Flaws, Faults, Imperfections
Merely a building
Bells
Roughness
White cloth
The aesthetic potential of flaws
Things that shine and glitter
We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. On the contrary we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky, patina.
A sterile sameness
Another kind of random variation involves the interaction of the craftsman’s skill and the texture of materials. The letterforms of Griffo and Colines were cut with immense care. But the letters they cut were struck by hand in copper or brass, then cast and dressed and set by hand, inked by hand with handmade ink and printed by hand in a handmade wooden press on handmade paper. Every step along with way introduced small variations planned by no one. In the world of the finely honed machine, those human-scale textures are erased. A sterile sameness supervenes.
The computer is, on the face of it, an ideal device for reviving the old luxury of random variations at the threshold of perception (quite a different thing from chaos). But conventional typesetting software and hardware focuses instead on the unsustainable ideal of absolute control – and has been hamstrung in the past by the idea of a single glyph per character. There have been several recent attempts to introduce a layer of random variation, but all have had to work against the grain of technological development.
Delight in the imperfect
An Article by David R. MacIverI think part of the difficulty in allowing ourselves to properly delight in the imperfect, comes from conflating delighting in something with wanting it to happen. This isn’t the case. You can appreciate something as it exists while acknowledging its problems. You can see that a fire is beautiful without becoming a pyromaniac, and you can appreciate the absurdity of your political situation without thinking it’s good.
Even if a delight in the imperfect causes you to want more imperfection in your life (and it should), there is no shortage of imperfection to seek out. The imperfect is not scarce, it’s abundant. If you find imperfection delightful, you will never be short of things that delight you, even if you fix any given problem. Solving problems and smoothing out imperfections doesn’t remove the source of delight, it merely opens up new vistas for it. You could give yourself over totally to delight in the imperfect and never run out of things to explore, even without creating your own.
How the light gets in
A Quote by Leonard CohenThere is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
Painting With the Web
So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
A constant dialogue
Have you ever seen Gerhard Richter painting?
It is phenomenal to watch. He might start one of his large, abstract paintings by carefully applying oil paint to the canvas with a thick brush. Then, he begins to scrape, smear, or add new layers of paint with a large, home-made squeegee. After each change, Richter pauses, takes a step back, and looks at the result: What did just happen with the picture? What composition has come about? Where have interesting parts emerged? What is the next move that might bring the piece one step closer to completion? And which action would be a mistake? There is a lot of intention and carefulness in this process, yet Richter equally respects the results of accident and chance. He lets go of a certain kind of control to let things happen that are surprising and exciting. But at the same time, Richter always exerts enough control to influence the result. He decides what to keep and what to destroy. It is the ultimate creative process: a constant dialogue.
Constant reflection and refinement
Ask any artist, musician, or writer and they might tell you that this conversation at the heart of the creative process is what makes their work special and so fulfilling. No piece of art exists in its final form in the head of the artist before the first brush stroke is put on the canvas. No musician has a full piece of music in her head without a conversation with instruments or the score. And no novel is done before the first word is put on paper or a computer screen. Constant reflection and refinement are key to creating any piece of work. This is what lets creators of any profession learn and grow, and, ultimately, achieve mastery. And the same is true for any user interface, design pattern, piece of code, or content on the Web.