YOUR GEOMETRIC REPERTOIRE

If you are a designer, what do you do as design exercises?  Athletes and musicians engage in strengthening exercises. If you are of the lingual bent, you develop sets of phonemes.   As a designer, you are a generator of forms.  What do you do to strengthen your geometric repertoire?

“The ability to design is intellectually grounded on the geometric repertoire.  Competence proceeds from this set of geometric ideas, spiraling from the abstract to the concrete, from useless ideas to liveable habitations.”  Glassie.  Folk Housing.  19.

When a musician practices scales, they are strengthening their repertoire of possible combinations of notes.  An athlete will use strengthening exercises without any specific purpose, so as to improve balance, coordination, etc.  It is common knowledge that doing these things will make you stronger and will give you a more solid basis from which to perform.  

The forms you generate with Transparent Drawing work the same way.  Your generation of a previously unrealized form is a powerful exercise.  It requires thinking, conceptualization, perception and coordination.  The forms have enormous potential, as they are added to your repertoire of possible design responses.  You can work thru a geometric exercise in less than an hour.  

If we engage the Transparent Drawing toolkit of Form Combine, and then utilize Automatic Form, you are expanding your capacities to think, perceive and conceptualize.  You work thru a geometric problem, without any concern for function. You construct holistic forms on your paper. Each of these forms is an addition to your geometric repertoire.  Each time you do this, you are a stronger designer.  

The form you generate is a summary of your thinking.  And just like any other exercise, it makes you just a bit better at what you do.