Chapter 1 — Thoughts
I really enjoyed reading the first chapter of Artful Design — it introduced vocabulary and concepts that were new to me, yet felt very familiar from my own struggles to find meaning in the work that I do artistically. I couldn’t help but think about the relevance of these ideas to frustrations and aspirations I have had both in my academic life and my creative practice. In the chapter, themes of pragmatics vs aesthetics, form vs function, and art vs engineering come up frequently. This chapter explores fluid definitions and guiding principles of “artful design” that seek to unify and intertwine these elements, encouraging usefulness and beauty in the act of intention and creation.
I found this incredibly inspiring, as I have straddled the ends of these kinds of dichotomies–balancing an active creative practice as a musician with my academic career as a cognitive scientist. For me, I have felt like “the grass is always greener” in the various environments I have inhabited–I’m too techie for the fuzzies and too fuzzy for the techies. I have always been motivated by the pursuit of knowledge and innovation as well as a need to create something beautiful. My whole reason of joining Stanford’s CCRMA program is to synthesize these values. I felt validated by this reading, as it expresses in much more lucid terms how I have felt for a long time. Since I was young, I’ve held Leonardo da Vinci as a role model for his seamless integration of arts and sciences, and so when he was brought up as an example of an artful designer, it resonated with me.
To be honest, I never considered myself a “designer”, or even really thought of some of this chapter’s examples (e.g. the zipper-pencil-bag or even Euler’s Identity) as instances of design. But after reading this chapter, it gives me a new lens to view the work I do and a new set of principles to aspire to fulfill. There is a quote from the movie Dead Poets Society that I think of from time to time:
“We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
At various times, this quote feels either inspiring or trite. When I was a high schooler, this quote helped me realize the intrinsic value of art, at a time when it seemed like the world around me wanted me to reject it. However, it also feels dismissive of those “noble pursuits” that are necessary to help others and support the complex network of systems our society relies on. I figured it was too greedy to want it all–to be useful and practically minded while infusing artistic and deeply human values in the process.
It’s hard to readily think of examples of the kind of perfect melding of pragmatics and aesthetics that Artful Design outlines. But I think this may be because I am not used to looking for those kinds of examples. I haven’t really had a good framework or lexicon to discuss or analyze things from this perspective. However, this doesn’t mean that the world is not rife with these examples. The design etude at the end of the chapter forced me to seek them out and reflect–and I am starting to realize that artful design is everywhere, and that so many things I gravitate towards (subconsciously) reflect the values and principles in this chapter. Maybe this is one of those cases where, once you know of a thing, you can never not notice it. I hope so–it would help orient me in this mess of a world.
Design Etude — Functional-Aesthetic Analysis of 3 Things
- “Good FS”
I take my interior design pretty seriously. Not in any sort of educated way, but I always spend a lot of time rearranging furniture, picking lighting (never use the fluorescent ceiling lights), and creating unnecessarily complex ergonomic seating solutions. I don’t necessarily need to do this–the room as it is would have served me fine. I like to imagine how I will feel doing any of the things I do in my room–producing music, practicing piano, reading/gaming before bed, doing my morning routine of washing up and dressing myself, etc. But, I’m a bit particular when it comes to doing any of these things. I have certain comfortable sitting positions, and need my desk to be arranged in a certain order to feel inspired to work. I even want the bed to be in a certain orientation relative to the door/windows.
I moved around a lot growing up, and my family would talk about feng shui when picking a new house, judging a place by whether the front door was perpendicular to a busier street (“bad FS”), or whether the bed had its back to a wall (“good FS”), and a bunch of other mysterious criteria that I don’t really know the reasons for. However, through the years I have developed my own subjective sense of feng shui, not rooted in the traditional Chinese systems, but more an expression of my own functional-aesthetic values. This is reflected in the way I designed my room layout–both for efficiency and this vague “good FS” beauty.
2. Thesaurus of Intervallic Melodies
This is a jazz theory/exercise book written by the great saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi. It is pretty arcane, technical stuff, but I think it embodies good, artful design. It elaborates a system of improvisation based on permutations of musical intervals and registral contours. When I first read it, it seemed a bit too synthetic, too “un-human” — following this process felt almost like doing a math problem. How could I make art with such a mechanical, almost algorithmic method? Jerry Bergonzi provides, for each section, several pages’ worth of exercises and examples of his method. When I played them, I was struck at how artful, how elegant the written exercises were. They didn’t sound anything like the phrases I was improvising, even though I was using the same system. There is something ineffable in those exercises–the hand of an experienced, human author who likely just wrote down what he might play in real life. The examples sound distinct, and I’m certain they sound different than if a computer were programmed to produce phrases based on the algorithms in this book. I still haven’t unlocked the ability to play expressively using this method. However, the exercises in this book exemplify a fusion of function and beauty: they serve to provide a well-defined tool for improvisers, while also giving a glimpse of how the tool can be used artfully, leaving the reader to make the connection themselves.
3. HITMAN III
I have spent an embarrassingly large amount of hours playing this game, which I think may be a sign that it is well-designed. Above that, I think this game is artfully designed. Most descriptions online describe this game as a “third-person stealth game in which you assassinate targets.” However, to me the stealth, and the assassinations, are not really the core aspects of the game. I don’t even really consider it a “stealth” game at all. To me, it is almost a work of interactive theater. The maps are extremely intricate–not as big as an “open world” map, but incredibly detailed, filled with NPCs with complex behaviors, hundreds of objects and items, and sequences of events that can be triggered creatively. It is not the kind of game where you beat a level and move on. In fact, there are only 5–6 maps. Each map is designed to be played over and over again. While the goal each is to assassinate the targets, there are infinite ways to get there, ranging from the efficient, silent, and speedy to the downright explosive and comical.
But more than that, you don’t have to “beat” the level at all. I have spent hours and hours just exploring the map, seeing how the different NPC AIs respond in various situations and seeing if I can manipulate certain events to happen. For instance, in the Dubai level, there is a way to orchestrate a complex kill where you can overhear a guard talking about an upcoming evacuation drill, learn an access code, find and steal a keycard, sabotage the parachutes by cutting them with a kitchen knife, place a banana peel near the exit point, and trigger the evacuation drill, so that the targets try to escape by skydiving, only to slip on the banana peel and fall off the building with no working parachute.
This takes a long time to set up, and a detailed knowledge of the timing, behavior, and locations of objects, people, and events in the game. There is no benefit to doing the level this way, and I think that is amazing. To me, this is what creative game design looks like: the player is given all the agency to be as weird or inefficient as they want, and the mechanics of the game support and invite this. There are constraints, but it is through the constraints that players can be creative and manipulate the level design to create fun and unexpected scenarios.
Every object/NPC/event in the game has a purported function–they can all be used to achieve the level’s objectives in a straightforward, efficient way. However, they are also all designed to transcend these basic functions to allow for an unlimited number of potential interactions and (ab)use. The creativity comes from players’ knowledge of the level and their own creativity. This is why I say it’s almost like interactive theater–left untouched, the NPCs follow certain routes, perform certain actions, trigger certain events. You can let these events play out, or you can nudge elements here and there to change the plot as you participate in it. To me, this is what makes the game unique and artfully-designed. It provides a tool for video game players to become level designers themselves and create beautifully elegant scenarios while completing in-game tasks.