As a young design student, eagerly devouring everything I could find that might help me understand the profession I was devoting my life too, I came across a book, titled The Unknown Craftsman, (1972) by the Japanese philosopher, Sōetsu Yanagi (1889-1961). It examined the beauty of anonymous crafts, particularly the most simple, straightforward and typically Japanese. For someone such as myself, an introverted minimalist, this was a very positive affirmation of at least some of my values. When I then went on to study with Jim Krenov in Sweden, I wasn’t completely surprised to find that he had his own copy of the book, which would have supported some of his values too, specifically those we held in common. That was what would have attracted me to him in the first place.

To my surprise, I recently found a second book by Yanagi (in Oslo, as it turns out), freshly published and a collection of some of his earlier essays; The Beauty of Everyday Things. I guess that after almost 50 years, his time to advise us has come around again. Unlike my earlier enthusiastic response, I now find him to be a bit naïve and pretentious, but I recall my earlier endorsement and happily acknowledge his positive influence on what is by now a succession of generations of designers and craftsmen. Evidence of this renewed interest is a very recent article in the Economist magazine. Yanagi coined the word Mingei, meaning folk craft, to describe what he found to be beautiful and now it has become part of our vocabulary.

Yanagi’s influence has been the greatest in Japan, or maybe he is only a reflection of pre-existing and underlying values and expression. But internationally, many current (and almost current) designers will recognize some of his ideas as influential and valuable. His writing would have influenced my desire to visit Japan which I first did in 1978. I was practically mesmerized by the attention that was so casually paid to beauty in both conspicuous and inconspicuous places, although there was plenty of ugliness too. One memory is of being served tea at some newly made friends home and after the fact, being told what the humble looking tea cup I was holding had cost them, which was more than their car was worth. That impressed me.

On the other end of an economic spectrum is the success that the Japanese company Muji has had internationally. It claims to produce No-Brand Quality Goods which reflects the Mingei philosophy, and that are largely anonymous in appearance. Ironically, this lack of identity has itself become a strong and valuable brand. Their commitment to simple products that are basic and necessary has succeeded beyond their expectations. I first found a few of their products for sale at a museum shop in Los Angeles almost 20 years ago, and I’ve been intrigued enough to have followed them ever since. It used to be that you could identity fellow designers by the fact that at meetings, their pens were also Muji products. Now, when I visit one of their stores in Toronto (or Berlin, or Shanghai), I’m the old white guy among a sea of young Asian-looking women. It has become popular fashion which is a bit of a surprise for me.

Doing a good job of making things simply and efficiently is hardly unique to Muji or traditional rural Japan. There are plenty of Canadian designers and manufacturing firms that are willing to produce goods that are anonymous in appearance as long as they do what they are supposed to do. We don’t need Mingei philosophy to value the unpretentious and modest. Part of it is because we have largely lost our traditions of ornamentation, accepting and perpetuating a premise of Modernism. Part of it is an intuitive preference of not making things more expensive than they need to be.

We have lots of talented designers who are able to design objects that are expressive and to design goods that are highly distinctive, as marketing (and individual egos) might require. And I’m glad we do. But sometimes I’m fully satisfied with products that are as straight forward and quietly effective as possible. It’s a long tradition.

Paul Epp is an emeritus professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design department.

In 1972, as a very recent design-school graduate, I spent some time as a private student of Jim Krenov. This Russian- born, American- and Swedish- based cabinetmaker had been introduced to me by my design school teacher, who thought that Jim’s approach might prove to be useful to me.

Jim was a traditional cabinetmaker in the truest and even the most restrictive sense. He only made cabinets. They were usually small and kind of perfect. His forms were very basic and geometric and he was very careful in his choice and use of wood. He made a virtue out of the necessity of joinery, featuring exposed dovetails and through mortise-and-tenons. Although he had some machine tools, he worked predominantly by hand, with self-made tools if possible. He hated sand-paper, and his surfaces were the result of his very sharp edge-tools.

He didn’t like manufactured hardware either and his pulls and latches were wooden, but far from clumsy. There was something almost jewelry- like about what he made.

He was also vain and fussy, so there was no question of my working on his pieces. I was a private student and he assigned me exercises. I was happy to comply, but the question finally arose of what my graduation project would be. There was a tradition in cabinetmaking that the final piece an apprentice would make would be a tool chest that he would carry with him in his new identity as a Journeyman.

His skills could easily be ascertained by any prospective employer as he had with him a kind of practical portfolio. I thought I could work within this tradition by building a Krenovian cabinet for my recently acquired hand-tools. I had made a set of hand-planes and bought the best Swedish chisels and my cabinet could house them.

Jim approved and rummaged around his woodpile until he found a plank of Italian walnut for me. I was to work with hand tools as much as possible, bow-sawing the plank into thinner boards and then hand-planing them six-sides (or even eight) before gluing them together. It was a lovely piece of wood, with only a narrow core of the dark colour we think of as walnut.

Most of the wood was a warm brown, shading from a toffee colour to latte. Fortunately for me, it was also lovely to plane. I joined the bottom corners with through-dovetails and the upper part with through-mortise-and-tenons. The doors and back panel were book-matched to display the stripe of darker heartwood. I added a couple of small drawers, using some Rio-rosewood that I had left over from one of my hand-planes. The interior did not receive any applied finish and the lovely scent of the Italian wood still lingers, almost 50 years later.

One of the most memorable experiences of this exercise was a mistake I made. When drilling (by hand!) a panel, I measured the location from the side that had a rabbet cut into it which threw the location off, as it was referenced to the other side. I was heart-sick and panicked, as there was no more of the plank left. Jim just laughed. He said the difference between an apprentice and a professional wasn’t whether mistakes got made. It was in how they were dealt with. My cabinet has an almost hidden and very faint semi-circular line that locates the very carefully made plug, a useful reminder about the folly of hubris and the ongoing need to handle mistakes.

We were both happy with the finished piece, and I brought it back to Canada. I used it for a few years, hung on the wall behind my workbench, but it was actually not that practical. I didn’t want to always open it when I needed a chisel and it seemed kind of pretentious and even a bit silly. I put it away for quite a few years but I’ve now given it a new life. The interior space is exactly the right height and depth for bottles of single-malt Scotch. It’s hanging in my dining room and I enjoy the warm colour of the Italian wood and the memories it evokes. I usually manage to have a bottle of my favourite Talisker in it and a few others. One of the most satisfying things about it is the wood-against-wood “thunk” it makes when I close the doors, to be held shut by a little wooden catch that is almost invisible.

Paul Epp is an emeritus professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design department.

Lately, I’ve found myself busy being a designer. It seems that I should describe this as working, but it actually feels more like playing. That might be more accurate, as there isn’t likely to be any remuneration downstream, but it’s still essentially the same activity that paid my way through much of my working life.

When I’m doing this work, I confront a challenge. That’s what design is. Whether its self-defined or provided by a client doesn’t actually make that much difference. A challenge is a challenge and its useful to take them all personally, regardless of their origin. We seem to do a better job of resolving these opportunities when they feel like they are impacting us directly. Obtaining that first-person based perspective can even be described as one of the steps in a design process. By our natures, we’re selfish creatures and we reflexively look after ourselves first.

Apart from identifying with the task at hand is the task of defining its parameters. What problem is it that we are trying to solve? While it would seem to be critical that we get this nailed down early on, so that we can proceed, I find its actually a kind of work-in-progress. I’m always adjusting my view of what the problem is, as I gain a better understanding of it.

The longer and harder we focus on it, the more we will learn about it, finding its nuances and the necessity to adjust our earlier perceptions and assumptions. That can send us right back to the beginning and a fresh sheet of paper. Images of playing Snakes and Ladders come to mind. But it’s no hardship to be compelled to start over, because it gives us more opportunities to play and to indulge ourselves in the joy of design.

What is the joy of design? In my view, it’s the searching for new solutions. It’s the mental gymnastics of turning a problem around and around in my mind (and not just my mind), considering different configurations and potential new versions. It can be frustrating, but I’ve never complained about that.

I got my start at this early, through a bit of good luck. It was our family’s habit to spend a lot of time in church, and the wooden pews were far from ergonomic. To help me endure the interminable sermons, I would redesign what I saw. A new pulpit. New pews (my start as a furniture designer). New pendant lights. Once I had the interior redesigned to my satisfaction, there was the exterior and when that was done, a whole parking lot full of cars that would surely benefit from my designer attention. I can thank the hard benches for nudging me along.

I’ve learned a lot since, and one lesson is that design isn’t as easy as just imagining things. The real work starts when one is faced with turning these dreams into reality. One especially hard lesson is that our imaginations lie to us, pretending things are possible when they are not. But, an experienced designer will allow for this and have devised checks and tests to keep him honest.

I’ve earlier described the process of design as an alternating use of our right brain and then our left, with the discipline to indulge our creativity without restraint and then, in turn, subject our dreams to the hard discipline of our rational criticism. It turns out that most of our good ideas aren’t that good after all, but we’ve learnt that if we have enough new ideas, the chances improve of having one or two worth keeping. So, we have to play that first part very hard, twisting and turning ideas around and pushing, pushing, for more. It’s almost like work.

Books have been written about the Joy of Cooking, and the Joy of Sex. There is probably a worthy book about the Joy of Design. But I won’t write it, I’ll be too busy designing.

(Knowing Paul, I think I’ll bookmark this one and see what happens. – Editor)

Paul Epp is an emeritus professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design department.

Louis Sullivan, employer and mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote in 1896 that, “form ever follows function.” Revised to “form follows function,” this was the banner the early modernists fought under. As a notion and an epigram, it entered the popular lexicon and is still often used, even by non-designers. But what does it mean and what is its relevance today when the use of many of our objects is dictated by their invisible computer components? Designers are always making form decisions (That’s a big part of what we do.) and others involved in the production of goods make them as well. On what basis do we actually do this?

Form following function is easy to understand when we think of an object such as a hammer. It has a handle that is easily grasped both literally and conceptually, and a heavy, durable end with a flattened face. Its utility as an object to facilitate hitting is obvious. No instruction manual is necessary. We might even say its function follows its form.

The clarity of the form of tools was often used by modernist theorists to illustrate their aesthetic. As well, those objects that move through fluids, like propellors and aircraft wings, cannot be encumbered by decorative features. Their form, in a minimalist expression, was critical to their function.

But what about furniture? To fulfill the function of a table, a flat surface is required, parallel to the floor and some distance above it. There are innumerable ways of achieving this, and in many of them, form is dictated only by the preference of the designer. Is a round steel tuber  eally a better description  of function that a miniature, wooden, Doric column? Obviously not. It has become appar­ ent that often the form of what we (as a culture) make, is determined by many factors of which function may be only one.

A recently popular book, responding to the poverty of “form follows func­tion,” just as I have, proposed that “form follows feeling.” This strikes me as accurate, but not particularly clarifying. Often when I press my students for an explanation of why they have made things as they have, they say it’s because they “liked it” that way. Although unassa ilably ac­ curate as a description, it is not a very rigorous accounting. And since I believe  that  the  best  results  are usually intentional, not accidental, I press them and myself for a more thoughtful an­swer. What follows is a number of specific possibilities:

Geometry

For reasons as variable as cost and intellectual laziness, geometry is often a default in form-mak­ ing decisions.

Cost

Price is rarely not an issue, and form decisions are often dictated by the least expensive approach.

Material

The form that makes sense in one material may not in another. The pre-formed op­tions of steel dictate a very different appearance of rough lumber.

Theory

The Martini theory I proposed in an earlier column is another approach to form decisions.

Style

Whether we realize it or not, much of the form of our environment is determined by prevailing styles. We usu­ ally can only identify them in hindsight. For example, itsi easy to date photographs by such things as tie widths and collar heights.

Systems

One approach to design is that of developing a number of components that can be assembled in different combina­ tions, yielding many different solutions. The resulting forms are determined by that of their components.

Habit, and/or expedience

Much of what we do is only nominally thoughtful. We take the path of least (mental) resistance in form as we do in many other things.       •

Family values

It is often a benefit to marketing that a group of objects look as though they are related, such as bedroom suites, and dining room sets.

Metaphor

Sometimes objects are made to look like other objects or plants or animals, to suggest a function or to appeal to a sentiment.

Aesthetics

When I was in the canoe-building business, my foreman once asked me why boats were so beautiful. Anticipating a nugget of wisdom, I demurred. The answer was, “there are no straight lines in them.” This is a useful insight and may be why wooden boats are often considered to have obtained a level of beauty that contemporary boats, with their pre-formed componentry, lack.

Women

It is probably true that the form of women is the mother of many other forms. Everyone seems to respond favor­ably to the form of certain women.

I’m not sure of the usefulness of these reflections on form, but I am intrigued by why we do what we do.                       .

Paul Epp is an emeritus professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design department.