THE CULTURAL DIALOGUE OF FORMS 

The forms that you design becomes markers of social order.  Our forms, our stuff, our crap, becomes talismans of cultural value.  Forms are a cultural road map:  they are in direct conversation with the social order.  The forms that you design will enter into this economic dialogue. Much our our evaluation of our fellow human beings pivots on the forms that each of us has.  

As Baudrillard tells us, 

“Objects work as categories of objects which, in the most tyrannical fashion, define categories of people – they police social meaning, and the significations that they engender are rigidly controlled.”  209.  

Forms are cultural markers, and they contribute to, unfortunately, a conflicting and overlapping schema of societal order.  We have a shared cultural understanding of the wide profusion of forms, and this is what we call meaning.  We say that we understand a form when it fits within a common, culturally shared, literary description.  This is, pure and simple, thought control.

If you are an architect, automobile designer, fashion designer, etc., the form that you create will function as a cultural marker.  It will enter into a cultural and economic dialogue with other forms. This is an escapable fact of the western culture that we live in.

One way to short circuit this economic / societal positioning and control loop is to generate forms with the greatest authenticity and provenance.  You design these things and you typically use some version of drawing to do this. These pages tell you to draw outside of your culture.  Transparent Drawing is one tool which allows you to adjust the settings of your mind so as to tune yourself in to a deeper level. Draw outside of your culture. 

We can’t, nor may we want to, absolutely smash the societal echo chamber of the control that forms exert over us.  Forms, after all, are what hold a society together.  Yet,  we can do everything possible to elevate the purity of the forms that we design.  In this manner, what we design will have a chance to make a positive contribution to the cultural dialogue of form.

1. Baudrillard, Jean.  The System of Objects.  Verso, London.  1996.