Four travel mugs filled with coffee, and four piles of music.
Road trips in my family always started with these two items, assembled in the early morning light of some crisp Saturday morning, as we piled our pillows and suitcases and books into the family car. As my father pulled out onto the highway, both the coffee and the music came out of their containers, and we would plan out what cds (and in what order) were most appropriate for that morning's mood. The groggy anticipation, the closed nature of the car, the way the music interacted with the landscape outside, and the four people experiencing it together -- these experiences were, and still are, strongly compelling to me. Even as adults, in the face of all popular wisdom, the four of us still willingly pile into the family car, music at the ready, and head off to visit family or explore new terrain.
Our music has progressed, too: as a child there were album cassettes in the VW Rabbit, mix tapes in the battered Aerostar, and up to six albums on shuffle in the cd changer of our Ford Explorer. (The introduction of CD burners and iTunes both cemented and exploded this tradition: it is now common for my dad to produce a specially-burned CD for the 30-minute drive between breakfast grocery shopping every Saturday.) Music is such an important part of the driving experience that my memories are inextricably linked to them -- Dwight Yoakum's A Thousand Miles from Nowhere while winding up the western side of the Rockies into Telluride; alone with Alone in Kyoto, weaving through clouds of early morning fog just past Memphis, Tennessee; or the spoken interlude of Robert Earl Keen, Jr's Front Porch Song with West Texas stretching flat and endless on all sides. Memory and song combine together over time to shape this ritual of the road trip, and merge together for me into a powerful sense of place.
What does it mean, though, to evoke a sense of place? In trying to seek answers to this question, I turned to the introductory chapters of "Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience" by Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, which posits that everything we know about the world around us is knowledge gained from personal experience. We experience through our perceptions of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste, and construct our knowledge of the world using a composite of all of these sensory experiences -- we see the window in our room, or hear the echoes off our walls, or smell the exhaust from the traffic on the street outside. The result is knowledge of the space we occupy in our environment.
Perception of the space is a basic form of knowledge. Most animal species claim some form of it, and this ability to sense space can persist despite deep injury to the brain and even the loss of some sensory organs. It is the objective, impersonal, abstract, and functional kind of knowledge. We move through space, in and out of it, over it, and around it. On the opposite end of this spectrum is the notion of place. If space is impersonal, place is uniquely personal. Place has a layered history of physical, social, and emotional connotations that have accumulated over time. Place is space that has acquired meaning to us as individuals, or as a society, or both. If space is the house, place is the home. Place can have a yesterday and a tomorrow, a good and an evil, a happy and a sad.
This space-place distinction is a fundamental idea in architecture, where Christopher Alexander observes that "[t]hose of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place, all of our experiences there, depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the pattern of events which we experience there." As our interaction has moved into the virtual realm, this space-place dialectic has also become a core issue in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), where Paul Dourish and Steve Harrison define place as "a space with something added -- social meaning, convention, cultural understandings about role, function, nature, and so on."
When presented with this distinction, my immediate response as a designer is to wonder: where do pieces of graphic design fall into this continuum? Phenomenology makes room in its definition of the world for "construed space," which means space that the mind "extrapolates beyond sensory evidence." We have the ability to imagine, to draw conclusions, to extend out our lines of perception into the area of imagination. William James wrote, "[...] the symbol will often give us the emotional effect of the perception. Such expressions as the abysmal vault of heaven, the endless expanse of ocean, etc., summarize many computations of the imagination, and give the sense of enormous horizon."
The tools we use to represent spatial experience can, Tuan suggests, be just as valid as actually experiencing the space. Where Tuan stops short, however, is in making the case for the most interesting part of this whole construction: construed place. If we can create the experience of space through verbal or visual symbol, then we can also create place.
Graphic designers understand the space-place continuum intuitively, if not in those exact words. A popular debate among RISD students and faculty is over the concept of duende, a vague term loosely translated from Spanish as spirit or magic. In slang terms you might call it the something something, the soul, the mojo, the special sauce -- that thing that elevates a piece of design work from functional to exceptional. Its highly subjective and rarely quantifiable, and yet so important to our profession. It is the intersection of graphic design and place -- where we as viewers enter into those accumulations of physical, social, and emotional so completely that the result is magical.
I believe that we don't have enough emphasis on place in graphic design, particularly as our social and professional lives are increasingly bisected into the so-called "real" world and the online world. We interact with people, have conversations, share meals, and go to work, but we also use cell phones, Facebook, Twitter and text messaging to interact with people halfway across the world. Graphic design is abnormally suspended between these two worlds, spanning everything from bookbinding and setting type to data visualization and web design. Balancing between these two extremes is a uniquely personal challenge for each individual designer, particularly as many of our traditional forms of production are rendered functionally obsolete. My thesis is an investigation of this unique blend of the digital and analog within graphic design, and an attempt to reconcile the two through the notion of place.
This collection of ten songs is an exploration of place, not only in the mood the pieces evoke, but in the way they combine digital and analog instrumentation. I began the process of compiling this soundtrack to my thesis by gathering tracks that I already knew. The most influential of these was the soundtrack to Lost in Translation, which is comprised of several contemplative pieces by the band Air. I then turned to a music mapping project called Pandora, and created a radio station based off of the characteristics of Alone in Kyoto, one of the prominent melodic themes of the movie. Over and over again, the following characteristics showed up in my stream: electronica influences, mellow rock instrumentation, extensive use of vocal harmonies, and jazz and folk influences. Even the songs that I had on my own exhibited the same qualities. If you listen to the songs without knowing these phrases, though, you might not know that these songs were considered "electronica" at all. Instead, they manage to find a blend of electronic and acoustic without losing sight of the voices or the melody. They evoke a sense of atmosphere, and of place, but you can still sing along to them.
Playlist:
Wass -- F.S. Blumm
Ikebana -- Kevin Shields
Jynwythek Ylow -- Aphex Twin
Mike Mills -- AIR
Alberto Balsalm -- Aphex Twin
Shibuya -- Brian Reitzell & Roger J. Manning Jr.
On The Subway -- Brian Reitzell & Roger J. Manning Jr.
Esther's Vice -- Bexar Bexar
Outro -- Kevin Shields
Alone in Kyoto -- AIR
