{"id":11,"date":"2014-05-19T11:25:25","date_gmt":"2014-05-19T11:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.darrenumney.com\/blog\/?p=11"},"modified":"2014-08-03T08:56:03","modified_gmt":"2014-08-03T07:56:03","slug":"designing-and-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/?p=11","title":{"rendered":"Linking the past with the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently ordered, through the arcane customer distribution\u00a0department of John Wiley & Sons, a copy of Gabriela Goldschmidt’s “Linkography –\u00a0Unfolding the Design Process<\/em><\/a>“. This is the latest volume in MIT’s “Design Thinking, Design Theory” series.\u00a0Aside from the thinking and the theory, her representation of the design process results in some quite beautiful abstractions that sparked off a series of childhood\u00a0memories, the most striking of which was of a primary school game.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of our classrooms was equipped with a box full of cards printed with simple lines, curves and dots in three colours. The players place cards, like dominoes, to link the relevant coloured lines and produce what, at the time, seemed like a vast network of red, blue and black connections. This became\u00a0a favourite way of plotting, card by card, our\u00a0escape down the corridor. It probably wasn’t\u00a0part of the designer’s brief but\u00a0the cards would always run out before we reached the playground.<\/p>\n

It would be several years later that my trainspotting career took off. Numerous day trips to\u00a0London led to a crash course in skim-reading Harry Beck’s map of the \u00a0Underground. This was an essential\u00a0skill if we were to get around every terminus of note and then\u00a0get home in time for tea. Such practicalities aside I still find the\u00a0various renditions of this map\u00a0utterly absorbing whereever they are encountered\u00a0across the network – in carriages, opposite platforms,\u00a0on my iphone.\u00a0It’s a personal preference but\u00a0the Underground\u00a0map is far more engaging (perhaps due to some yet to be explored notion of authenticity) when it relates to the railway network and much less so when appropriated to other purposes such as\u00a0a loose collection\u00a0of ideas in an artist’s head<\/a> or a schematic representation of the pubs in Bristol<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I only recently\u00a0remembered the existence of the primary school card game (the memory of trainspotting is less\u00a0delible) and\u00a0came across\u00a0an interview with Ken\u00a0Garland<\/a> where he explains\u00a0how he and co-designer Robert Chapman were inspired by Beck’s map\u00a0when they were designing “Connect<\/em><\/a>” for Galt Toys.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Connect, Galt Toys, Ken Garland and Robert Chapman.
image:www.kengarland.co.uk – photographer Harriet Crowder<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At this\u00a0point\u00a0the link between\u00a0a buried childhood memory and an iconic and everyday design artefact became an obvious fact. The connection with linkographs may just be a passing resemblance – a series of lines and dots that are joined together to represent something. It may turn out that it’s the something<\/em> rather than the representation<\/em> to which I must\u00a0attend.<\/p>\n

In any event,\u00a0having spent years harbouring a suspicion that the Underground map had some hidden depths\u00a0–\u00a0albeit in the end of little consequence other than a recapturing of my own past and the subject of this present post\u00a0–\u00a0I’m looking forward to reading the comprehensive guide that Goldschmidt has now produced in case it has any pointers to\u00a0how I might go about recapturing my future.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently ordered, through the arcane customer distribution\u00a0department of John Wiley & Sons, a copy of Gabriela Goldschmidt’s “Linkography –\u00a0Unfolding the Design Process“. This is the latest volume in MIT’s “Design Thinking, Design Theory” series.\u00a0Aside from the thinking and the theory, her representation of the design process results in some quite beautiful abstractions that sparked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}