«Sign of Design. Memory of a practice» by Ronald Shakespear

Table of Contents

• Sign of Design
– The daily forge. Doing design work for nearly half a century.
– Design is not and island.It’s a sea.
– The underground treasure map.
– Design for the people.
– Horror vaccui.
– Asking the way to Rome.
– Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.
– A sign is a smile.
– Sing to your village and love globalization.

• Our daily design
– At the beginning there was design.
– “If you can dream it,you can do it”.
-The machine for living in.
– Design’s audience.
– Design: a mental plan.
– Signs are therapeutic.

• The Urban Stage
– “If you can’t ride two horses at the same tieme,you can’t be in the circus”
– About the structure of design.
– The green dream.
– “If you love the rainbow, you must put up with the rain first”.
– Form for function.
– Signs as an identity.

Stage Fright
«It is no tragedy to aim high and miss. The real tragedy is to aim low and hit.» – Michelangelo.

In the hard work of creating Stevens, that wonderful man-servant character in the movie “The Remains of the Day”, Anthony Hopkins suffered the usual tribulations of the case. James Ivory, the director, advised him to talk to an old Windsor butler, already retired. Hopkins and the man met for tea, obviously, and they had a long and charming conversation. When the butler was about to leave, however, Hopkins had a feeling that the man had not actually told him anything specific. As he walked him to the door, Hopkins blurted out: “Tell me, finally, what is a servant?”. The old man turned, thought about it for a second and said: “a servant is someone who, when he walks into a room, makes it look emptier than it was before”. As time goes by, in this difficult task of making public spaces legible and giving answers in terms of communication and building an identity, I have come to the conclusion that this sweet story about Anthony Hopkins somehow sums up the nature and essence of our work. Obsessed with creating a sequence of signs that makes messages predictable, obsessed with the outcome of our work, we have developed a number of the stimuli present in the urban landscape, forgetting that those stimuli should operate silently, without screaming. They should operate as people’s servants. The following thoughts were born a long time ago in Sao Paulo, where a lucid colleague of mine, Hans Donner, told me that he was writing a book that he meant to call “Como foi feito” or “The making of”. “Sign of Design” is sort of a recollection of the work done, or as Rafael Viñoly once told me, a theory of practice.

Every designer coins -not without difficulty- a theory of his practice and, for someone like me, who never went to college, learning comes necessarily from the school of life experience. Reading the space is a somewhat complex skill, and learning to do that takes time and effort. Trial and error. These notes are a compilation of a number of articles published throughout the years in various media, my presentations at Icograda, Nice, Montreal and Sao Paulo conferences, as well as my lectures for Segd in Hollywood, Toronto and Edmonton, a workshop with Massimo Vignelli and Lance Wyman in New York, and conversations with my UBA students. Finally, these notes are about our communication design work in the fields of transportation, urban areas and several other projects. They are also about the battles fought in order to make those projects possible. The fight to make design a part of the city has been the fight of many, and as I quote from them -Jock Kinneir, Harry Beck, Jorge Frascara, Raymond Loewy, Alan Fletcher, Tomás Maldonado, George Nelson, among others- I do so with gratitude and admiration. The roads we travel today have been paved by many. And I owe them.

Also, if I may say so, putting these notes together has an additional meaning: getting rid of some ghosts. It is a clean slate. Along with my conferences, articles and discussions, this book is fed by 48 years of projects. I cannot possibly imagine –and I never could- talking without the testimony of actual projects. Just like a canal steersman, words are stuck to the projects. Hopefully, these pages will be useful to someone. I will be honored if they are. This is a two-lane book: the first lane encompasses my notes, while the second lane offers a simultaneous or alternative story of descriptive memories, epigraphs and comments. In the first place, I want to thank my parents, who guessed this forge was meant for me. I also want to thank my teachers, Alan Fletcher, Romulo Maccio and Juan Carlos Distéfano. They did the best they could. The result is solely attributable to my lack of rigor and my own flaws. “Our daily design” includes comments by Jorge Frascara, who also wrote the introduction to this book. I thank Jorge for always staying close, ever since that icy morning in New York when we first met; I thank him for telling me that my work was worthwhile and encouraging me to put these notes together. Together we drove across half of Canada, giving lectures like strolling actors. From Montreal to Vancouver, from Edmonton to Calgary, I remember those journeys as a celebration.

Thank you, old friend. To Justo Solsona, Rafael Viñoly, Flora Manteola, Javier Sanchez Gómez, Fina Santos, Carlos Sallaberry, Juan Pfeifer, Oscar Zurdo, who enabled us to enter the territory of large-scale graphics. To Matt Woolman, for organizing the first Exhibition of Diseño Shakespear in the United States (Richmond AIA Branch House), and for having the courage to take on this English edition of Sign of Design. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Gladys Brenner, who introduced our graphic work in the United States, particularly at the Virginia Exhibition and the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C. To Juan Hitters, Daniel Nieves Piazza, Joaquin Viramonte, David Consuegra, Marcelo Cima and David Ratto. I also want to thank Daniel Viacava, Carlos Fresco, Graciela Melgarejo, Luis Grossman and Alberto Borrini, who published a number of these notes in La Nación. The images and photos included in this book are documents of the graphic mega-projects developed by us over fifthy long years. Hundreds of talented people, associated with Diseño Shakespear over all this time have substantially contributed to the design, management, production and documentation process, or with the always comforting encouragement of their enthusiasm. It would take many pages to name them all. I want to express my gratitude and recognition: this would not have been possible without them. A number of the works published here were done with my sons Lorenzo and Juan, whom I thank endlessly for their devotion, talent and courage. But I thank them especially for the joy of sharing the journey. I also wish to thank my daughters Barbara, Maria and Sofia, for standing by me throughout my battles, each from her trench. Thank you for the fire. I owe the design of this book to Lorenzo. Not just the layout: all of it. The laborious, sensitive endeavors through which he turned these notes into an exciting, interactive frieze of words and images, a document of memory. Thank you, son, for bringing light to me. Finally, I wish to thank Elena, my partner in life, who raised a family, taught us how to live, brought all the texts together, translated the words of my heroes and never ever stopped smiling.

Ronald Shakespear, Buenos Aires

Design, order and Freedom
Every perception involves a search for meaning. Every search for meaning calls for an ordering process. Every ordering process calls for a design hypothesis. Perception is an ordering task. In the face of chaos, babies cry, children get lost, teenagers become distressed, adults become wasted, the presumptuous ones go wrong, the humble ones ask questions, religious people believe, scientists analyze, and designers act.  Everyone tries to understand. Understanding is, in the first place, interpreting signs and making up connections. This is no easy task. In fact, “finding similarities between two situations in spite of the differences between them” and “making sense of ambiguous or contradictory messages” are high functions of human intelligence (Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid). In the second place, understanding is trying out hypotheses to see if they work (many a time, what may seem right at first is not actually so).

Understanding is a learning process. Every learning process involves “deutero-learning”, that is to say, developing the ability to learn that particular type of thing: if I learn by heart a series of letters that do not make any sense, not only did I learn those letters, but I also learnt how to learn series of letters that do not make any sense. The more we understand, the more our ability to understand grows. And so does our confidence and independence. Understanding entails making sense out of chaos. For that purpose, we need to understand both the elements in that seeming chaos and the potential relationships among those elements. Eskimos, Touaregs and Jivaros know perfectly the meaning of little details in their respective environments. To the inhabitants of 20th century cities, ice, sand and the jungle are just that: three things. In the Inuit language, however, there are a number of different words to describe the various conditions of ice and snow, just like the color beige has a number of well- defined hues in the language of Touaregs, and the endless variety of Amazon plants and their respective properties hold no secrets to Jivaros, which turns the word “jungle” into an unacceptable simplification.

Likewise, the term “city” is an unacceptable simplification to us. A city is made up of hundreds of overlapping, juxtaposed realities. Increasingly complex realities are found all the time. While a Jivaro and a peasant learn all they need to know about their environment before the age of 20, an inhabitant of our civilization can go on learning all his life, even if he never leaves his hometown. His context is not physical but conceptual. Life in today’s cities is basically life in a sea of communication. This sea of communication is full of noise from confusing, irrelevant, incomplete or scrambled messages, such as the ones described by Roland Barthes in “Mythologies”, where he denounces the media as being to blame for the creation of unnecessary appetites, desires that it is impossible to satisfy, fictitious realities (I am aware of the paradox), and distorting rather than forming our perception of reality. The serious nature of this problem becomes even more apparent as we remember McLuhan’s words: “The medium, or the process, of our time -electric technology- is reshaping and restructuring the patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our private lives” (“The Medium is the Massage”). Our relationship with the complex realities of contemporary life is filled with interactions with people and events, and is largely ruled by time.

Time is wealth, and timing is a necessary condition for the development of human communication, if we want to communicate intensely and efficiently. Meetings, lessons, conferences, entertainment, visits, journeys, sports, in summary, all of our social endeavors are ruled by time. People get together, scatter, come and go. In this environment, coordination, order and agreement are of the essence. Accurate information, timely delivery and speedy actions call for clear communications, and are based on a notion of respect for other people’s time. If time is gold, efficiency is currency. The notion of value of the time SIGN OF DESIGN does justice to those endeavors, by bringing the usually invisible communication design to center stage. The role of graphic designers in this era of informational revolution is charmingly described in Richard Saul Wurman’s story: “What-if, Could-Be; an historical fable of the future”. “… We do not know how to articulate what we need. We do not know how to describe the function we need from a person or product in order to solve a problem. We do not know, in other words, how to articulate constructive requirements in order to obtain an improved and more efficient environment… The problem can be defined in a question: what do we need in order to ask the right questions? The answer is obvious: information (information in its highest form is both art and entertainment). What this story tells is that, at their first meeting, the Committee made the following resolution: public information should be public… this means that the city of Could-Be was a society because of its citizens and accordingly it was accountable to those citizens. This meant that all information about the past, the present and the future of Could-Be, was citizen property, and the government and inhabitants of Could-Be had a responsibility towards their city and towards every individual to make information accessible, and easily so. This means not only that public information must be physically accessible, but it must also be understandable”. Amidst the avalanche of information constantly flowing around us, which is the blood and oxygen of civilized life, designers bring order, education and freedom and turn chaos into information. SIGN OF DESIGN bears witness to those endeavors.

Jorge Frascara, Professor Emeritus, Edmonton, Canadá.
Icograda Past President

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