Design to Reinvigorate the Public Realm

I remember clearly a day in the fifth grade when our teacher brought out an old relic of a slideshow projector to show us the film “Powers of Ten.” This movie blew my 9-year-old mind. The 1968 documentary takes the viewer on a ride that starts with a couple on a picnic near Lake Michigan in Chicago. The camera zooms out by increments of “powers of ten” to the far reaches of the universe, then zooms back in, this time, to dive beneath the skin of our couple until their smallest biological construct has been reached: the atom. Though I had already had a fragmented experience of scale up until that point in my life, this was the first time that I had seen such a fluid and visual connection of scale between concepts I was already familiar with—universe, earth, country, city, humans, cells.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, when this past Friday at Creative Mornings, Jamer Hunt (designer and current Chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons the New School for Design) began his “SCALE” presentation with that same video “Powers of Ten.” He went on to explain that the oversimplified, relatively concrete (and my 5th grade) understanding of scale was more complicated than simply enlarging or shrinking objects—zooming them in and out by powers of ten. He went on to illustrate how problems arise at each level of scale, because “properties change.” I think back to those fifth grade years and find that, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I had already discovered this concept in the exercise of sewing an outfit for my barbie. On the trip to the fabric store, I had picked a pretty, sturdy gingham that draped nicely over my arms. But once it had been trimmed, pinned, and sewn to barbie-size, it stuck out stiffly from her waist. It was different, and a little disappointing.

Hunt illustrated this same concept in design terms, with the typeface Bell Centennial, which was designed specifically by Matthew Carter to deal with the problems that arose when printing tiny text for telephone books. Due to the spreading nature of ink, type used at a normal text size could not simply be scaled down to such a small size without the ink blobbing and ruining legibility. Bell Centennial used ink traps (areas carved out of the type) to allow for this spreading. Though the letterforms look strangely notched at large sizes, they work perfectly at the scale for which they were designed.

Bell Centennial with ink traps highlighted in red (left), printed in a phone book (right).

(A side note: Bell Centennial is one of 23 digital typefaces recently acquired by MoMa, which are currently being shown in the small but informative exhibition “Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design“ through January 30, 2012)

Hunt’s other example of  “powers of ten” in design starts with a bicycle—at the first power of ten, a designer deals with how to design a bicycle on the consumer scale. At the next power, the problem shifts to the street level, how that bicycle will deals with safety and navigation issues. At another power, it becomes a metropolitan issue (how does the bike fit in that city—are there bike lanes to deal with an increasing number of bikes?), at yet another, a policy issue (should there be government subsidies for people who use environmentally friendly transportation?), and finally, a global one (where are the materials used in the production of the bike sourced, and are they sustainable?, etc.).

Designers, Hunt pointed out, are often working at one specific “power of ten” (usually the smallest). It is up to them, then, to recognize that each design is part of a larger scale of impact, and to decide where their point or points of entry should be. So watch Powers of Ten, get your mind blown, and get to work.

Next month at Creative Mornings New York: Albert Wenger, October 7, 2011

Susannah Hainley is a graphic designer for Red Rooster Group, a New York based graphic design firm that creates effective brands, websites and marketing campaigns for nonprofits to increase their visibility, fundraising and communications effectiveness. Contact us at info@redroostergroup.com.