The Unfinished Table
What is this obsession with finishing things? Does life really become more manageable with beginnings, middles and ends, or is ‘finished’ just a comfort zone? The point at which any act concludes is purely subjective. We are in a perpetual state of unfinished everything. Our emotions exceed the chemicals that manufacture them. Even when dead we carry on living through the tinctures we leave behind. The economics of creativity demand that we deliver conclusions to our clients and audiences. But dare to think that an idea might have been realised, and the restless invent-a-holic inside you screams that ‘finished’ is a merely a contrivance; a close relative of “Are we there yet?” and “When are you going to grow up?”
During the 1980s I was a partner in a London based prototype workshop and an ideas store in West Berlin. The arrangement emerged from the frustration of sourcing adventurous manufacturers, and the aggravation of trying to show work in other people’s spaces. The beauty of our own premises went something like this: Monday (London) big idea, drawings and models. Tuesday: exploring functionality of emerging prototype. Wednesday: destroy prototype. Thursday: re-jigged manufacturing techniques inspire re-configured prototype. Friday: testing and pushing. Saturday: finessing, paint and tweaks. Sunday: Load truck and drive to Berlin. Monday: fledgling object attracting attention in the Schlüterstraße windows. This fast-track route from inception to reaction was incredibly compelling because the more we dreamed it – the more it happened.
The Cold War was running on empty. East and West Berlin were like Siamese twins spitting with sibling rivalry. Tin-pot generals, faceless apparatchiks and secret service operatives spooked each other to the edge of reason and back. The politicians slugged it out in phoney slanging matches. World War II was still unfinished business. Peace had never been declared. Each side of the city exaggerated its extremities: the West in conspicuous consumption, the East in a dreary repression. The opposing powers played a swaggering game of brinkmanship. American Forces Network Radio flaunted itself as ‘…a beacon of hope in a vortex of tyranny’. Soviet propaganda bragged that life behind the iron curtain was ‘…imaginative, inventive and open to the world’. We stewed in a neurotic pleasure-dome. We danced till dawn in clubs fitted out like jungles, or tropical beaches, or giant padded cells. Disaffected German youth flocked to West Berlin for its licentiousness and the Berliner ID card, which exempted them from national service. Strangely nihilistic student riots only succeeded in reducing the windows of the precious Ku’damm boutiques to smithereens. Our guardian angel was Laurie Anderson, and the anthem was O Superman for its atonal and asymmetric astringency. She conjured up a nowhere of non-places. She warped, manipulated, deconstructed and sharpened our senses by bending perception. She squeezed her voice through digital interfaces until they morphed into synthesized apparitions. We lived for the moment because the end of the world almost but never quite happened.
West Germany was in ferment; its post-war renaissance driven by a government quick to suppress any activism that could jeopardise the ‘economic miracle’. But this vision of a spotless society on the road to recovery was pockmarked by the bombings, kidnaps and assassinations of the Red Army Faction. They claimed to speak for a new generation alienated by a post-war bourgeoisie papering over the horrors of the Third Reich, but they were just another bunch of thugs. The nuclear stand-off made Washington and Moscow equally tetchy. Twenty years earlier the USSR President Nikita Khrushchev joked that Free Berlin represented the ‘Testicles of the West’. Eastern Bloc irritation at ‘capitalist provocation’ was signalled with petulant border closures. We were stranded in 10-kilometre tail-backs of trucks on the DDR autobahn corridor. The lethal no-man’s-land, machine gun towers, booby-trapped razor wire and grizzly militia added up to a surreal brutality. The Wall filleted streets down the middle, and although contact – even waving – was strictly forbidden, East and West hausfraus in carved up neighbourhoods pretended to clean windows in unison. The 365-metre high revolving telecommunications tower in the secular East was known affectionately as ‘God’s Revenge’ for its phenomena of transubstantiating rays of sunshine into a cock-eyed crucifix. Even U-Bahn stations became ‘other countries’, as you on Platform West stared across the tracks at them on Platform East.
My creativity was evolving into narratives around schisms, the attraction of opposites, the clash of similarities, and the sparks that arc across loose ends. Deliberately unfinishing provoked in-betweeny stuff that lurched towards even more revealing excursions. Unfinishing meant unlearning completion. Falling off the straight and narrow. Neither coming nor going. I had been increasingly working with wood because of its unfinished qualities – from the germinating seed, to the insatiable roots, to the ever-expanding branches, to the cycles of the seasons, to the felling and the drying, to the expanding and contracting, to the transformation into furniture and to numerous presences through generations of lives. The Unfinished Table began with the idea of creating a space in which opposites could meet. It also became a kind of domestic schematic that cut through the fog of familial complexity. One elevation of the table was honed to perfection with turned legs, ogee mouldings and deep golden patina. The other end appeared fresh from the timber yard complete with sealed end grain and splinters. The central area became transitional and reflected the common ground between the bi-polar madness of the times. Its form was critical because the dining table – unlike walls that divide cities – symbolised the lowering of defences and exchanges of ideas. Dinner guests who craved resolution clustered around the ‘finished’ frame of mind, whereas more spontaneous folk were drawn towards the ‘unfinished’ state of being. Ambivalent visitors who could not decide where to sit, hovered somewhere in the middle. But as the table began to work its magic and the camaraderie melted inhibitions, people moved from one end to the other, prompting animated discussions around how unfinishing can liberate us from the tyranny of THE END.
Tom
PS Here’s another 66000mph angle on unfinished business, this time in terms of narrative, organisations and faith.
Attention
Design Week magazine has published some of the most useful articles on writing and design over the last ten years. It was an article on tone of voice in DW that led to the first meeting of 26, when the writers and clients quoted decided to get together to talk further.
The latest design writing piece in the magazine, Screen literate (29 July 2010), examined the power of the written word online. It was triggered by the launch of Yahoo’s first editorial style guide, which the internet services provider describes as ‘the ultimate sourcebook for writing, editing and creating content for the digital world.’
The quoted contributors to Anna Richardson’s article offer some sound points. Andy Budd of digital design consultancy Clearleft makes the can-never-be-made-too-often call for content and design to be developed together, “rather than pumping content into a bucket”. Jon Melville, content analyst at Civic, states that writing for the web requires a number of skills, including an understanding of “usability, search engine optimisation and decent grammar”. That hangs a question mark over the often-held belief amongst copywriters that they can turn their hand to any media for any client. How many really understand web usability?
Along with the good sense, there’s an assertion from Anna, the journalist, that I’d like to challenge. “Attention spans are much shorter” amongst “online audiences”, she says. This is a common belief, but I take a different view. The excellent Poynter EyeTrack studies, which looked at how people read print and digital newspapers, suggest that while online readers may navigate quickly to the content that interests them, they often read for longer than offline readers when they’ve found what they’re looking for. It’s a myth that we have all become Twitter-brained visual grazers with no appetite for prose. I’m with comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who said: “There is no such thing as an attention span. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them.”
In my experience, good digital design enables readers to be more ruthless about navigation and more immersed in conversation. The best digital design provides efficient journeys to great content destinations. That’s why usability is so important for writers working in digital media – get that bit right and you’re more likely to gain your reader’s full attention (possibly for longer than in print). The speed with which people move through the content they’re not interested in isn’t evidence that they’re not interested in spending time with online content per se. Incidentally, much print design is now influenced by web design, and comparisons should note this dynamic relationship.
The myth that readers are increasingly tough to reach and retain is fed by mountains of books, articles and talks on the enormity of information being produced and the supposed increase in demands on our time. We are swamped by communications and content, apparently. This version of society and culture suggests that the contemporary, connected reader must bravely navigate an ever-rising ocean of content in a small nimble craft. But such an interpretation of our collective media experience is wrong. There have been many periods in history when people had less time and faced enormous work and social demands (extreme poverty tends to require most of your attention). And previous generations have experienced larger single leaps in communications technology than we have, from the arrival of printed bibles to radio, film, TV and the Filofax. OK, maybe not the Filofax. But what’s most important here is that humans are hugely adaptable. We respond quickly to the new and incorporate it into our life. We interrogate innovations and use, reinvent and mash up whatever can provide us with practical benefits and pleasure.
'Living Identity' project, a collaboration between Moving Brands and Tim, using augmented reality software to create new links between digital and print content.
In terms of reading, I think we’re witnessing something rather wonderful unfolding before our eyes. We’re seeing a flowering of reading and writing that crosses generations and classes. We can now read a novel, use our phone to access a library to check a reference in it, share what we have found with our friends via social media, read our friends’ responses, draw on competing sources of information via the web, watch a video of the author talking, and so on. And we can often do that on the move. And we can have a similarly rich media experience in terms of content about everything from news reporting to poetry to fashion to cookery to politics to gossip and on and on. Thanks to digital technology, our reading can be deeper, richer, more rounded, more instinctive, more timely and more diverse. This mirrors the way our diet has improved and varied. Today’s media can provide readers with more flavours, more choice and more nutrition. Of course, there are many, many serious issues to address around literacy and education. I’m particularly concerned that many schools seem to lack the appetite to teach great, demanding literature. But the proliferation of new ways of accessing, navigating, reading and re-using content is not part of the problem, it is a potential aid in addressing the problem.
So, that leaves us to question why the myth of shrinking attention spans has become so widespread, when all around we are gaining the benefits of more powerful and varied reading technologies. For me, it points to a fear of change driven by a lack of confidence in the robustness and flexibility of our culture. Whenever I hear people bemoaning the fact that ‘young people don’t read anymore’ it suggests to me that they fundamentally mistrust others, particularly the young. But I think that cynicism goes deeper; I think it suggests we don’t trust ourselves. It suggests we feel technology (and so content) has become a Frankenstein’s monster – created by man but raging out of control. That’s not the reality I experience. Really, there are no chaotic seas of content to drown in. There are no systems so complex we can’t redesign and improve them. There are no demands on our time that we can’t reorganise or reprioritise. We created reading. We created digital media. We created culture. And we are recreating them every day. Far from being helpless victims of technology-driven dumbing-down, we are actively paying attention in all sorts of new and productive ways.
Tim