Dimensions of Design

I am not a craftsman but feel close family ties with one of the crafts and particularly with some philosophy on that craft. Some of you have heard of it. Some might have read about it. Although I am a painter and teacher I have accepted the invitation to talk here to you because I feel attracted by the topic of your conference by a great challenging topic.

It says not "Dimension of Craft" which might point first at sessions on trade or organization issues marked by separating, limiting professional boundaries. Instead it says "Dimension of Design", meaning probably something not exclusively professional. And I like to read this topic as something broad, as something connected with culture, and particularly with art.

Since I have tried—for some time to make and teach art I feel encouraged to participate in a conference connected with art,—with art as visual formulation.

First I should like to clarify the term "Design" both, as I saw it, and as I see it. In my mother tongue there is no word of an equal meaning. So it took me a long time to grasp the connotations of "Design." You will remember that for many years—every year again—abstract art was declared dead. But it even entered children’s art classes. And when they made those non-representational color scribblings I asked a little boy what it meant. "Oh" he says, "that’s just design, just design."

It was just as puzzling for me to hear the word "design" used by people I met at my painting exhibitions. After the first favorable comments—namely on my beautiful frames—another comment, also favorable, came: "But I like your design." Listen to the singing of these two words design, just design, but your design.

All this did not lead me to an easy or pleasant acceptance of that word "design." To this end—it seems—I had to become first a Chairman of a "Department of Design". So I finally "rose"—just before retiring from that position—just now, I "rose" to the following verbal formulation of my own. I quote:

"To design is to plan and organize to order, to relate and to control. In short, it embraces all means opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing."

With this formulation I point at design as an outspoken human affair and its concern with quality and selection and consequently at its ethical implications.

Therefore I do not accept the much posted slogan: "Design is everywhere," published by a great institution!

Of course nature presents order, and surely relationship but only nature’s order, although an admirable order.

I believe that it is human control or, if you prefer, human interference with nature, that converts earth and water and what grows from both into design. It is human imagination, creativeness that transfers nature’s products into containers and tools answering human needs. Containers and tools just to name two large categories.

This brings us to factors upon which design depends—two conditions of design.

It is not first Tradition as the retrospective 19th Century has tried to make us believe; nor economic conditions—also invented by the 19th Century—and which, for too long, were to explain almost all human development, incidents and accidents, from war to peace, and even art.

And it is easy to prove for instance that Marx’s assertion that art depends on wealth is nonsense.

Slowly we have learned that human development, with human mentality, depends first on psychological conditions not on economic, social conditions. They have learned that human action depends on love and hate much more than on possession—no matter whether possessions are equal or unequal.

And now we know—finally at the middle of the 20th Century—that tradition in art is to create not to revive. I repeat—‘tradition in art is to create not to revive.’ In other words, tradition is to look forward, not backward, but inward, instead of outward.

With thinking about the development of psychological conditions we come to education, a most decisive factor in any field of human endeavor. And this leads to teaching of design which is to prepare: actively, planning and producing, passively: consuming and appreciating of designed goods.

Though I need to go into methodical details I dare to show now how we teach design at Yale.

By design, here, I do not mean industrial or product design, but a general training in and for design in general.

And as in all general education, we start with elementary studies, and as we learn in school among the 3 (or 4) "R"s—I prefer four because then art is included—we learn first, arithmetic (for instance as an elementary discipline) no matter whether we are later housewives or bankers.

So we expose our students mainly and thoroughly to a basic learning, Whether their aim is painting or sculpture, printmaking, photography or graphic design—whether they plan to go into architecture, city, or stage design, all learn first basic design; learn basic drawing; learn basic color.

And just the same studies are offered to our "customers" from the campus, undergraduates of varying interests, and graduates of many fields. As those coming to us from Yale College and the University, and as those outnumber our professionals, it may be of interest, why they come to us. They come rarely on advice of their academic professors, but mostly because of their discovery that the eyes, our most important contact with the world (psychologists have proved that 80 – 90% of our perception is visual)—they have seen that our eyes are neglected—especially in "higher" learning. Or they have heard that our training of eye and hand includes mind and heart and also connects and broadens studies in other fields.

In order to make clear what "basic" means I must emphasize first that we do not believe in so-called self-expression. Neither as a way of study nor as its aim. Instead, we believe in a step by step learning of observation and articulation that is of clear seeing first, and of appropriate precise formulation second, both the natural conditions for producing meaningful form.

I am not competent to give you—representatives of many crafts—specified advice.

But I think it will stimulate, despite my being indirect, to tell some typical features of our basic teaching.

As our methods of teaching—learning—differ from those of other schools, I hope they offer new comparisons, viewpoints, and challenge thus a re-evaluation of our own work and also self-criticism.

So I speak first about drawing. I think this illustrates most clearly what I mean by step-by-step teaching and learning. Our drawing class, with a normal enrollment of twenty-four is attended by 110 to 120; despite the fact that the class demands hard and concentrated work, despite the fact that we don’t use charcoal and still more, despite the fact that we have no naked girls around. Why—without such a big attraction? I had to teach, during my years of study for years, naked ones, but I know that I hadn’t learned a thing. I got some skill but I didn’t have any understanding really of what I did. I tried to save my students from this negative experience and achieved that by saving Yale every year several thousand dollars for models. Instead, we offer our students exercises as a teacher in music might—maybe as a piano teacher has to do—if the aim is learning to play the piano. In this way we learn to repeat form. We repeat form by performing a whole page full of triangles, one after the other, all of the same direction on top of each other—and if the page is full of black pencil strokes then we take ink or red pencils. We do reversed shapes.

We don’t see only with our eyes. We see also with our motor sense that the arm is sometimes surer than when it concerns direction—than the eye is. Why? My explanation is that the eye is too close by our memory. There are two kinds of shooting—this one and "bang". Visual shooting and motor-sense shooting. We do repeat forms, we reverse forms, we extend forms and always with the aim to produce similarity.

We learn that a circle remains a circle only in a frontal position. If you can imagine a wall—a big wall—only on eye level the circle remains visual. In that corner the ellipse has this tendency—in this corner the ellipse has that tendency—in between—this way—this way—this way. You won’t find the explanation in books and I won’t give it to you, because I would like you to find it yourself. We learn to see. We learn to dispose and for this reason we have a saying: "To speak without thinking—produces nonsense if not an insult." To draw without seeing what we are doing, is just the same. So we draw a lot (in the air)—the so-called meander. We draw above the paper—we draw with closed eyes and then we see what we might get. Then we go down and put it down. You see, I’m against self-expression. We draw lots of things; pots, glasses, flowers, twigs, tools, umbrellas—a very good model—bicycles—the most hated model—because it is very difficult often to see, particularly when it is lying on the ground, whether the wheel has this leaning or that leaning. We are always misled. If we don’t know the optical rule, we will be misled. We do a lot of figure drawing. A lot! When we do them the models are always our friends or class members. We know them. We draw the people of whom we also know how their legs are underneath the dining table—or what is characteristic. We do not express ourself, as I said. We do not represent but we present. We present that we understand what we are doing.

The next field that I have here is basic design. In the school’s catalogues it is called 2 and 3 Dimensional Design. I would like to reverse this order because 3 Dimensional is easier to conceive than 2 Dimensional. We should know that. We do not start with design principles like movement, balance, proportion. We start with material and with elements and try to find out how far they lead us to improve our flexibility which is discovery and invention.

The Mexican people, I think, are the richest people in sculpture in all history. When you study their little clay figures, they are always all done with great respect for the material. The material stands on its own and never on armatures. Clay on armatures is a swindle. Let’s have clay representing itself. (Then make a ball this way—make a sausage this way!) The study of Mexican sculpture and the elements from which they have produced their great culture is most enlightening. These so-called primitive people. We can learn from them a lot.

Try to avoid and even to condemn so-called design terms which too easily lead to mechanical application.

One term is texture. I think I am entitled to consider myself instrumental in re-introducing texture 30 years ago. But what happened to texture since then is frightening. Originally it was meant just to present honesty, insuring the material’s honest face. But today we mix it with form and with shape and even with color. To hide either—to improve—form and color—or to hide failures in form and color. And then it is called "personal handwriting." I do not permit in the basic design class to use the word "variety." Why not? Because, again it’s a device to hide lack of imagination. We need an excuse. Please be honest to yourself and find out where you have excused something without meaning as "variety" and are fooling yourself and others. So I say, what was practically said here before—this is not a place only to please and to praise, but also to challenge opposition.

In basic design, we emphasize very much economy of effort and in art I must say, we achieve more than in physics; in mathematics more than the bankers can do. Only in design one and one is three—please. One and one is three—can you see the three? One and one is four—can you see the four? Only in art, and only artists are entitled to have this profit. Now to make it short, I rush on and say a little bit about color.

Color—we have developed a new way of study and particularly in order to oppose mechanical applications of rules. And to name right away very bad ones—complementaries—I say complementaries in scientific terms, which might exist in a physics laboratory but does not exist in paint which is our medium. When you start with a certain red and go to the Munsell System you find the opposite so-called complementary color here. But take the same color and go to any systems there are and you will find different ones. Complementaries is a most vague relationship and if it is so vague, let’s protect ourselves and our students from this very poor advice. We are tired of reds and greens all the time. Let’s find a little bit broader range—so we are speaking in our course—mainly—that we never see a color what it really is—please be aware of that. We are always deceived by colors. We never see a color as that what is physically in our mind. This should be known and this should be applied if we want to be fooled again by stupid rules. We do not start with color systems—we start with color effects and we make out from three colors that they look like two. We are able to make three colors look like four and we are almost able now to make black and white look alike! And we do all this nonsense only in paper—not in pigments—this is particularly healthy because paper doesn’t permit mixture. Therefore, we do mixture a lot and that’s the main study of our papers, color studies that we learn mixture. With closed eyes we try to find out which might be the mixture of two color parents. We know and learn that any mixture is not lighter—is not brighter than the lightest and the brightest of the color mixture parents, or lower or deeper than the color parents.

Now I would like to compare these three fields which I have presented. Drawing means discipline—means position. Basic design very briefly means lubrication of imagination, and color—just plain magic. These details show that our aim is seeing and formulating, or as I said before observation and articulation. We oppose the academic concept of theory and practice, in which theory is placed artificially first, because naturally practice proceeds theory. We believe in learning by experience as more lasting than memorizing rules and theories. We demonstrate that there is besides thinking and logical conclusions—also thinking in situations and that is in my opinion, what the creative process means. When I brought this word up first I got some laughter from professors that were older than I, and also from anthropologists and psychologists. Now the term is already published by economists even. We are convinced that ultimately only the development of real readiness for action serves human co-existence and that is why education has been invented originally and again and again through the ages.

As human life and society demand fulfilled obligations, we as people depending on eye and hand must be aware and make aware that the visual type of student and the manual and auditory type deserve as much educational attention as a minority of intellectuals if we aim at democratic learning which is learning for all. students in democratic learning.

One dimension of our work is measured by vision. Because it is vision—I believe—that directs us to art. Therefore if our work is—or approaches—art (though the final decision on it is not ours), then sensitive eyes will discover an inner seeing, inner reading, revealed on the producers side, and equally evoked on the spectators side.

With such concepts, we again move away from the 19th century which considered nature as the main source of creative, productive, inspiration. But we have found that nature too easily is read as something outside of us—around us.

But if man is our first concern—then I recommend life—human life as a closer and deeper inspirational source. All evaluation stems from comparison and analogies or parallels of our work with situations or conditions of human life—I believe—convince easier and lead further than similarities with forms in nature.

After the present fashion of self-expressionism, and over-individualization, manual work and craft will be needed and will be asked for to give weight to the development of ability and will. The first and last justification of education. The times are with us—the lead of materialism and retrospection is waning. Self-expression is eliminating itself in self-disclosure of little and less significance as it rejects planning and control.

After yesterday’s emphasis on economic-social issues, ability and personality will be sought again and spiritual needs will be recognized again. Our time is encouraging! The public is interested in art; art books and poetry are again best sellers; after too much of renaissance and 19th Century revival, we now learn art from so-called primitive peoples. Their visual revelations move now from natural history collections into art museums. When we learn from folk art that respect for material brings design further than "personal handwriting" then it should be clear again that true design is good instead of interesting. It is serving instead of (now listen—I think the word comes from the greatest vice of today—serving instead of entertaining.)

Beyond all those Wagnerian posters, screaming that enriched bread builds strong "somethings", last month in eight ways—last week already in twelve ways. I don’t know if the middle-west is also bombarded with such posters as we have in the east. Enriched bread helps build strong bodies again. When we see such nonsense, then it should become clear again. Good design is not first interest and it is not first entertaining.

Beyond three-colored cars and tailfins, beyond multi-colored iceboxes competing with rejuvenated hotels, and beyond all this great color consciousness of the times, let us not overlook that one dimension of design—namely its great mission.

Its emissaries will demonstrate that behavior produces form—behavior of material—plus behavior of ourself. They also know that, in return, form results in behavior. I repeat: behavior produces form and form results in behavior. The emissaries will develop receptiveness, receptiveness for meaningful form advocating a meaningful life instead of "gracious living".

Concluding: I dare to forecast. It will be seen again that beauty is more than outside surface make-up—that beauty is virtue.

So I am looking forward to a new philosophy telling us that esthetics are ethics. I invite you to deal with this new concept that ethics are the source and measure of esthetics.