Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.

So having skipped past the need for that re-cap, I thought I’d now witter on a bit about what sort of design I like, and I thought I’d start with a couple of links to designers I know.

Phil Clandillon. I worked with Phil in a little yellow room in Acton. Dark Days. Phil’s particular knack is coming up with really interesting and clever shit using unexpected technologies. The Kasabian “Football Hero” video was him, as was the AC/DC music video that was an Excel spreadsheet, as were a few other clever things that you can find out about at his portfolio there. What I like about Phil’s best work is the strength of his ideas – the execution’s important, too, but I like the fact that Phil isn’t just turning out websites any more, but is in a place where he can come up with genuinely orginal stuff that pulls in all sorts of digital media, and generally makes me think “I wish I’d thought of that”.

BERG. BERG is the sort of place that I would love to work for, but quite frankly, am not clever enough to do so. What I love about their work is twofold: one, is that it tends to be cutting edge, at least in terms of thinking, if not technology, and two, that it tends to be made the with the aim of enabling people to do things – they’re makers, rather than marketers. Also, how can you not love an agency who named themselves after of something out of Quatermass?

Between those two, I find I’ve very neatly encapsulated what I love about design – it’s the means by which people’s ideas shape the world, and bit by bit, change our lives. Here at the start of the 21st century, if you’re not engaged with design as a (very broad) field on some level, I do kind of wonder what you’re doing with your life, apart from taking up resources that the rest of us could be making better use of.

So that’s design as idea, and design as world-shaper, which is all vitally important background, but what about aesthetics? After all, that’s what most people think of when they think of design.

Well, I only really qualified to talk about my own sense of aesthetics, and me, I’m a pretty unabashed Swiss modernist. Give me clean, clear lines, plenty of white space, and attention to simple detail in the service of clarity. Sure, I can appreciate the cluttered, hand drawn and grungy look – I quite like the work of people like Courtney Riot or Christopher Cox, but honestly, give me plain black text, well spaced, on a white background every time – a bit of simple elegance. If I had to pick my favourite font, it’d be Helevetica Neue – just about the only font face that is more precise and tidier than Helevtica.

This applies in just about everything from ink on paper to products to architecture – I love simple clear lines and an absence of clutter. Those who have seen the spaces I inhabit and the general state of my desk are probably laughing themselves sick right now, to which I can only remark that very often, really good design is an aspirational thing.

We’ll start with a quote that was very nearly the quote I used yesterday, and is something that I willl probably have tattooed on myself at some point in the not-too-distant future. “The map is not the territory”. That’s Robert Anton Wilson, talking there, and it’s a simple a pithy phrase that means in essence that just because we can model, explain, or illustrate something in a particular way right now, we should not confuse our current way of thinking with the truth. There is always more to learn, and if we accept that what we know now is that absolute truth, we run the risk of becoming dogmatic, and ignoring future discoveries.

Which is, of course, why fundamentalists always misunderstand science – they have confused their map with the territory, and have trouble the idea that the map science provides is subject to change – for them the very fact that it’s subject to change means that it cannot be true. So their faith tells them that X is true, while science asks them to give you the comfortable certainty of X for the more difficult uncertainty of any one of a number of other letters.

But I’m digressing. I don’t just like maps as metaphor. I like them as objects in an of themselves. The inamorata knocked it out of the park a couple of months ago, when she bought me a poster of an old tube map, from back before it was the tube, when there were only half a dozen short lines, and it was called “The London Electric Railway”. I went out and bought a frame for it the very next day, and it’s hanging in pride of place in my office. I think that anyone that knows me could instantly understand why it would.

I said a minute ago that I don’t just like maps as metaphor, and that’s true, but I think it’s more accurate to say that I love them because the are metaphors. Maps are a very human thing – a means to reframe the world in a different context, a means to make vast scopes smaller, and more comprehensible. I love them because they same territory can be mapped in hundreds of different ways, and each of them is true, and valid, and will show us something different about that space. Maps illuminate the real and the unreal with equal ease – chart territories both physical an imaginary, or, indeed, the intersection of the two in a marvellous manner.

Maps exist at the point where art and science touch, a space for design and culture. And they’re ever evolving – there is no such thing as a completely finished map, because by the time a map is done, the thing it is mapping will have changed.

One of my favourite ever maps, in fact, is visible incomplete. My Dad owns two volumes of a three volume set of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If he had all three, in the same nick that the two he has are in, they’d be worth a grand or two. As it is, they’re worth about 20 quid each. But their worth isn’t my point, except perhaps to illustrate why I was allowed to handle them as kid, and have therefore seen the map of the world contained therein.

The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1776. On the map of the world in contains, the coastline of Australia is incomplete, and it is not labelled as Australia, but rather “New Holland”. Absolutely bloody magic.

Design is very obviously allied to Art – they’re often mentioned in the same breath as a subject of study, and that’s not really terribly surprising – it’s more or less the same range of techniques and materials that they draw on. There is no discipline in one that does not have a corresponding one in the other. If we proceed from my definition of Art as at attempt on the part of the creator to communicate something inside them, then it follows that a reasonable definition of Design is an attempt to communicate something that is not inside the creator. (I nearly used the word “extrinsic” there, and then I thought of an old Fry and Laurie sketch, and backed away at speed.)

Design, more than Art these days, is the language of our culture. It’s where people are actually paid money to work out how to get ideas across, to push values and yeah, products. Art is generally looked on as the “purer” of the two, (theoretically) unsoiled as it is by filthy lucre, but one might also argue that it’s in design that we find most innovation these days, as people and brands compete to be heard over the increasing noise. (There’s obviously the counter-argument to be made about corporate conservatism and people sticking with an idea that works, but one only has to look at any sort of design retrospective to see that things do change.)

It occurs to me though, is that for all the designers I’ve met who have made Art in their spare time, I’ve met the same number of designers who don’t really seem to have any urge to create for themselves outside of work. They enjoy the science of communicating, but they don’t seem to have anything to say themselves. I personally don’t understand this – I’m hugely interested in design because I think it’ll make me a better artist (in so far as I make any claims to be one). I could come up with half a dozen reasons why this should be so – lack of confidence in their own ideas and opinions, simply being left creatively tired by work, unwillingness to do for free what they can earn money doing, all sorts of things. It doesn’t really matter why it should be. And I’m not yet too terribly disheartened by it. I think it illustrates that the fundamental human urge is to communicate, even if one has nothing to say.

Which explains small talk, I guess.

On a related note: I am heartened to see the D&AD are now offering an option for people who aren’t professional designers to join up, and it’s something I intend to do later in the year.

Architecture isn’t something that immediately springs to mind when someone says “Art”, yet it’s probably the form or art that most of us have most daily interaction with, since it’s the art form that creates the spaces we live in.

But on the other hand, it’s also the one to which it is hardest to apply the working definition I opted for in my last entry – that Art requires that the creator be expressing a thought they have had about the world. It’s not impossible. Jump Studios for example, created a fascinating space for the new Red Bull office in London this year. I’m not sure how it would feel to work there, done out as it is in heavy blues and stark whites, but it’s certainly interesting. It’s other major unusual feature is that the building incorporates slides as a way of moving between floors in the office.

Which leads me, of course, to “Test Site” Carsten Höller’s current exhibition at the Tate Modern. Holler’s body of work combines architecture, sculpture and other disciplines to ask questions about the way we interact with the space around us. It’s a notion that’s increasingly relevant today, as we start to move from an industrial economy to an information economy. Suddenly, we no longer need to have our use of space dictated by the practicalities of using machines. There are exceptions as, for example, major internet companies are forced to locate their server farms in places where they can obtain the bandwidth and electrical supply they need, but for the most part, we are increasingly free of the need to work in warehouses, or even dedicated office space.

And so it becomes increasingly relevant to ask how we can make use of space in such a manner as to enhance our daily lives, not just from a functional point of view, but also as a means to create moments of pleasure in our day to day life. This is the question currently facing artists and architects, and having been to experience “Test Site” myself, I have to say, Höller and Jump are probably on to something.