Core Competences /
a full introduction to the methodological process and a first small task
The vocabulary of composing
One of the most important questions in design - if you want to become a designer with the will, the ability and the responsibility to realize design as a tension between authorship and performance - is how to cut up an object to get the elements we need to design another object, which in any case means composing the fragments anew.
In a sense, this is something we do all the time; we cut up the world around us. We will continue to use the term deconstruction to describe what we do to order the chaotic reality around us in a very special way.
You might think that everything is pretty well arranged. Certainly not perfect, but good enough to find a path for one's life, to act according to what one wants to achieve and what one wants to avoid.
Sure, physical and mental things are ordered - as best they can be - but that is already a result of the design that has been in place since we as humanity began actively writing our history. To think in terms of history is to order our being here according to past, present, and future. Thus, to make history is to design the world according to the words (and numbers, and formulas, lists, equations, etc.) we use to describe and calculate our plans for the future.
Behind the seemingly ordered world reigns pure chaos. This is the stuff that art (in all forms) deals with. For the past three centuries (as long as communication design has existed as a separate discipline), designers have done their best to stay on the side of order. The idea has always been that an orderly world is a safe world. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have to painfully accept that this idea has fundamentally failed - which was already obvious with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, but we tried to ignore it for another 75 years.
The problem is not the chaos behind the ordered world, but rather the assertion that only an ordered world, i.e. a world ruled by humans, is the only world worth living in.
Now the designer is forced to change sides. The question of design is no longer how to create physical and media products that optimize - or at least ensure - the order of the world. The question a designer must actively address is much more: How to create physical and media products that enable us to deal with chaos, that is, to deal with a highly complex, multiple, multidimensional reality. A reality that we will not be able to determine or control, no matter how sophisticated the technology.
Although today the designer is forced to change sides, the way of changing is paradoxical (in fact a leap into disorder). A paradox characterized by the question: "How to develop a system of order in order to deconstruct order, so that disorder becomes the order of togetherness".
What does it mean to say that disorder becomes the order of togetherness? We define the term disorder not as the opposite of order, but rather as a constant background state of being. Disorder provides the possibilities to become someone or something. Order is a necessary condition for every being to stay, at least for a longer or shorter period of time. If order completely replaces disorder, then no development is possible, it is just a matter of keeping the being in a mood of optimized functionality that resists any decay.
Certainly, we are very afraid of decay. For us, decay means getting sick, losing mental control, and ultimately dying. As long as we assume that only maximized functionality guarantees an optimized life, we need a reference for the idea of optimized functionality. For this we have a simple equation: the better we fulfill the commandments of order, the better our life will be.
It is hard for us to accept that decay (or falling apart) is an elementary condition of being as such. The more we try to work against it, the more decay overwhelms us. This is exactly what we are facing after the first quarter of the 21st century.
We can remain within the idea of systems of order that will eventually stop any decay, or we can replace this idea with the immediate perception of becoming part of becoming, which always means becoming a subject of togetherness. This is what art is: participating in the becoming of the togetherness of elements that we neither expected nor could have foreseen, which build the coded score of a living figuration that we call composition. And this is what a designer has to take from the artist's toolbox:
How to deal with the order of disorder?
How to unfold the possibilities of disorder as given with the solidification of any order?
In other words, how to deconstruct the ordered solidification found in every physical or media object we call a product?
To understand more about the evolution of how objects, products or things have been ordered, I highly recommend reading "The Order of Things" by Michel Foucault.
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If there is a first conclusion to be drawn, it is that it will be impossible to understand the seemingly paradoxical demands of being a designer today - in terms of authorship and performance - if we don't practice it.
From my experience as a student, the practice of art has two prerequisites:
1. (even if it seems paradoxical) not to know why one is driven to write poems, to draw and to paint, and what their actual purpose is,
2. to encounter works of art that arouse an irrepressible desire to become active oneself.
I can neither give you the drive nor the desire to follow the drive. What I can and will do is show you how to develop your own methodological approach to fulfilling the drive to create.
I will do this using my own work. Your task will be to use your work to develop, step by step, your own methods of design.
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1) Deconstruct your Perception
This is what we do continuously from early childhood until today; we make selections…
Let's start with perception.
I try to give a description of what is around me right now. I start with the blanket I am lying under, the pink couch I am lying on, my smartphone next to me, also a book by Artaud (The theatre and its double). Inside the book, a piece of paper that I cut out and used as a bookmark can be found between pages 72 and 73. Strangely enough, the reading tape got stuck between pages 38 and 39. On my left, a bookshelf that takes up the height of the room and is more than four meters long. Inside it a huge number of books (I am much too lacy to count), small vases and other objects, for example an old Rolleiflex surveillance camera, used as bookends. In front of my door, a lamp, a dog pillow, another small bookshelf made of metal bars, placed between the brick chimney line and the sliding door that leads to the dining room. I will stop at this point. If I tried to list and describe everything here in detail, it would take hours and days and months and certainly thousands of pages. Although everything is pretty much in order, the stream of shapes, colors, movements, condensed into objects, meanings, memories, is too powerful and would immediately overwhelm me if I did not automatically make a selection.
This is what we do continuously from early childhood until today; we make selections, which means deconstructing and reconstructing what is around us to produce what we call reality. This happens at every moment. It is the basis of any profession.
We, in the field of creativity, do it in a special way. Understanding how on both levels, practical and theoretical, is the goal of this lecture.
Your assignment:
Take some early drawings of yourself (the earlier the better), at least six drawings, redraw them quickly with thin black lines (best with a black fineliner or ballpoint pen). Redraw again. You will need at least three different copies of each original drawing.
Cut up the re-drawings (artistically deconstruct the deconstructions that result from your perception). There is no rule for this, except that the parts should not be too small.
Start recombining the pieces. Make at least four collages (in A4 or A3 format, as you prefer). The reference for your work is the how (to do it) to achieve a lasting aesthetic quality.
Now you can add pencils, paint, or other collage elements - but you do not have to.
When you are finished, save your results.
The following is an example of how to do a redraw (your assignment is to do this six times, so you will end up with six compositions):
2) Syntax / Semantics / Pragmatics
The question of how to work with syntax, semantics, and pragmatics is fundamental to any kind of design.
The result of the last step shows in many examples how difficult it is to concentrate on the pure form, i.e. the syntax. The syntax is to be understood as a kind of frozen or congealed movement without any reference to semantics or pragmatics.
By the way, one of the appropriate ways to understand how it works is to make mistakes on the practical side and use them as coordinates of understanding on the theoretical side. So a mistake is not a bad thing, but rather the entrance to a deeper knowledge!
The question of what syntax, semantics and pragmatics are is the regular teaching material from the first secondary level, i.e. during the 9th or 10th year of school. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need to repeat it here in the basic studies. In order to develop one's own methods and tonalities of design, it is inevitable to acquire this knowledge.
Here we take a broader view of how something we can read is constructed. It is not just about written language, to which syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are usually assigned. It is about any kind of language: text, music, image, dance, film, sculpture, and so on.
Each of these languages is fundamentally based on a structure of dots and lines, the construction of each letter as well as the notes in a musical composition or the sequence of steps in a choreography or performance, and if we deconstruct the formatted combination (of a movie sequence or parts of a picture) we find the same basis for every movie or image. This basic construction, already a formation of dots and lines (hence the title of this lecture, Formative Design), but without any meaning, is called syntax, which in turn is made up of even smaller elements, the formatives.
A formatted combination (a construction of formatives) tends to take on a semantic dimension, i.e. it can be identified as a word or an object. Ultimately, it is the relationship of the words or objects that become a combination that tells something.
Schematically, we can say that we have tree levels:
1st, the level of dots and lines, called the syntax level,
2nd, the level of formatted combinations that can be read as a single word or object, called the semantic level,
3rd, the level of sequences of formatted combinations that can be read in terms of meaning, called the pragmatic level.
The three levels, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, correspond directly to the three main questions of communication: what, why and how.
As we have said before, here we concentrate entirely on the how in order to experience how the how involuntarily leads to the what and from the what to the why.
Again, from a schematic point of view, we can say:
The first level, the syntax, is directly related to the how; how we have to design, i.e., work with the very basis of any design (points and lines), so that the designed is taken from the immediate impulses on our perception.
The second level, that of semantics, refers to what is to be identified (or read) through the perception of a formatted combination, such as the combination of letters that make up a word, or the combination of formal elements that make up an object.
The third level, that of pragmatics, is related to why; why something happens in terms of physical or psychological reasons. As soon as a sequence of words or a series (in space or time) of objects appears, we are involuntarily forced to clarify the why.
1st assignment:
Go through the task of the 1st step again. Make sure that you focus on identifying and tracing the syntax as a basis for further elaboration:
Cut up the re-drawings you made.
Create a form catalog from the cut-ups. The catalog should contain a minimum of twelve and a maximum of 24 syntax elements. Use a vector program (Illustrator) to create the catalog.
Note that each element remains in syntax mode, i.e. it cannot be directly identified with an object.When you are finished, save your results.
Examples of how to develop a vocabulary of signs or figurations based on the "formative elements":
3) The Designer’s Toolbox
In communication design, we have to deal with an interconnection between what, why and how that is specific to our profession.
We have related the three levels of working with language (the term language in the broad sense of its meaning): the level of syntax, semantics and pragmatics to the basic questions of communication design. In detail: the question of what in terms of identifying what it is, the object itself (for example, a ball) or the basic interaction of objects (kicking a ball), the question of why related to a sequence of objects, that is, individual signs or basic interactions (for example, a soccer game) and the question of how the ball is designed, the body works to kick a ball, how the rules of the games are etc..
Although in fact it is more complex because of several intersections between the levels, to keep it simple we will work with the following equation:
The syntax level is related to the how level.
The semantic level is related to the what level.
The pragmatic level is related to the why level.
Now we will examine which tools are needed to fulfill the tasks of each level and how we proceed to acquire the necessary knowledge.
Tools of the What Level
We start with the what level in its relation to semantics. We define the what level as the one in which all objects are to be found, in a sense as a categorized collection without any narrative relation, i.e. pragmatics, except for the respective category to which the object belongs. By the fact that categorizing is already a pragmatic act that follows a narrative of an ideological kind (the idea that things need a taxonomic order), we have here one of the intersections I am talking about. But even in this case we stay with the what as pure semantics. Thus we can claim that categorization itself is a pure object of a media nature. This allows us to use the method of categorization to divide the object ( to be precise, the answer to the question "What is this?") into three categories:
Material objects, meaning any kind of thing or product or commodity to be used, as well as any media object in its material dimension, such as a text, image, sound, sculpture, choreography, play, film, in the sense of what it is ("this is a text, this is a picture!", etc.) and not what it says, in the narrative relation to why it is said.
Objects that move and evolve on their own, including humans, animals and plants. We should also include all astronomical objects in this category (and here is another intersection, that with the static objects...). These are objects that we call nature because they are created without any cultural input.
Objects that we can call ideas, first of all the idea of mathematics, the idea of taxonomy, and the idea of logic, about which we cannot say whether they were found or founded by man. These ideas interact and form the framework of the idea of natural science. In this way, they have had and will continue to have an enormous influence on the production of material and media objects, ultimately in terms of the Internet and artificial intelligence.
Most undergraduate studies in design concentrate primarily on the material objects and the material dimension of media objects. For this, tools are needed that focus mainly on the material dimension of how to do. On the technical level, the what, i.e. the object, requires the how of production, which focuses on materialization, both physical and digital: How to use a vector-based software like Illustrator, how to use a pixel-based software like Photoshop, how to use a grid- and typography-based layout software like InDesign, and so on. Other tools needed for media production such as photo camera, film camera and the corresponding software for image editing and video editing are also included in the study program. In addition to the digital technical tools, handicrafts are taught, such as silk printing, working with paint, clay, fabric, experimenting with unusual materials, etc.
Concentrating on these tools is understandable from a historical perspective, but today it represents a high risk for those who believe that these technical skills are the critical competence for success in the practice of contemporary design. This is no longer the case. In particular, design work focused on digital implementation is increasingly being taken over by sophisticated software under the control of artificial intelligence. The same is true for craft. Automated 3D printing techniques will more and more replace manual production.
In other words, the production of material and media objects and their design using already developed components (such as images, clips, sounds, etc.) is no longer the primary task of the designer. We still teach it because we are convinced that, for methodological reasons, someone who becomes a designer needs to know how technical production works, but it is highly doubtful whether a designer will still be working in this form in the coming years at all.
The design and production of objects that move and eventually evolve on their own is the field of science, especially at the intersection of AI programming and robotics. In a technical sense, a designer is at most working on the surface design of the robot or the human-machine interface.
Finally, the objects of ideas, which, as already mentioned, are to be seen on the one hand as the basis for the other object categories, and on the other hand lead us to the fundamental question of any syntax: How is a point, as the result of two intersecting traces, to be fixed in the multidimensional structure of a field consisting of nothing other than pure motion, so that between it and the points that arise in the same way, a permanent form will emerge?
Tools of the Why Level
The question of why something is happening presupposes the answer to the question of what it is. A simple example: You smell something. Your experience tells you it is smoke. So what you perceive is that something is burning. The answer to what you perceived requires the what of the physical source. For example, that a barn is on fire. Now involuntarily we will ask, "Why is this barn burning?"
In the same way, it works without a direct sensory perception, but through a medial perception, for example by reading or watching the news, which forces us to ask why. Why is there war in Ukraine? Why this conflict in Palestine? We see that the why immediately demands a how, in the sense of a political, psychological or technical explanation: How could this happen?
In communication design, we have to deal with an interconnection between what, why and how that is specific to our profession. This is our "What is it all about?" It is about the conceptual formula of designing a communication process:
What by whom, why to whom, how
What is the object to be communicated and by whom (who is the sender, a client or the designer himself)?
Why is it necessary to communicate the object of communication to whom (in other words, what is the problem between sender and receiver)?
How should it be communicated in order to satisfy the need, that is, to solve the problem?
The tools that we need to acquire in order to create a concept that can be used as the basis for a design that works according to the formula are given by a didactic methodology that we call "Authorship and Performance". This methodology is taught in the lecture "Coincidental Aesthetics", which is part of the main course.
Tools of the How Level
The explanatory how, which remains in the structure of logical reasoning, is a subset of the why and not the how of methodological procedure in terms of the syntactical dimension. The first how examines an event that has already occurred. This how is the starting point of human sciences such as sociology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, ethnology, etc.
The how we are dealing with is the how of an event that is going to happen in such a way that at the end there will be an object, a physical, media or interaction object, designed to transcend the what and the why by giving appropriate answers to these questions. This is how it happens: By going as deep as possible into the possibilities of how the result is questioning the what and why in such a fundamental way that the general answer, from which all sub-answers are to be derived, is given by the system of how, how to create an individual syntax and how to use it. This is the fundamental answer to all questions regarding what and why - not at least in the design of the 21st century.
This may sound a little too abstract for you. So let us try to give you a practical idea (not abstract anymore, but maybe a bit too pathetic) by relating the how, the why and the what to the basic questions of every existence. The main question we have to ask ourselves is: "How do we want to live?"
I think it is obvious that we will only be able to give an appropriate answer by fulfilling the how day by day in our concrete existence; how we behave with ourselves, how we behave with others, how we perceive everything around us and how we react to it. All questions of what and why are in fact derived from this.
The how we have to work accordingly is the how of creating a narrative (which necessarily contains physical, medial and interaction objects) whose quality lies in the way the events are told. What is said and why it happens is, in a sense, only an accessory.
The how (how to do it / how to proceed / how to develop a relationship to the what and why) is what you will learn here through the practical tasks of the Formative Design lecture. The reason why you need to learn it should be obvious now, because this methodical process of design will lead you to your own visual language - how you will be perceived, how the aesthetic quality of your design will have an impact.
4) How to Derive What and Why
In communication design, we have to deal with an interconnection between what, why and how that is specific to our profession.
In response to a physical impact, we usually start with the question: What was that? It can be something that touches us or that we touched involuntarily, something that we see, hear, or smell, in other words, something that we perceive aesthetically, that is, with our senses. Once we have identified what it was, depending on whether it seems important to us, we ask why it happened. Either to prevent it from happening again, because we are afraid of it, or to ensure that it will be repeated for our pleasure.
The designer's task is to find an aesthetic answer to a communicative question. The communicative questions are always related to the needs of the particular sender; what needs to be communicated in order to stabilize the particular position. It can be a market position, a political position, a religious position, and so on.
Regarding the position, we also find the what and why questions, but here not related to the sensual impact, but rather to the need to secure or increase the respective position. To do so arguments are needed. We are dealing with two different kinds of arguments, intellectual and aesthetic. The main aspect of studying design is to relate them in an adequate manner.
Expressed in a simple scheme, we can say that the intellectual arguments are related to the What and Why questions, and the aesthetic level (or argumentation), that is, what we perceive with our senses, is related to the How question. If we break down the How question into its basic components, we find first an impulse, and second, how long the expansion of the impulse will last.
Based on our bodily experience, we understand that any what question, whether or not it leads to a why question, presupposes an impulse that somehow happened.
The powerful force in the play between the intellectual questioning of what and why, on the one hand, and the sensual perception of something happening, on the other, is the aesthetic that transforms the how of the happening into a sequence of lasting impulses.
The strongest arguments are the physical ones. In its most extreme form, such as corporal punishment, we speak of physical violence. But it has never been possible to convince anyone of intellectual positions by physical punishment. This applies to any kind of punishment, even if it is not physically carried out. Part of every punishment is the promise of a reward. All you have to do is accept the arguments and follow the given instructions.
Simply following instructions does not require understanding, but rather a maximum of obedience. Obedience never asks what is happening and why (to guarantee the reward, it is much safer to ignore the what and why), never seeks knowledge, never asks how to do what to do, in your own way.
The designer who simply follows the rules is caught between punishment and reward: “If you are a good boy, if you do all your chores to everybody's satisfaction, you will get this wonderful house, this wonderful car, this wonderful wife, these wonderful children, this wonderful dog...". The problem is that between punishment and reward, the world perishes; the environment, democracy, social interaction.
The problem goes deeper. Only by resisting the promises of reward will nothing change. The search for great change has always been a promise in itself. At the beginning of the 20th century, design started to work for the big social change, failed, degenerated into a service provider for the consumer, finally finds itself pushed out of the game, which will be almost completely taken over by artificial intelligence by the end of this decade.
Arthur Arbesser
5) Active surrender to the formative structure
In communication design, we have to deal with an interconnection between what, why and how that is specific to our profession.
More than we realize, grammatical structure has a fundamental effect on the content of what we say. So if we want to say something, we must first surrender to grammar. This becomes obvious as soon as we begin to learn a new language.
Studying design means first of all learning a new language. We might assume that we already know how this language works. That it consists mainly of the ability to reproduce, i.e. to copy what we see, physically in front of us or in our imagination, and to learn how to do it on a technical level. But we do not need any knowledge of the visual language, or more precisely, of the sensual language of aesthetics. To reproduce a physical image or an imagination in our mind is, literally speaking, nothing more than a reproduction of what already exists.
To be able to say something in the language of aesthetics, we need a completely different knowledge than to simply copy something that has been said over and over again.
First of all, we need to understand what the grammar of sensual language is, which we call visual grammar, and how to actively surrender to this grammatical structure.
To put it as simply as possible, grammar is generally the knowledge of the relationship between the elements that make up a text. The term text must be understood as a readable sequence, which may contain a sequence of different physical objects as well as a sequence of letters. The term read is to be understood on both human levels of understanding, the intellectual and the bodily.
As designers, we must consider both levels and how to relate them so that one can activate and intensify the other. In order to do this, it is essential to acquire a deep knowledge of the basis that underlies all the different grammatical structures, such as those of spoken and written language, of music, of dance, of images, films, sculptures, and so on.
The tricky thing is that in order to acquire the knowledge, you have to practice it physically. That means you have to use pen and paper. And you have already done that. In your very early childhood drawings it is quite obvious how you have physically acquired the basic grammatical structure. Now the challenge is to activate, systematize, and use that knowledge to build your own vocabulary.
The grammatical structure of sensual language is fundamentally based on the elementary experience of being physically moved: by breathing and by our heartbeat, which causes blood to flow in our veins from our feet to our brain. As soon as we actively detect the movement, it becomes solidified at the intersection of movement and perception.
What we simply do when we detect a movement is to fix the start and end points by drawing a line between them. This is how every drawing of a very young child begins. This is how every masterpiece drawn by Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci begins.
The fact of drawing a line from one point to another seems quite simple, and indeed it is, but understanding what it means to unfold one's own use of a sensual language from this simple gesture becomes more complex with each step forward.
In the first unit we start with our childhood drawings. The task was to deconstruct the result of that which had already been deconstructed and thus traced and manifested. So we understand that early childhood drawings are just that: traces of the deconstruction of our perception. We do this in order to order what we perceive so that we can read it and tell about what we have read. This is where our narrative of being related to the world, and thus to ourselves, begins.
The task was also to use the elements gained from the deconstruction of the early childhood drawing to create a composition that tells nothing more than the aesthetic tension between movement and its manifestation.
Here you can already see what is meant by active surrender to the formative structure. Formative is the smallest element that carries a basic meaning, in a sense the boundary between that there is nothing to be identified and the identification of punctuate fixed nothingness that by being punctuated becomes something. At this point we can do nothing but surrender to the movement and actively trace our surrender. The result is a drawing that may or may not show something that can be identified. But this is, as always, a matter of interpretation.
The activity of surrender requires a deep knowledge of how to follow the movement. It is important to remember that it is the living movement as such that we are surrendering to. What used to be called the individual signature or tonality of the artist was literally based on the movement of his hands.
Although we use very different tools today than the generations before us, it remains the same: the movement, that is, the process by which we methodically acquire the formal elements of our composition, unfolds our own use of language. Thus, beginning with the point and the line, the methodical use focuses on the formation of the elements, colors and materials you use. This defines the formal result of your object, whether it is physical or media.
Finally, methodical use is the result of almost endless experimentation with formal elements in relation to your preferred means and media, until you are able to define your own methods of creating unique aesthetic results.
You see, the main knowledge to be gained is how to create an individual vocabulary to design objects that are involuntarily perceived as the result of an individually executed composition.
The second part of the task is to develop an individual vocabulary by deconstructing an existing artifact, then choosing an object from a given list of objects and realizing it using your individual vocabulary.
For an example of what is meant by an individual vocabulary, see the work of the French designer Simon Renaud.
One last note: to unfold your own sensual language from the basic formative elements requires a lot of commitment in terms of time, passion and patience with yourself (which may be the most difficult part), and last but not least the inner freedom to make your experiments, your discoveries, your failures.
The study gives you the framework in the form of assignments, all the theoretical knowledge you need to develop your own methodological approach, the opportunity to reflect on each step over and over again, the exchange with others who are also trying to find their own way and, through all this, the perspective of what it takes to become a designer in the 21st century.
To activate and withstand your passion (in the double meaning of the word), to use your freedom and to dive as deep as possible into the opportunities given here - that is entirely up to you.
Now take another look at the results of the first assignment, if you are happy with them, compile them into a PDF file and upload it to the 'Upload your first small task' section.