What is it about coloring books when we’re young that make us scribble all over the page without regard for the lines that clearly define boundaries and guides? On those monochrome pages, how did we decide what color of crayon to use on the sky, trees, or dinosaurs. In my own case, I clearly wasn’t choosing based on what I experienced in daily life. I drew purple water, green dogs, a red Big Bird, or sometimes an entirely different scene than what was suggested by the thin black lines.

I have an early photo of my dad and I sitting side by side coloring in the same book. His crayon never made a mark outside the Sesame Street character, while my outline of Big Bird was looking something like waxy, uncontrolled Modrian painting. I recently rediscovered that photo and couldn’t help but wonder why I colored the way I did.

First, the conditions: I have to assume that I had seen Sesame Street previous to my attempt at coloring and knew the general color pallet of the characters. I was also drawing next to someone who had good technical drawing skill (a former draftsman) and was setting a good example for me to follow. I’m sure I had some experience of borders and boundaries (don’t go near the stairs, walk on the sidewalk not the road, ect.).  So what compelled me to disregard all of the suggestions around me to draw inside the lines on the page? Why did I choose the colors that I did? Was it simply that I didn’t yet have the ability to understand relationships between reality and representation? It seems logical that I simply didn’t associate the singing and dancing Big Bird on TV with my static line drawing on the page. Unable to make that observation, I drew what I thought could be reality. Maybe I was coloring the possibility of a large, red bird. I doubt I was consciously seeking to color in the opposite method of my dad, but perhaps I simply didn’t recognize that he was drawing “correctly” and I was disobeying the rules of the page.

Obviously I can’t thoroughly understand what was going through my head at that moment in time, so maybe it’s best to focus on the what we can learn. We all eventually were told that we were, in fact, supposed to color inside the lines.  I wouldn’t be surprised if most of us even received a grade on our coloring ability at some point. I’m not going to project that our creativity was stifled by our parents and teachers when they advised us against coloring outside the figures and shapes on the page, or that we could solve the world’s problems through a “freedom of the crayon” campaign. I do believe, however, that we could apply a child’s approach to coloring to some of our design decisions.

What makes us experiment and try new things? How do we find inspiration? More and more, it seems like our design culture is simply adapting to a different set of rules or guides rather than truly breaking a mold. By being “unique” we are simply being someone else’s view of normal. How can we avoid simply shifting philosophies and truly do something groundbreaking? I’ll return back to the thought of separating reality and representation. Abstracting reality or even interpreting reality is not an option. At the same time, however, designing for someone or something outside of reality isn’t useful to anyone. We should be designing for a possible reality. I’m not referring to regurgitating future concepts and scenarios that never seem to carry any weight. Instead we should separate ourselves from what is reality to design for what can be reality. If we go back to the Sesame Street coloring session above, we can create a methodology for achieving this separation. Instead of looking to reality for inspiration or guides, perhaps we first abstract a framework for reality. By taking an abstraction of reality as the new reality, we allow ourselves to step back from legacy issues and memory. The abstraction will have just enough reality in it’s DNA that any solutions or designs resulting from the exercise will be able to be implemented in our current reality.

I suppose the trick to all of this is to successfully design the abstraction. Maybe we simply need to discover the inevitable abstractions in our own realities. The Red Big Bird of design.

Tags: design, ideas, opinion, process, sesame, solutions, street

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.