Shape

377 Getting in the Right Frame of Mind
view is as good as another calculating with shapes, and no view lasts forever. This
goes for styles themselves and ways of defining them. It strikes me that my description
of style is simply a generalization of what’s been tried, with more freedom and flexibility
when it comes to schemas, using them, and changing them, and with greater emphasis
on how assignments and transformations vary to tie things together. In
addition, my approach to style corresponds to what I’m doing now with schemas and
rules in different algebras of shapes, etc. It’s a useful fit that’s temporary if not evanescent,
yet no less rigorous for that. It’s being right without being eternal and unchangeable.
It’s just calculating with shapes.
Choosing assignments and transformations is another way to get in the right
frame of mind to design, although I really don’t have anything more specific to recommend
than what I’ve already shown by haphazardly dividing shapes, defining spatial
relations, etc. Building up a repertoire of examples and motifs that can be used in
assignments—perhaps this is what designers mean by defining a vocabulary—repays
the effort. In fact, this is as much as I know how to do, in addition to augmenting
my catalogue of schemas. Even so, it seems there are too many options to be systematic.
In principle, anything will work. However, the idea is clear. Given an assignment
g and a transformation t, the composition t g determines when parts are alike and
how they change as rules are tried. There’s plenty of room for variation and a myriad
of expressive possibilities. The proof is easy to see in a small way in ice-ray lattice
designs. Starting with a rectangular frame, orthogonal compositions produce
and parallel ones
But then there’s also this