Shape

III
USING IT TO DESIGN
We began utterly wrong in England, and we have gone on wrongly, and the consequence is that it
is only the exceptional person who learns to draw very well. Now in my experiments I have
reversed that process, and I find that not only does every person when he is taught rationally,
and intelligently in the same way that he is taught Latin, and Greek, and mathematics, learn to
draw well, but also to paint well, and to design well. But it is on a wholly different principle from
that on which he is taught here in England. . . . We have developed an intellectual method of
teaching drawing, more industrial, more practical, more artistic, and infinitely more successful. . . .
I propose to show how art education can be as sensibly treated as Latin and mathematics. I have a
great wealth of illustration here, which, if you allow me, I shall be very happy to submit to you.
Probably it would interest you if I showed you some of the actual work of the children in the
public schools of Boston and Massachusetts.
—Walter Smith
Design Is Calculating
Metaphors are good heuristics. In fact, there’s this metaphor for metaphors and heuristics.
And there’s also the one I started with
(1) design is calculating
as something to try and to prove. An alternative to it is an equivalence when I use the
mathematics of part II. It’s this
(2) drawing is calculating
where drawing is both seeing and doing. Whenever I put pencil to paper, I’m calculating
with shapes or symbols. But there’s nothing to code in a drawing, so I don’t have
to use symbols in place of shapes to calculate. Shapes are fine by themselves without
underlying descriptions or representations. In the introduction, I said that I wanted to
do this book in a rigorous way with shapes and no words. Now I can, and in a sense,
this part is a first try—at least there are a lot of drawings that are all just as rigorous and
formal as symbols and code. Shapes in rules show how to change shapes in an openended
process for drawing and design. This is to see, but it’s also included logically in
statements 1 and 2. They combine in the formula