Shape

8 Introduction: Tell Me All About It
is no longer part of the shape—it simply isn’t there to see—because its sides aren’t
embedded in these lines. There’s no identity. (The elements in sets work in this way.)
And for the same reason, A’s and X’s and bits of hexagons aren’t parts of the shape
either. The lines and their combinations are parts of the shape. That’s all there is, and
that’s all there is to see
And second, my scheme implies a kind of inverse relationship. Anything I can do with
shapes visually I can do just as well with given symbols, at least if shapes are described
in certain ways that I’m going to specify. For example, symbols are all I need for shapes
like these
made up of points, lines, and planes that I can draw on paper with a pencil and a ruler.
This is really important—it means that computers can deal with shapes and ambiguity
exactly as I do. A machine can see what I see no matter how it’s drawn. What’s there
for me is there for the machine, and vice versa.
The way different kinds of expressive devices connect up in my scheme—
whether they’re visual and use shapes or verbal and use symbols—puts design with
other kinds of professional practice. Design belongs with business, education, engineering,
government, law, medicine, and planning, and with history, literary criticism,
logic, mathematics, philosophy, science, and anything else you care to name.
Designers may be as creative as you like—geniuses, in fact—but their reliance on visual
devices doesn’t exclude them from the ambit of expression fixed by everyone else in
the course of their everyday activities. The scheme I have in mind makes it difficult if
not impossible to believe in two cultures—one visual and the other verbal, separate
and equal—that have nothing in common. Whatever people are doing—within professions
and across them—they can always communicate. The expressive devices they
use make their activities commensurable. And it’s good to talk. But it’s easy to be lazy
when it’s time to show someone else what you’re up to in a straightforward way, or not
to make the effort to see what the other guy is working on in his or her terms. Designing
is a practical way of thinking (reasoning) in which seeing is key—that’s its chief