consilience: seeking resonance in form across cultures and time
Forms that last are not seasonal. Profound shapes are arrived at slowly, refined over generations. Cultures all across the globe and history created the same forms, used the same decorations, understood the same innately human qualities. Their built objects converged because they addressed fundamental aspects of our human experience and morphology. We are more the same than we let on.
For a time anthropologists sought to characterize true commonality between human cultures. Examining of historical records and observing of cultures in disparate places in an effort to identify common threads that unified the human tapestry. Uncovering the common rituals that seem universal to all humankind. This approach to anthropology became unfashionable in the midst of efforts to reestablish cultural identities that were displaced by the West’s domineering technocultural hegemony. Cognitive science, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology have half-heartedly picked up where structural anthropology left off. Yet perhaps we lose something when we are unwilling to see a sameness in our innate human qualities.
The human hand has not changed in eons, nor the eye’s appetite for symmetry. The inner troglodyte recalls the heft of a good rock, knows the tension in curves of rivers or bent branches. Every ancient culture had talismans and cherished objects. To give form well is the understand deeply human work.
The shape an object takes in the world and in your hand communicates its intent and its context. Too many industrial designers blend formgiving with fashion. The studio sprint towards the award winning aesthetic innovation, the revised silhouette, the new colorway, the little details that cast aside the old work to herald the new, new thing.
As a designer I seek examples of deep cultural crossover – forms, rituals, interactions that unpin our profound humanness. I study art forms from cultures that practiced refinement and concentration instead of innovation. I read anthropologists, linguists, and art historians that seek unifying foundations of cultural expression.
I study the cultures that chose refinement over innovation. Northwest Coast Formline: an entire visual language built from a handful of geometric primitives. The Arctic tools of the Yup'ik, where the utilitarian and the sacred are the same object. Sumi-e painting, where a whole figure lives in one unrepeatable stroke. This is all in the service of shaping modern objects that express deeper sensibilities, inspired by timeless works to build modern technologies.
The modern design master seeks as little design as possible. The inevitable forms of our contemporary masterpieces share a kinship with the ancient ones. The Haida bentwood box and the Braun calculator, the eskimo snow goggles and the iPod. The soft-cornered rectangle in your pocket is not a recent idea. It is the shape a river wears into a stone and a tool takes in a grip, found independently on every continent. The designer who notices this is neither chasing novelty nor copying the past, but learning the morphological grammar of what endures and connects.
The fully considered form seems inevitable. A thousand years of refinement arrives as a singular expression curvature, a material that meets the task, interactions paced to the work. Translating from the long human record down to the myriad design decisions is the deep craft.
