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.

The word brand is much in the news these days. The frequent use isn’t particularly new, but it’s not letting up. It seems that brands are a bigger part of how we think of our world now. It wasn’t always this way, and, as the concept of brands has developed, our understanding of them and use of the concept, have changed as well.

It seems that the word and its attendant idea derive from the practice of cowboys searing their marks into the flanks of calves, on the 19th-century Texas plains. How else were they to identify their own property when their produce was largely undifferentiated? Young calves, after all, look very much alike as they run to hide in the brush.

In the case of the cowboys, the purpose was to identify the owner. It is likely that the products, the calves now grown into cows andsteers, were not qualitatively different from ranch to ranch. It is unlikely that buyers sought one brand in preference to another.

Quality, not quantity

So there has been a big shift in how the word brand is used. We know it is now intended to identify quality (or various discrete qualities) rather than quantity. How did this happen?

For a maker to identify his products with some mark is hardly new. It is usually said to have arisen with the start of the Industrial Revolution, in the 19^th century, but I suspect the practice has been around as long as makers have organized their making in such a way as to increase their volume and sales.  I have seen ancient Greek oil lamps, as identical as wheel-thrown objects can be, marked with a distinct stamp, or brand, showing they have all come from the same source. Stradivarius was signing his violinsthrough 1720. This might have been simple vanity, the way Sunday painters dutifully sign their work without hope of eventual appreciation, but I doubt it. A maker, serious about his business, might wish to claim ownership, or authorship, because that act wouldconfer extra value to the object produced. Not all makers are equal, so why not push for a marketing advantage?

Marketing as an entity

What is surprising is how many manufactured articles have been anonymous. The generalized notion that value can be generated by the identification of the maker is comparatively new. When a handful of western European nations took to transforming themselves into manufacturing economies, they sought captive markets for their wares. Hence the scramble for colonies. At that time, goods were often identified with  their country of origin, not the individual maker. French lace. English blankets. And so on. They dominated their dominions as countries, not as corporations.

With the post-war collapse of the colonial structure, individual corporations have been forced to do their own marketing, and brand  identification has proven to be a powerful tool in achieving this. I think what is most remarkable is just how successful this concept hasbeen. All travelers know they will find the same products to be available, regardless of where in the world they are.

It seems we are now in a new era of colonization, but this one is of brands. The world’s top brands remain overwhelmingly American, which is not surprising. America is the top country after all, by many standards. What is surprising, though, is after that how mixed the list becomes. Japan and Germany certainly dominate the auto industry. Italy and France top the luxury goods. Finland’s Nokia is the largest cell phone maker. And so on.

Eager colonies

Developed countries retain some advantages, even though manufacturing may no longer be one of them, and I think that advantage is education. The dominant international brands establish the dominant international style. They set the aesthetic and visual standards. They do this with their own educated designers and marketers. Collectively, they are the alpha males, so to speak. Theirs is the visualDNA that gets passed along. Countries that do not have the same level of education, confidence and capitol structures embrace and follow this leadership. As well as consuming it, they imitate it with their own manufacturing and novice brands. They seem to be anxious not to be left out, and not to remain at the bottom of this pack’s social order. The foreign DNA is embraced, absorbed and replicated.

It’s a (mostly) peaceful takeover of the world. Neo colonization via brands. Who would have guessed?

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

When fishermen get together, they’ll probably talk about fish, fishing, and the pleasures thereof. When designers get together, there’s a pretty good chance that, at some point, they’ll swap stories about clients that were reluctant to pay. Why are so many clients loath to meet their commitments to their designers?

One obvious answer is that a reluctance to pay for something that is not proven is both natural and almost inevitable. Even we designers are reluctant to buy a pig in a poke. To mix metaphors, we want to kick the tires, and take it for a spin before we separate ourselves from our hard-earned dollars. This is one reason why tradeshows have enjoyed so much success. There are many ways to expose a market to a product, but an opportunity to actually have a real visual and tactile experience of what we’ve seen in the media is very alluring.

What is ‘real’ work?

Part of what we do, as professional designers, is to project the nascent reality of our designs in as realistic a way as possible. We produce photorealistic renderings, maquettes, models, prototypes and so on, all in our pursuit of making the not-yet-real as real as possible. Unfortunately for us, though, our clients seldom have the same degree of imagination or even ability to “read” our presentations in a way that allows them to see our work as we see it. So they may be reluctant to buy in.

Another answer, although less obvious, is likely to be a bigger factor, and that is the poorly understood nature of intellectual property. What is protected, when intellectual protection is sought, is the manifestation of an idea. But it is really the idea that we seek protection for. The very idea that ideas can be property is a bit of a stretch for many people, especially those that are not in the idea business. Ideas are not even tangible, until we make them so, so how can they be property?

All of us, designers or not, produce ideas effortlessly. This may lead some to doubt that what can be obtained without effort is deserving of being compensated for. But what distinguishes those of us who are designers — that is those of us who are in the business of the production of ideas — is that we have trained ourselves to generate a specific type of idea and to improve the chances that these ideas are useful and valuable.

Ideas require investments, too

This training came at a cost and it alone represents a considerable investment on our parts. And then, the time and effort we devote to the generation of ideas, on behalf of our clients, is real and skilled work, however lacking in perspiration we may appear to be.

It is the idea that ideas can and should be eligible for protection that is the great intellectual leap that much of the wealth of our civilization rests upon. It was this perception, in the United Kingdom, that caused the Industrial Revolution to flourish there in ways that it did not elsewhere. It is the expectation that ideas can be protected that is behind the explosion of ideas that created our digital world.

The ownership of ideas ought to be respected. Our commercial well-being, both personal and general, rests on this. Piracy, cracking, swapping and sharing, and the other cute words that we use to hide behind when we steal may not have brought our engines of industry to a halt yet, but the harm can be felt. We designers know this because it is from people like us that this theft occurs. And we fail to be placated when our clients make a slight change and then claim that, since the idea is no longer the same, the ownership isn’t either.

There is a final reason that we might experience difficulty in getting paid and, in a way, it encompasses the other two as well. And that is that there are a lot of people in business who are, quite simply, assholes. But that’s another topic.

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

Objects exist for many reasons, but most of them are created for the use to which they can be put. They are a means to an end. They are our tools. Our contemporary tools serve our contemporary lives: cell phones, tablets and laptops, flat screens. When the use is frequent and the outcome critical, we appraise our tools the most carefully.

This is very evident in the building trades, for instance. When you make your living by your screw-gun driver, you will want the best combination of torque, long battery life, low weight, balance and grip that a non-extortionist price will buy. If you only drive a drywall screw now and then, you will probably make your purchasing decision differently.

For those that have a ‘special interest’, the same scrutiny of objects takes place. If you are a fly-fisherman, for instance, you will know a great deal about lines and lures and rods (I don’t). You may even claim that you don’t know anything about design, but given even a small chance, you can hold forth at length on the minutiae of your tackle.

“Professionals” is one way we define or differentiate those that make their living from their specific set of tools (and skills). Chefs, as another example, will care more about the balance of their knives, their weight, their ability to hold an edge and so on, than most of us do. Marketers know this, and there are often ‘professional’ lines of products to complement the regular offerings.

But there are reasons to be cautious here, for tricks can be played. Most of us can be gullible, at least at times. I know I can be, but I’ve learned some things along the way. One early lesson came to me in design school, when a prominent manufacturer of tools came for a show-and-tell. One model of hammer was much more expensive than the others. I asked why, anticipating that it had been made from a better quality of steel. But no, it came from the same forging as all the others. It had just received the most polishing. It was brighter and dearer, but not really better. The benefit to its maker was that it returned the highest profit margin, from those dazzled by shiny things.

Only the people that use tools critically are really able to appraise them. To my mind, one of the biggest problems of design and one of its greatest challenges, is that the people who design (those professionals like me) usually are not really familiar with the tools that they may be called on to design. It’s easy to be arrogant and to think that your (our) specialized training singularly equips us to see and understand. But it may not. Another lesson from my design school involved the design of the handle for a backsaw. I did my research, ergonomic studies, clay models, prototypes etc., just as I had been trained to do, but when I showed the sleek and polished final model to our wood workshop technician, I got my real critique. He, being polite, said gracious things about my efforts, but then said that as far as he was concerned, the rather mundane handle of his old backsaw was hard to improve on (the very handle we had been challenged to improve). He noted that my version, which fit me perfectly, was the wrong size for his much bigger hands. As well, he showed me how he used his saw: like this and like that. The round handle allowed him to adjust his hands position without compromise. The ridges on the turning gave him just the right amount of grip. He used the tool and knew what it should be, in a way that I, as a designer, had little insight into.

I’m often reminded of this lesson when I review the results of industrial design competitions. There are often new designs for tools. It turns out that I may have spent quite a bit of time on the working end of some types of tools and this allows me to make considered judgments on them. There are often deficiencies and anomalies to spot and I suspect that in the categories where I lack experience, the same truths apply. Only the people who really use tools know what is crucial to them. Internet research doesn’t do it.

I think that it would look well on designers to adopt a bit more humility when it comes to tools and to do their research ‘in the field’. There is more to making a good tool than to improving its polish.

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