The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Frank Chimero on the Shape of Design and the Harmonics of Influence

This month, my studiomate Frank Chimero — who is one of the most talented designers, most eloquent writers, and most dimensional thinkers I know — is releasing The Shape of Design, an exquisite meditation on what makes great design*.

From the very first line, Frank grabs you by the neurons and the heartstrings, and doesn’t let go until the very last:

What is the marker of good design? It moves. The story of a successful piece of design begins with the movement of its maker while it is being made, and amplifies by its publishing, moving the work out and around. It then continues in the feeling the work stirs in the audience when they see, use, or contribute to the work, and intensifies as the audience passes it on to others. Design gains value as it moves from hand to hand; context to context; need to need. If all of this movement harmonizes, the work gains a life of its own, and turns into a shared experience that enhances life and inches the world closer to its full potential.

[…]

Marshall McLuhan said that, ‘we look at the present through a rear-view mirror,’ and we ‘march backwards into the future.’ Invention becomes our lens to imagine what is possible, and design is the road we follow to reach it. But, there is a snag in McLuhan’s view, because marching is no way to go into the future. It is too methodical and restricted. The world often subverts our best laid plans, so our road calls for a way to move that is messier, bolder, more responsive. The lightness and joy afforded by creating suggests that we instead dance.

But the part that sang to me most comes from Chapter Three, entitled Improvisation and Limitations, and touches on the harmonics of influence — something I think about a great deal and have explored both playfully and seriously:

When we build, we take bits of others’ work and fuse them to our own choices to see if alchemy occurs. Some of those choices are informed by best practices and accrued wisdom; others are guided by the decisions of the work cited as inspiration; while a large number are shaped by the disposition and instincts of the work’s creator. These fresh contributions and transformations are the most crucial, because they continue the give-and-take of influence by adding new, diverse material to the pool to be used by others.

Frank goes on to illustrate this with an example from eighteenth-century Japanese haiku master Yosa Buson:

Lighting one candle
with another candle—
spring evening.

Buson is saying that we accept the light contained in the work of others without darkening their efforts. One candle can light another, and the light may spread without its source being diminished. We must sing in our own way, but with the contributions and influence of others, we need not sing alone.

The Shape of Design is excellent in its entirety, with a wealth of insight spanning everything from the interplay of How and Why to the role of storytelling to the alchemy of creative magic — an indispensable read not only for designers, but for creators in any discipline.

* Always a good time to revisit John Chris Jones’s meditation on the same subject.


Published April 23, 2012

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/23/the-shape-of-design-frank-chimero/

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