Shape

7 Answer Number One—What Do You See Now?
that enhances rather than diminishes what’s possible in drawing and making things. It
doesn’t work to say you understand design unless this explains what you can see and
do with pencil and paper. These are the flip sides of what I want to show. There’s a lot
to see and a lot to say. And there’s more.
Designers tell me they’re special. It’s evident that what they do when they’re being
creative—that is to say, designing in practice—distinguishes them from everyone
else. When I first heard this, I wasn’t really sure. I wondered how anyone could tell.
Luckily, Donald Schon had a reason why—‘‘reframing’’ and ‘‘back talk’’ make the difference.
This is the ability to interact with your work in the same unstructured way you
argue about something new in vague and shifting terms that haven’t been defined—to
reconfigure what you’re doing before and after you act, to react freely as you see things
in different ways, and to try new ideas in an ongoing process as you like. Designers
work in this way. And in fact, everything about drawing confirms it. Shapes are the
reason why—embedding and the consequent ambiguity make reframing and back
talk inevitable. That’s how they work. But Schon went on to say that designers aren’t
alone in their use of reframing and back talk. Reframing and back talk are hallmarks of
all professional activity. Good doctors, lawyers, and planners use them, too. However,
shapes still make a difference that may make designers right. There are devices for visual
expression—shapes—and devices for verbal expression—symbols—that aren’t the
same. Designers may be special because they use the former before the latter. Only
the difference isn’t categorical, even if shapes and symbols classify professions, the
mainly visual ones and the mainly verbal ones. There are some decisive relationships,
and an unexpected kind of equivalence. Shapes are full of ambiguity—this explains
reframing and back talk in design and may show something about how they work elsewhere.
It’s still a question of ambiguity and how to use it.
I’m going to develop a unified scheme that includes both visual and verbal
expression with shapes and symbols, respectively. My scheme has two aspects. First,
whenever I use symbols, it’s a special case of using shapes. Embedding is restricted,
so that it’s identity. This may seem like a minor change—it’s merely a question of
whether the things you’re dealing with have dimension zero or more, whether they behave
like points or not—but the implications are huge. It makes all the difference. Take
the shape
and assume that its three longest lines—the lines that I drew—are individual symbols.
Then the triangle