Shape

138 I What Makes It Visual?
Why is he the big guy rather than the little fellow? It’s the same watching a sunrise,
with historical significance for astronomy. Is the sun rolling over you—the sun moves
and the earth is fixed—or are you rolling under the sun? Simon’s figure is just as ambiguous
as his sentence, to multiply the confusion. But there’s scant reason to take
shapes seriously when you’ve already read what you’re supposed to see! Nonetheless,
shapes hold their surprises patiently. And it’s a good thing, too. Otherwise, it would
be easy to run out of new things to see. I’d have no reason to calculate with my eyes.
I’ve spent a lot of time quoting Simon. There are three main reasons for this.
First, he doesn’t pull any punches. You know exactly where he stands. So I can try to
be clear, too, especially with the ambiguity and vagueness I’m trying to keep. Second,
his take on computers, calculating, and hierarchical structure is canonical today. What
Simon says is what everyone does—one way or another. I don’t think this is entirely
because of Simon—it may be, yet probably not—but because it’s what we’re taught calculating
is from the time we’re taught to count. Calculating by counting doesn’t go
very far in design and creative work. It’s calculating by seeing that’s worth a real try.
And third, Simon makes use of spatial examples and analogies that give me something
to see. I’ve looked at a few of these, and need only remind you of the truly marvelous
idea that calculating and painting are linked. In fact, Simon’s description of this relationship
could be my own.
It is also beside the point to ask whether the later stages of the development were consistent with
the initial one—whether the original designs were realized. Each step of implementation created a
new situation; and the new situation provided a starting point for fresh design activity.
Making complex designs that are implemented over a long period of time and continually
modified in the course of implementation has much in common with painting in oil. In oil painting
every new spot of pigment laid on the canvas creates some kind of pattern that provides a
continuing source of new ideas to the painter. The painting process is a process of cyclical interaction
between painter and canvas in which current goals lead to new applications of paint, while
the gradually changing pattern suggests new goals.
If situations are shapes, then this is what calculating is about. There’s no need for
consistency or to keep to prior decisions and goals. Nothing is ever finished. Everything
is always up for grabs. Change may be sudden rather than gradual as Simon has
it, but either way you look at it, things are different. Yet all Simon can think to do is to
make change combinatorial—spots of pigment really are independent spots that can
be identified. It simply doesn’t work. It just isn’t painting, nor is it visual calculating.
There’s more to seeing than rearranging units—
forms can proliferate in this way because the more complex arise out of a combinatoric play upon
the simpler. The larger and richer the collection of building blocks that is available for construction,
the more elaborate are the structures that can be generated.
Vannevar Bush wrote of science as an ‘‘endless frontier.’’ It can be endless, as can the process of
design and the evolution of human society, because there is no limit on diversity in the world. By
combinatorics on a few primitive elements, unbounded variety can be created.