Design is a recent profession and an even more recent discipline. It began with a certain ideal, transforming the nature of the human condition by changing the objects, products, environments, and communications that people dealt with. So if you really wanted to change the nature of humans, you needed to change their environment.
After the merging of private and social time and space, after work has become pervasive and ubiquitous, the next level is to masquerade work as play. From coerced co-habitation to broken logistic flows, this locked-down world is neck-deep in spatial issues.
After the signaling display of the company logo, no matter how the identity travels, it is heading toward a web. It’s creating a pattern. If we work outward from the design of the logo, we expand its recognition in various ways, each individual, each a deliberately intense exploration in search of ubiquity.
Being drenched in the sameness of millions of logos, this is our time for an alternate path, and these patterns represent an outer circle, with its blurred boundary that can move further out — or spiral step-by-step back toward the original corporate identity.
Futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil considers pattern recognition so important that in his recent book, How to Create a Mind, he argued that pattern recognition and intelligence are essentially the same thing. Expertise, in essence, is the familiarity of patterns of a specific field.
Today, machines are learning to recognize patterns as well. Marketers analyze patterns to target their messages and IBM’s Watson can detect patterns embedded in millions of documents in fields such as medicine.
Rhythm is intrinsic to good patterns, like music, when something sounds good, even when you don’t know what it is. It’s what happens in poetry, when you read something and it has a good cadence.
It is about alternation and repetition, marked by the regulated succession of opposite elements, the dynamics of the strong and weak beat, the played sound and the inaudible but implied pause, the long and short note.
My vision in pattern design at a high level is influenced by many. Tomás Saraceno imagines a huge collective instrument ready to be played so that when you play one string it reverberates in all the other strings. Exactly!
