Niall Hobhouse to Jenny Woods
Niall Hobhouse:
Given that we have agreed to examine design as a form of research can I push harder on the parallels with scientific process? Does your experience suggest an answer to any of the following?:
What do architects mean when they say that a good building needs a good client?
Why should architects say that a tight design brief makes for a better design? By ‘tight’ do they mean specific and detailed or just lucid? Is there something in the mantra of a friend of mine: good design produces happy accidents?
The last was in response to reading about the discovery of penicillin in the (wonderful) Faber book of Science.
Jenny Woods:
These take a bit of mulling over – and I’m not sure I have any particular ‘scientific’ insight here, I’ll just build some answers from my own opinions and experience.
Whilst working for EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Science Research Council) I was asked to take up the role of ‘Quality Champion’. One of the buzz phrases used to describe quality is ‘fitness for purpose’ – so we could interpret ‘a tight design brief makes for a better design’ as a ‘good’ or high-quality design getting a tick in all the boxes that the client has specified in the brief. I suspect this holds in the majority of ‘bread-and-butter’ design work. However, the client can only build their brief based on their experience and world-view, and it may be the case that the architect or professional designer has a wider experience and can create a ‘better’ design than is specified by the client. Strictly speaking this may not be such a ‘high-quality’ design as it has moved away from the brief, but in some way - artistically, creatively – we judge it as ‘better’. Obviously if we were running this ‘project-management style’ we’d re-write the brief and objectives at this point, but we’re talking creatively for the moment!
Niall Hobhouse:
This works a treat; in fact, I don’t see any need NOT to rewrite the brief, etc, just because we are talking ‘creatively’. We should be ruthless with the parallel, and say that there is really no distinction between mechanisms of ‘creative’ design and the scientific sort.
From my observation of architects, they welcome this collaborative stage of writing the rules for themselves, and see it as part of designing. It is only by way of rules that the finished design achieves coherence and logic.
What is surely critical is that any client brief in its final version makes it clear what the designed thing is FOR - getting to the moon, sitting on, memorializing the victims of 9/11. But it should never say HOW. Where it reads ‘ensuite bathroom’ what is meant is that the client will want to be able to have a bath, and without leaving the bedroom.The client is unthinkingly trying to be the designer.
Jenny Woods:
I’m not very good at these generalisations so let me give you an example. Whilst a student (2nd time around!) we were given the opportunity to enter the design competition for the British Memorial Garden to be built in Hanover Square, New York. This had a pretty tight brief, including such entertaining items as ‘no tall planting (to stop muggers hiding)’, ‘individual park-style benches (to stop skateboarders playing on them)’, ‘planting to include British wildflowers’ . We students stuck as tightly as we could to the brief and I was pretty chuffed to be shortlisted in the student competition. The overall winners were the Bannermans and I learned so much by looking at their design after having wrestled with the same brief myself. They did not meet those specifications I’ve listed above - they created marvellous continuous cut-stone arcs as benches; threw out the wildflowers as totally impractical; put in tall topiary to give the design strength – and came up with a design that was far better than any which matched the brief could have done – because they were better designers than the committee which set the brief.
Niall Hobhouse:
I remember this as one of the stupidest competition briefs I could have imagined; it deserved to be ignored. To continue from above, brief writing is one of the least understood (and most casually embarked upon) aspects of a creative project, even for one where the basic pragmatic objectives are not in dispute.
In the case of a garden - and this may be our knub - there are real problems about what they are ‘for’, as documented by the web correspondence. Produce, science, visiting, show, solitude, entertaining, different things at different times, even different-things-to-different-people …
No clear client brief could be easily built out of this chaos, and offering to share inspiration with the client is perhaps all that is left to the designer. He or she just needs to be clever -like Mary - to work this out , and then to stick to their guns . And fair enough, in its way.
My problem is that so often, and almost by definition in a garden that is not the designers own, the inspiration feels on loan - borrowed by the garden, if you like; not honestly shared.This is why I am so interested -as the pleasure I want from mine- in the oppurtunity of observing a gardener in his own garden .This is a good brief statement of MY client brief; it is quite close, as I’ve said, to what the Nori and Sandra did offer until last year.
Jenny Woods:
Actually that’s probably just an argument for client and designer working together to define the brief – which will happen on most projects (except where there’s a competition!).
Niall Hobhouse:
In the open stage of the competition we are not asking for a response to a brief but only for conceptual approaches.
Jenny Woods:
I’m going to try to include an image here to illustrate ‘happy accidents’ – I’m sure they arise as even the most open-minded designer is working from their own mental model and can’t foresee every way their designed object will be used (actually the more I think about this, the more delighted I am by it)
This little chap is enjoying a garden at the Westonbirt Festival. I watched him run round and round, completely absorbed, oblivious to his parents’ calls. I doubt the designers (David Meyer and Ramsey Silberberg) had specifically thought ‘this would be good to entertain kids’ – I expect their thoughts were more along the lines of mine on looking at the garden as a restful space with a strong, simple theme. I’d like to use this as a counter-argument to your letter to Anne and speak up in defence of Mary Keen by saying that I believe instinct does have a part in recognising good design. The child couldn’t intellectualise why he liked the space, yet he was still totally engaged by it. I wonder if this is a part of our brain that has evolved pattern-recognition at a very primitive level – we evolved in situations where we didn’t have the time to think “Hmm, a balanced pattern of contrasting-coloured stripes, what are my options here?”, we just needed to get the message “Tiger! Run away!” After we have escaped we can rationalise why we got the danger message, in the same way that we can split a design into its elements and understand why it is good, although the artist creating it was probably not consciously running the design principles through their mind.
Niall Hobhouse:
He is charming, your little chap; the designer should be very happy.
At the start of Russell Page’s autobiography there is a description of his design process which, apart from its diffidence and elegance of expression, might have been formulated by any doctrinaire modernist. Eventually, he says: ‘everything that detracts from the idea of a unity must go.’ Just suppose that a great architect designs a building that is uniquely focussed in intention on the effect of natural light within its interior.
I would not then take a beautiful (and unpredictable) change in the light as a happy accident, but as a demonstration of the success of the design. However fortuitously, the building has acheived it’s objective of being a receptacle in which light behaves to beautiful effect. It is the unique focus - the unity - of the design that makes one understand this as an achievement of the building, and not a chance effect of the light.
Jenny Woods
Perhaps the best designers are ‘just’ able to instinctualise the design principles – Kim’s ‘thinking very fast’ again?
Niall Hobhouse:
I do agree that good designers have something that most people don’t, and I really like this formulation. My thought is that we are talking about processing power, not simple speed -ie. loads of memory as well. Does this allow them to envisage many more options than others, and is that it? ‘Design principles’ then do the rest. Or is there a force which I’ve missed in your ‘just’, which bears somehow on the skill in identifying which option is the right one?
Jenny Woods:
In the meantime, there are snowdrops and primroses flowering by the gate and the scent of Sarcococca is haunting the Peach Walk – is it time to stop intellectualising and start gardening?
Niall Hobhouse:
I completely agree; this needs no reply. Thank you in any case.