact, the ampersand as a visual invention is a designer’s dream.  Just trace the curves of it and you will see that it has enough twists and twirls to challenge the talent and impress the mind of the most experienced typographer.  And...take a visual journey through all the different variations out there in fontland and you will see a vast variety of designs from sturdy to graceful, poetic to operatic, coy to ornate.

In addition to its form, the & is the perfect symbol for the designing spirit.  Designers are all about the and.  Nonetheless is for accountants; yet is for philosophers; however for lawyers.  And let the politicians have their buts.  But of and (and the & that so beautifully expresses it), what more can be said?  And is not just any old conjunction; it is the quintessential word for creativity which is the work of making connections, forming innovative relationships, forging breakthrough links.  To the designer especially falls the duty of putting together in new ways, of making the new from the existing, of recombining, of constructing.  

Ands upon ands and more ands.

That makes the ampersand the perfect logo for design itself, which is nothing less than the process of taking what is and making what will be.  This notion of the endless connection is best represented by the mobius look of the symbol, especially in the italic version which tend to be more fanciful.  Those swirly curves should serve as a reminder to designers everywhere that + is just adding, that “in addition to” is a mere pile of facts, and that two and two only make four for those with limited imagination. 

So all hail to the mighty &.

And...all that it implies.

UP IN SMOKE

Everyone knows about unintended consequences. 

The Butterfly Effect, the law of rotten outcomes, the Snafu rule.

In design – that is, in the making of new things – this is a persistent factor we must keep in mind.  We do our best to see projects through to the ideal end but we always have to consider unexpected twists and turns.  Learning this as a habit of thought is one of the things that turns students of design into true practitioners.  Blind faith is not a helpful trait and that is why worriers tend to make good designers.  I speak from experience.

The notorious cigar story is a good parable to keep in mind here, whether it is true or not.

As reported in the news several years ago, a man in North Carolina bought a box of very rare and expensive cigars.  He took care to care for them, including insuring them against fire.  Within a month he had smoked all 24 of these fine cigars and had not even made his first premium payment on the policy.  At this point, a brilliant idea occurred to him.  He filed a claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, he stated that the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires."  The insurance company naturally refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in exactly the way you would expect, by smoking them himself.  Small fires, indeed.  Yet the man then sued the insurance company...and won the case!

In giving his ruling, the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous but said that, even so, the language of the policy was too vague on this point.  The man in fact held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire.  But because the policy did not define precisely what an "unacceptable fire” was, the judge stated that they were obligated to pay the claim. 

Rather than go through a long and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the man for his loss of the rare cigars in the “fires.”

Ah, but once the man cashed his check, the insurance company turned the tables on him   They had him arrested…on 24 counts of arson!  Using his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case against him, the company won the day.  The man was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property – a form of arson – and sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

Moral for all designers:  Think it through.  Just because the plan sounds good to you from the start does not mean that it is a good plan in the end.

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.

STITCH IN TIME

Putting on my pants, one leg at time as is my custom, I instantly thought of Barthelemy Thimmonier.

You would have to be a designer, or historian of technology, to know why.

The reason is in the seams that held my pants, like all garments, together.  We can thank Thimmonier for that.  Without his design, only the rich would be able to wear clothes; the rest of us would simply be covering our nakedness. 

Although his name is no longer familiar, not a single stitch in the grand fabric of clothing and fashion design would be possible without Thimmonier, who was no clothes horse nor even a fashionista.  He never designed a dress or sketched an outfit.  Yet without his work, designers like Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan would be mere gluers of materials.

Thimmonier invented the sewing machine.

The idea of combining fabrics and skins through the use of stitching is ancient.  Needles with holes for thread made of mammoth ivory, reindeer bone, and walrus tusk have been found in Paleolithic caves.  It is even possible that our Neanderthal cousins knew a thing or two about sewing. 

These kinds of tools were significant because they made possible a new method of assembling clothing that went beyond the limitations of tying skins or felting fur.  But despite various improved techniques, hand stitching did not change for millennia until the early whispers of the Industrial Revolution and later, the first patent for a threaded needle to a German inventor named Charles Weisenthal in 1755.  This was intended to be a component in an automatic sewing device but the patent did not describe the rest of the machine.  The English inventor and cabinetmaker Thomas Saint was issued a patent for a complete machine for sewing in 1790 but it is not known if he actually built a working prototype.

A number of people in the early 1800s toyed with the idea of combining the eyed needle with some sort of wheel to automate the sewing process but none worked.  Then in the 1840s, French tailor Barthelemy Thimmonier designed the first working device.  His machine used only one thread and a hooked needle that made the same chain stitch used with embroidery.  It was not very efficient but it worked well enough to produce army clothing…until his workshop was wrecked by a mob and he narrowly escaped with his life. 

This kind of reaction was not unusual.  Almost every single machine designed to automate garment production has historically met with violent confrontation from workers fearing for their livelihoods.  The word Luddite as it refers to those who oppose technological change comes from the mobs who destroyed automatic sock-stitching machines in the 19th century.  Undaunted, Thimmonier continued to improve his device and was awarded patents in both England and America.  But resistance proved too great and Thimmonier never saw the success he sought.  He died in poverty in 1857. 

The goal of automated sewing did not, with the improvements of Elias Howe and Isaac Merritt Singer.  But it was Thimmonier’s design that first proved the possibility of automated sewing...to his detriment, to our eventual benefit.

Chain stitch, zig-zag pattern, electrified gizmo, and endless lawsuits and fortunes later, the sewing machine is one of the most familiar industrial products in the world and clothing manufacturing one of the world’s largest industries.

So the next time you dress for success, pay homage to one of the designers who made it all possible through the ultimate stitch in time.

BAM! BOO!

The towel I used this morning is made of bamboo, of all things, and it is actually a little too soft.

I have no idea how they accomplished that; the towel seems to have no connection to the stalky plant growing in my backyard.  Another example of the alchemy that is at the heart of the design process by which you really can turn a tree in the forest into a book in the library.

Transformative magic.

Bamboo is really just a kind of grass and therefore rather ordinary.  But it is also one of the most amazing plants on the planet.  In fact, it is so useful that its many applications often strain credulity – the towel is just one case – so that it ought to be the source of the word bamboozled.

For one thing, it is incredibly versatile.  There are over 1,000 species of bamboo in the world, making it uniquely adaptable to many environments from jungles to mountains.  And because it can tolerate extremes of precipitation – from 30-250 inches of annual rainfall – bamboo can thrive where mere mortal plants would surely drown.

It also grows so fast that many varieties of bamboo can be harvested in 3-5 years, not the standard 10-20 years required for most softwoods.  It is for these reasons that tropical dwellers historically planted, grew, and constructed their homes out of bamboo.  In fact, it is an ideal building material…growing to a height of 120 feet in some species, but also round and hollow, making it one of the strongest building materials known, natural or otherwise.  Its tensile strength is 28,000 per square inch versus a skimpy 23,000 for steel.

Yet bamboo is also flexible.

Throughout the world it has always been an essential structural material in earthquake architecture.   But the uses of bamboo go well beyond its structural advantages.  Easy to cut, carve, and slice, it has also been used to make tools, utensils, rebar, even machine parts.  Its pulp is used to make paper, tiles, briquettes, insulation, and a new form of wall paneling called plyboo.  Its hollow tubes have been used for pipes, drainage, flutes, pots, baskets.  And its growing popularity in landscape design makes it perfect for providing shade, wind break, acoustical barriers, and aesthetic beauty.

For centuries, bamboo has also been used as a medicine in Ayurveda and Chinese practices.  The secretion from bamboo – pulverized, powdered, and hardened – is used to treat asthma, coughs, and even as an aphrodisiac.  In China, ingredients from the root of black bamboo help treat kidney disease.  Roots and leaves have also been used to treat venereal disease and cancer; the sap is said to reduce fever; bamboo ash cures prickly heat. 

Bamboo also plays a key role in the general health of the planet itself.  Its astonishing growth rate and the fact that it generates more oxygen than an equivalent stand of trees, makes it ideal for the re-greening of degraded areas.  Its anti-erosion properties create an effective watershed, stitching the soil together along fragile riverbanks, and preventing soil erosion in deforested areas and in places prone to mud slides.

As if all that were not enough, bamboo is also a major food source; bamboo shoots provide nutrition for millions of people.  In Japan, the antioxidant properties of pulverized bamboo bark prevent bacterial growth and it is used there as a natural food preservative.  Bamboo also provides fodder for animals and food for fish.

Did I mention that it repels insects?

Given all that, it is easy to understand the appeal of bamboo as mystical plant, symbol of strength, flexibility, tenacity, endurance and compromise.  For centuries throughout Asia, it has been an important part of religious ceremonies, art, music, and daily life.  It has been the paper, the brush and the muse for poems and paintings.  The home, the bed, the pillow. 

The towel!

As designers we ought to keep bamboo in mind, as a material if not an inspiration.  Indeed, we might well heed the words of the ancient Chinese poet who said, “We are only what we are.  If we were but bamboo, what could we not achieve?”

THE UNSCREEN

It is mostly thought of as background, behind the scenes, a mere substrate.

Yet without it, history itself would be unimaginable, creativity a mere hope.  What is it?  I am holding it in my hands right now as I read this.   It is nothing less than a piece of paper.

Until paper, books and manuscripts were written on a variety of coarser, more expensive, and less workable surfaces.  In ancient Egypt, papyrus was made of strips from the stem of the plant, woven together and pressed to make a flat surface.  In ancient Greece, parchment was introduced, made from animal skins that had been scraped, stretched, and chalked.  Silk in ancient China was woven from the fine thread of the silkworm.  Clever solutions all, but unforgiving materials that resisted the graceful gestures of the various tools of written language.

Paper may have been invented by an actual person.  His name was Ts’ai Lun and he lived in the first century in what is now China.  Ts’ai Lun was the chief eunuch and court officer under Emperor Ho-Ti of the Eastern Han Dynasty.  Using a ground mix of sesame fibers, tree bark, and hemp fibers, Ts’ai Lun created an early paper that was far more useable and available than any of the other materials.  His invention was so revolutionary that papermaking remained a state secret in China for hundreds of years.  It only slowly spread the East and then the West over the centuries.

The true magic of paper as you hold it in your hand is its solidity since there is no glue in the paper making process; the fibers stick to themselves when pressed.  Actually, any fibrous material will do.  Rice, wheat, straw, cotton, cornstalks, hemp, and jute have all been used.  But nothing works quite as well as the pulp from trees, which is first chemically or mechanically reduced to fibers, then cleaned, bleached, drained, and  pressed into sheets.

The first paper mill in the US was opened in Philadelphia in 1690 using rags, but in the mid-1800s a series of inventions for grinding logs into pulp and using sulfuric acid to separate the fibers marked the beginning of modern paper production.  We now produce more than 40 millions tons of the stuff each year.  As in every story of design, we have gone from one only-kind-there-is paper to an explosion of types, styles, weights, colors, textures, shapes, surfaces, thicknesses for an endless variety of uses.

Even as I hold this sturdy sheet in my hand, its very longevity is in question.  Will the digital revolution mark the end of paper?  Will screens replace it?  Not now, not ever.  Touching the page, rubbing it between my fingers, flicking the edge, feeling the surface – it is a lovely sheet of Arches cold-pressed watercolor paper – it is easy to see paper not as background to anything but as a sensual delight in its own right.  And to a writer or artist, nothing can compare with the allure of a sheet of it.  A blank screen is just empty; a blank piece of paper is a seduction.

There really is nothing quite like paper.  Skin with a memory, cloth that catches thoughts, archive of designs.  Nothing else like it.  And try making a flapping bird from a computer screen.