Designing Design (the complete edition) is a book I have just finished. What its author, Kenya Hara, offers is not a neatly packaged portfolio. Project by project, he dwells on what he thought, considered and felt, as an author rather than as a designer. Or, as he puts it himself, putting design into words is a new kind of design: no longer Design of Design, but Designing Design. Either way, this is not a book only about design.
The passage that resonated with me most goes like this: "We have also begun to understand that when we make things, we attach too much unnecessary reason and order to the process. In the practice of making things, modernist tendencies push us toward perfection and rigidity. Bauhaus purity, or reaching perfection by refining something, certainly has its worth, but if the whole world were wrapped in this reason and maturity, we would feel a kind of claustrophobia. The world sustains itself through the right balance between creation and exhaustion. The wisdom of design lies in being aware not only of the direction of life but also of the direction of extinction. The world is like the water's edge, where creation and exhaustion meet."
Why, on the beach this book laid out, did I pick up this one shell? Because I feel I have been living for a long time with a "claustrophobia" brought on by "reason and maturity".
I suspect many people are like me: in work and study, each of us is building a fairly explicit method of our own, including the order in which to do things and the standards by which to judge and choose. In this information age we take in huge amounts of information every day from the internet and other media, and our work, study and life are all built on processing it. Whoever knows better how to use information can dig out more value, so we tirelessly look for ways of processing it, hoping they will be scientific, rational, orderly and effective.
I, for one, put a great deal of effort into controlling the channels through which I receive, filter and use information: their quantity, quality and type, and the rhythm and rules by which I use them. I watch my Evernote, my Chrome bookmarks and my local folders swell in an orderly way, every piece of information handled by a mental standard that is unspoken and vague, yet real. The internet and the computer have gradually become a second brain; with them I can easily get, store and retrieve most of the information I need. The world is large, yet it cannot escape the cognitive frame the two brains have built together. Even though much of the world is still unknown to me, I trust that once any of it appears I can quickly gather information about it, parse it, rebuild it, turn the unknown into the known, then drop it and go looking for the next thrill in the sea of information.
And yet, living in this age of abundant, even excessive, information, I feel myself growing fuller and emptier at the same time. I feel I understand the world more and more, while the world grows less and less fresh, less and less interesting to me. The pleasure of feasting on endless information is real, but so is a faint hunger that keeps getting worse and leaves me weak and powerless. Why? Is there simply so much information that my digestion can't keep up?
Kenya Hara gave me an answer. This glut of information, he says, is only an illusion. What floods us are fragments, like bits of chaff blowing through the air, each carrying very little information, clinging like seasoning to our tofu-like brains and fooling us into thinking we know a lot. In fact what we know are only shallow fragments. The seemingly vast torrent of information in the media, the internet first among them, carries less than what the soles of our bare feet take in when they touch the ground. Our information stress does not come from the brain failing to keep up with an explosion of information; rather, these fragments severely hold down a brain that longs to perceive more.
In Hara's life and in ours, a certain kind of conversation happens all the time. One person has barely raised a topic when another jumps in with "I know, I know…", "Isn't that just…", "Ha, I just…", offers a general description or a vague opinion, signals, openly or not, that they already understand well enough what it means and what is fun about it, and the group closes the topic in an air of apparent mutual understanding. Then they move on to the next round of raising and closing topics. Between the people talking, no real exchange has taken place.
Hara says such conversation is gratifying in a sense, but what he hopes for is the possibility of another kind. Not an exchange of known information that leaves us content with what we know, not the "I know" loop, but a conversation that makes things unknown, that helps us "understand how little we know", and so leads us to a new possibility of the world.
It is here that Hara puts forward "exformation" as the counterpart to "information". One is "in" + "formation", bringing the unknown world into a known frame; the other is "ex" + "formation", drawing our understanding of things out of our rigid thinking so that we discover more unknown meanings, more angles and possibilities of understanding.
With this in mind, he led his students in the Department of Science of Design through a series of exformation projects. They overlaid photographs of rivers on photographs of roads, so that we see a river from the strange point of view of a driver. They photographed the ground along a river through a footprint-shaped mask: some frames all weeds, some all stones, some wildflowers and fish lying in the shallows; whatever was inside, it made us imagine stepping onto it. They laid the lifebuoys and striped patterns of beaches and parks over road signs, or simply photographed a group of people dozing on the grass on a sunny afternoon, to dig out what a "resort" essentially is.
These all look like odd, arty, useless topics, yet they struck a surprisingly deep chord in me. A river, it turns out, is not the beautiful, untouchable thing in a landscape photo; we can imagine how slick or dry it would be to walk along it, even imagine our bodies leaning with its bends as we drive down a road made of river. A holiday place need not be a tourist spot of green hills and clear water or of carved beams and painted pillars, whether quiet and easy or packed and bustling. Set aside every constraint for a moment, close your eyes, feel a breeze that blows in at random, and you get a real sense of being on holiday.
In an "information" world lit by the glow of reason, we carry too many rules and orders we cannot throw away. They make us look mature and steady. They make every step we take and every decision we make look composed and well-founded, backed by our accumulated experience and by information close at hand. This is an age of "in": everything runs in order like a steel machine, with reason and information as the current surging through it. We face screens large and small, face a rolling, shifting sea of information, and keep scooping a little of it into our heads. As technology has conquered text, stereo sound and 3D images, one integrated device plus the invisible internet is all we need to feel the whole world vividly. People are closer to each other, and to information, than ever before. We refresh web pages constantly; notifications from social networks are the brain's favorite stimulus and feed; fragments of information pile up on the screen like snowflakes, making us feel connected to the world at every moment, with everything answered quickly, instantly and precisely. Everything is in the palm of our hand, and we know these are the fine fruits of reason and order.
But is this really fine enough?
Not long ago I took advantage of the bright spring to visit an old water town south of the Yangtze, built along the water and full of bridges. What moved me most there was not some elegant view or tasty snack, but the mild, damp air of the water country, the moving wind, the sound of water under the bridges late at night, and the grain of tree bark rubbing against my palms.
Technology has conquered our hearing and our sight, yet it still cannot convey smell, touch or taste. A real breeze reaches us through hearing, touch and smell together. If the audio and video stored and played back by precise circuits are already flawless to us, why do we still feel that a concert's indescribable "atmosphere" can only be felt in person, and why do we still feel that printed books have a "texture" that e-books lack?
Adrift on the sea of information, can we really know everything? Can reason and rules really let us understand and possess it all?
At the end of the book, Hara notes that humanity's most primitive tool is the hand. The hand can use the things around it to change the world; the hand can also be a vessel, receiving the world the way it scoops up water from a lake. This is a pairing of life and extinction, outside and inside, being and nothing. Interestingly, the hand can make more advanced tools for changing the world, like a club, and also more advanced vessels, and something like a spaceship is by nature both kinds of tool at once.
We need to create: to bring the unknown into the known, turn disorder into order, act on the world and build a temple of reason. We also need to embrace: to admit that the unknown outweighs the known and disorder outweighs order, to let go body and mind, drop rules and logic, return to a state of emptiness and stillness, merge into the world and be replenished in spirit.
So give yourself a chance and step away from the screen in front of you. Pick any place at all. Feel any frame of sight that pixels cannot measure, a breath of wind that stirs your hair and may blow who knows where the next moment, white noise in countless layers all around you, a ray of light slipping into some fine line on your skin. Feel the randomness, the chaos and the incomprehensibility of the universe.
Simply savor and consume the wonder of the world, then tell yourself that not knowing is fine too.
2014.03