Figuring: an Ambiguous Move
2005 – with Tim Marshall
The room is windowless, of that I am certain. I remember the walls as painted grey, a fluorescent light flickering in the ceiling. That is probably not true. I have lost track of time in this place with no sun, absorbed in the process of designing I don’t know what. For now. I am alone with Illustrator, the application. We are absorbed in conversation. I am moving shapes around in ways that anyone observing might read as directionless. This aligns with my perception that I have no clear intention.
My education led me to understand that the designer designs communication, objects and interactions. This productive practice comes with a set of decisive moves and sacrificial prototypes that scaffold a process of iteration and feedback. Yet, today I am lost in flow as I aimlessly move form around to see how the materials respond to me. You see, I am lost. I am new to this country, to this university. As I sit with the abstract forms on the screen, I am thinking more conceptually than concretely. I do not know the context well enough to begin addressing any meaningful challenges here in my new job. I am not trying to imagine what a new curriculum might look like as much as sitting with how a new orientation to design education might feel. At this point, I have no words for what I am doing. I just know I am not trying to solve a problem as much as sense a way into what I do not know.
I came to call this a practice of figuring. In that bleak room, displaced from anything familiar, it became possible to use my form-making, propositional thinking and abductive sensing to not fix a solution but to be abstractly, yet deliberately, in conversation with my own ideas, assumptions and values around curriculum design. Until that moment, my mental model of communication design would construct the artefact as a mode of communicating to others, like Figure 0.1 of a scientific text. In this new space, figuratively and metaphorically, I am unconsciously exploring whether this act of figuring could be an end in itself.
On this day, my conversation is with threads of colour on a screen. I am wondering how different ways of conceiving Parsons curriculum might be visualised – do the ribbons represent fields of design practice or transdisciplinary thematic? The meandering curves in the paths remind me of aerial views of New Zealand’s braided rivers. It makes me question what would braid the strands together and what directs the ever-shifting flow of the water. The backtalk in my mind is further animated by the serendipitous moves the computer makes, drawing me into a conversation that asks what happens when scales unsettle, opacity promises and forms collide. Are the marks on the screen proposing bridges or tunnels, crossings or intersections? Suspending the impulse to interrogate the consequences of these ruminations I try to stay in the realm of the potential.