Design Avatars

Figures do so much more than indicate scale! They serve as avatars for the end-user, exposing non-optic features of any design, including those that address plant, soil and water management. Chris Grampp, author and co-chair of the Landscape Horticulture Department at Merritt College invited me to discuss my approach to using figures at Merritt's design forum. Keep it practical was his direction. For a spring afternoon, live watercolor sketching on the document camera and inviting folks to draw-along seemed appropriate. I had a lot of fun. During Q & A, someone asked how to draw dogs. I could only answer in relation to a human figure. (Proportion is so fundamental.) Fortunately, someone in the crowd knew dog anatomy and informed us that curvy part is the dog's knee. 

Matchstick Men and You

weight-shifting of matchstick figures

A good group of designers has signed up for Figures for Design this month! My challenge is to identify and preserve each person's stroke style and give guidelines for proportion and level of detail. Everyone possesses a stroke style, whether they identify as being able to draw or not. Like other behaviors, stroke style can be discerned and incrementally modified. Above is one phase past paperclip people on the workshop's path toward identifiable figures that communicate ideas without drawing attention away from the design itself. 

Gullible Travelers

from bluff overlooking top of Alamere Falls, Point Reyes NP

Sunday. I persuaded a friend to do a 7.5 mile hike in Marin. I wanted so badly to get out after the rains and try these Daniel Smith pigment sticks that I mis-read the distance to Alamere Falls: yes, 7.5 miles --one way. I also failed to register the meaning of a dirt road lined with cars on the satellite picture. There would be crowds. 
We ended up picking over muddy trails, single-file with every other politically-traumatized and rain-fatigued local. More than enough hours had passed, yet we had no sense of being anywhere near the shore. I consulted the map and realized my error: we'd be taking our wintersoft bodies twice as far as anticipated. Deal! Doubling-down is in these days. As we neared what just had to be the descent to the falls, some of the earlier-risers were heading back, toward us. Our file stood aside and asked, How far to the falls? 

It's closed, a big dude answered. For a tired nanosecond, we long-marchers believed him! After all, for the past 4 months, we'd been sheltering indoors, hearing bad-upon-bad news. It's a National Park; could they...?? The landscape colors and the sounds of the Pacific beyond pounded sense into us. We chuckled sheepishly and marched on.  

Visibility and Virtuality

Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, 15th c Florence, cast bronze

I get to geek out on linear perspective as a guest lecturer for Whitney Davis' proseminar in Art History. The first time I covered linear perspective among art historians, I suggested there may be no deeper reason to omit the more distant floor grid in this panel of Florence's baptistry doors than Ghiberti's lack of tinier tools. Tool size limits the depiction of space. Still true, even when the tool is modeling software. Why else would Pixar shell out for proprietary software? 

In today's burgeoning visual culture, glitches in spatial depiction arise, and we are so early to this game that we lack the shared vocabulary to describe them. Davis sets out to provide terms we can use to talk about how people depict and relate to images and ideas of 3D space. He is deep into it. 
Today my goal is to persuade academics to draw simple perspectives and hope that through practice, they will sense the perceptive constraints one must accept to participate in this illusion...not unlike the beliefs we suspend when we pull on an Oculus headset. Regardless of tools & equipment, Ibn al Hazen, 10th c scientist and unwitting parent of linear perspective says the act of seeing may begin with light, form and eyes, but is only completed by the mind. That idea makes linear perspective more an interim translation of desire and less a stand-in for a deliverable product!