The Humanity of Designing:

Design: from the word to designate

I like the demand of design, the process that creates the uncreated from a moment's thought. It's the isolation of high demand. The isolating essential of putting all else outside the creative head-sphere to give myself over to a vision kept yet private as the pictures in various perspectives and profiles form in bytes but only in my mind.

The alignment of real and imaginary lines sweep in strokes to declare proportion relating to space. Sizing is all-critical for a design to fit and be fit. The placement of pencilled dots start a baseline, a perpendicular vertical creates the ninety and alters to maybe, not sure yet, a ninety-five and then a compound complexity takes over at the tops of this as yet unmade post where rails meet, a tenon's formed and fits the mortise and a union in two distinct and direct opposites bring integrity to the union of several parts.

My wood, once planks, became scraps kept from the bigger projects and retrieved as offcuts for a day when I might need them or use them. They're small and useless, space-hogging bits all others might chuck, but this week, today, I made some use of them.

I like the singular reality that all things designed are designed only by humans and that those designed things become 98% of our everyday three-dimensional objects designed for our human convenience, control, economy of motion and comfort. A field fence and gate enclose, the gate swings and the catch catches to hold and contain. The ladder lifted suspends two-dozen rungs on two poles and the taper from top to base lightens the weight on the end to be lifted most, yet strength is given to the base a man's life will be suspended and dependent on. And who looks at the gutter and the downspout, the cranked neck connecting on to the other, the sash made light that holds panes of glass that's yet unchanged in two hundred years and can still be made from wood?

Designs always start with the limitation of space. The space in the hand to hold. The cage and box and drawer to contain. In the initial consideration phase, buildings, paths and roads are sized according to the space and distance allocated. A village designated long ago becomes a town and possibly a city from the long-term consideration and forward planning. That one becomes a city and another not. Mostly it hinges to the possibility of support infrastructure and the amounts of water, rainfall and water collection, geography and terrain. I once lived in a place called Willow City, Texas, population 13 in its entire sixteen-mile stretch. The layout for the city was drawn up and plans to build soon were sorted, but yet to come was the flood that could not be diverted, and the plans were aborted.

The buildings are designed to meet the needs of people, usually in groups large and small. The vast array of building types varies according to the local needs of communities, purpose of the buildings, location and available space. Housing takes the initial priority in providing a place for workers and generations to live close to their work. Work buildings follow and include all forms of manufacturing, services, offices of different types, labs, shops, places for leisure and so on. Most buildings follow the widely accepted tenet of construction design: form follows function. Inside those buildings, we furniture makers and woodworkers become adoptive; the same philosophy of space allocation and space fit within an allocated sphere limits our sizing. For home furnishing, office furniture and such, we recognise a secondary design type called interior design that tries to defy the tenet I speak of yet the work of the designer cannot quite fully defy the tenet I speak of because they must work according to budget, space constraints and more, but then there are those who tend often to defy too much constraint in following the "form follows function" as the only principle of design. The reality in my world is that these two elements, form and function, are spiritually one and the same and therefore defy separation. Form, human form, ultimately determines both shape and purpose whereas purpose defines and determines the ultimate and optimal size, positioning, material composition and so on. In my world, designing and living with furniture, wooden objects and tools, such like that, one cannot live without the other.

Additional to all of this, we then enter the realms of decorative design both in comlimentarianism but then too the serious consideration of symbolism, the influence of diverse cultures, and the complimentariness of aesthetic. Practical needs should never dismiss these elements to design, but practical needs should firstly accept them and ultimately absorb them.