Shape

49 Background
Getting it first and seeing it later needn’t match. Everything fuses and divides in between.
The real secret to calculating with shapes is to see that there’s always something
new. No matter what I do, it’s a surprise. What you see is what you get.
On page 6 and again on page 17, I talk about ‘‘results.’’ The terminology is from
Søren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. His marvelous discussion of this
idea may just as well be about shapes, and what it means to calculate with them. The
American pragmatists and today’s neopragmatists also write in a way that describes
shapes, and sometimes this is explicit. But for now, listen to Kierkegaard.
While objective thought translates everything into results, and helps all mankind to cheat, by
copying these off and reciting them by rote, subjective thought puts everything in process and
omits the result. 9
When it comes to shapes, everything is up for grabs. There are no results—fixed
constituents—to guide seeing. You can’t cheat in this way with shapes. Nothing is
given objectively to copy or recite by rote. There aren’t any divisions to remember
and get right. Seeing isn’t a test. No one can do it for you. It’s up to you now and
whenever you look again. You’re free to see whatever you want to see. You’re the one
to decide. And what you decide changes the way you go on in a process that’s always
open-ended. This kind of calculating is subjective and variable—the shape grammarist’s
voice is ineluctably personal. And once again, that’s why I talk about shapes in
this way because it’s how seeing and doing work. In fact, whenever I use results, it may
carry Kierkegaard’s meaning to remind you to look again in your own way. (I have a
peculiar habit of reading everything as if it were about shapes. I recommend this highly
to everyone. It’s a useful point of view. As soon as I saw how shapes worked, especially
in calculating, nothing was the same. Things I didn’t understand before were clear.
It was a Kierkegaardian leap.)
Donald Schon’s description of professional activity is in The Reflective Practitioner.
10 ‘‘Reframing’’ and ‘‘back talk’’ are at the center of ideal practice in design and elsewhere.
When I first met Schon, he told me that everything I had ever said about design
was wrong. I thought this was a nice way to start a conversation. And we went on and
on about it in a professional way for a long time. It was the freewheeling, unscrupulous
kind of conversation we both liked. It was the same calculating with shapes. Schon disliked
shape grammars because he didn’t trust calculating. It was moving symbols
around with rules—as in a formal system with axioms and proofs—and this was entirely
mechanical with routine results. Schon liked John Dewey, and so did I. We both
agreed that his logic—that’s his theory of inquiry—had a lot to do with design.
Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is
so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original
situation into a unified whole. 11