Massimo would tend to play the role of idea generator. Lella served as the critic, editing the ideas and shaping the best ones to fit the solution. Massimo was the dreamer, focusing on the impossible. Lella was ruthlessly practical, never losing sight of the budgets, the deadlines, the politics, the real world. It was Massimo’s worldview that had defined my studies in design school. Lella’s concerns were entirely foreign to me. So I may as well say it right now: I learned an enormous amount from Massimo about how to be a good designer. But I learned how to be a successful designer from Lella.
Michael Bierut on Lella Vignelli for The Design Observer
Although not said explicitly in Bierut’s article, how a project is proposed, structured, and managed is as much an act of design as the ‘final’ manifestation. The systems through which the project operates is indivisible from the ‘project’ itself. The project is the method, the structure, the decisions.
Design is a series of intentional decisions that collectively form a new piece of work; design is a piece of work defined by its process. Increasingly, we are trying define explicitly the process through which a project emerges. Every project has a statement of method that is revised and refined throughout, but gives explicit and designed intentionality to how an idea develops.
How material is organized informs how the material is understood. We broadly see projects as a network of points connected by lines. A point may have many lines connecting to adjacent points, yet also have far reaching lines to ‘distant’ points. Points are to be seen in relation to one another, not just within a circumscribed ‘project’ boundary. If the work is understood as relationships between points, we want to reduce the resistance to drawing these lines.
On a practical level, this means reducing hierarchical file structure (locally) so the points are always seen in relation to one another while (online) having the posts occupy many categorizations. The flatness and multiple categorization inherently forces overlap and encourages many lines between many points.
By identifying ourselves by what we do (we research, document, code, illustrate, etc) rather than roles (I am a researcher, coder, designer), we emphasis the process of developing work rather than identifying or prescribing the categorization of the work.
The manifestation of an idea, of a project, is informed by the idea itself but also critically: it’s process. The ‘thing’ we are designing is the process for investigating an idea. This process is communicated and disseminated through a form, whether it be a film, website, essay, installation, instrument, game, building.
These assersions needs to be substantiated with external precedents and research to situate our forthcoming work within a discourse that we’re constructing.