Designing Design

Like many people, I have gradually built a clear method for work and study: a way of doing things, standards for judging and choosing. I spend a great deal of effort controlling how information reaches me, watching my notes, bookmarks and folders grow in orderly fashion. The internet and the computer have become another brain. The world is vast, yet it cannot escape the frame these two brains have built together.

Yet I feel fuller and emptier at the same time. The more I understand the world, the less fresh it feels. That faint, weakening hunger is real too.

Hara’s answer: information overload is an illusion. What floods us are fragments, like chaff blowing through the air, each carrying very little. They cling to our brains like seasoning, fooling us into thinking we know a great deal. All that seemingly vast information online adds up to less than what the soles of our bare feet receive when they touch the ground.

“I know, I know”

It happens all the time. Someone raises a topic; someone else jumps in with “I know, I know” or “Isn’t that just…,” offers a broad description, and signals that they already understand. Everyone closes the topic in an air of mutual understanding and moves on. No real exchange has taken place.

Hara hopes for another kind of conversation: one that makes things unknown again, helping us “understand how little we know.”

In-formation fits the unknown into a familiar frame, like putting it in a jar. Ex-formation takes it out and lets it scatter.

Hara calls this Exformation, a counterpart to Information. In + Formation brings the unknown world into a known frame. Ex + Formation draws our understanding out of rigid habits of thought, opening up new meanings, perspectives and possibilities.

A river is a road

With his design students, he explored a series of exformation projects. In one, they overlaid photographs of rivers and roads, letting us see a river from the strange perspective of a driver.

RiverRoad

The river becomes a road, then a river again. Hold any stage and keep moving forward.

A river is no longer a beautiful, untouchable thing in a landscape photograph. Imagine the slickness or dryness underfoot as you walk along it. Imagine driving along a road made of river, your body leaning into its bends.

Footprints

Another project photographed the ground beside a river through a footprint-shaped mask. Some frames held only weeds, some stones, others wildflowers or fish resting in the shallows. Whatever appeared, it made you imagine stepping onto it.

Walk across this ground, as blank as paper.

You can walk with the arrow keys too. On a phone, tap “Walk with your finger,” then “Scroll the page” when you’re done.

Another project asked what makes a holiday place. Lifebuoys and stripes from beaches and parks appeared on road signs. Or people simply lay on the grass, dozing on a sunny afternoon. A holiday needs neither grand scenery nor ornate buildings. Let go for a moment, close your eyes, feel a passing breeze: that can be a real holiday.

These projects seem strange, arty and useless, yet they struck a surprisingly deep chord.

The water’s edge

The passage that resonated most with me describes how modernism attaches too much unnecessary reason and order to making things, leading toward perfection and rigidity. A whole world wrapped in such reason and maturity would feel claustrophobic. The wisdom of design lies in being aware of the direction of extinction as well as the direction of life.

The world is like the water’s edge, where creation and exhaustion meet.Kenya Hara, Designing Design

Write something in the sand. The waves will come.

Move with the arrow keys; press Space to start or stop drawing. On a phone, tap “Draw with your finger,” then “Scroll the page” when you’re done.

The hand is humanity’s most primitive tool. It can use what surrounds it to change the world. It can also be a vessel, receiving the world as it scoops up water from a lake. Life and extinction, outside and inside, being and nothing.

We need to create: to bring the unknown into the known, turn disorder into order, and build a temple of reason. We also need to embrace: to admit that the unknown outweighs the known and disorder outweighs order, let go of rules and logic, return to emptiness and stillness, and merge into the world to replenish the spirit.

Coda

Step away from the screen

Not long ago, I visited an old water town south of the Yangtze in the spring. What moved me most was not its elegant scenery or snacks, but the mild, damp air, the moving wind, the sound of water under bridges late at night, and the grain of tree bark against my palms.

Technology has conquered hearing and sight, yet it still cannot convey smell, touch or taste. A real breeze reaches us through hearing, touch and smell together. Why can a concert’s indescribable atmosphere only be felt in person? Why does a printed book have a texture an e-book lacks?

Tap to let the page fade away, leaving only wind and sky. Tap anywhere or press Esc to return.

Pick any place. Take in a view that pixels cannot measure, a breath of wind that stirs your hair and may blow anywhere next, the countless layers of white noise surrounding you, a ray of light slipping into a fine line on your skin. Feel the randomness, the chaos and the incomprehensibility of the universe.