I is for Imperfect - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Perfection may not be easy, but at least it’s not hard to understand what it is. Depending on your degree of skill, to a greater or a lesser extent you succeed or you fail to achieve it. It has been a preoccupation of designers ever since they were first asked to work on industrially produced artefacts.

Perfection is what once drove Dieter Rams and now drives Jonathan Ive as they and their teams invest limitless energy in achieving the perfect radius curve, and the perfect finish that shows no marks. The search for perfection is what created the language of modernism, and as such has taken on something of the flavour of a period piece. Imperfection is a more elusive and a more difficult quality to work with, not least because it is harder to measure. It can be an equally positive quality, one that speaks of the more agnostic times that we live in now, when compared with the moral certainties of the 1930s.

Attempting perfection in manufacturing is to know what to aim for in the design of every joint, the creation of every seam, and the shaping of every surface. To find justifications for the positive qualities of imperfection, you cannot blindly commit to a mechanical process or to a template and expect the desired outcome simply through the exercise of skill or persistence or consistency. It demands the exercise of a different kind of judgement.

The pursuit of the perfect is rooted in one of the key issues of the early days of mass production when many components were made using moulds. The process of filling and refilling a mould with hot metal inevitably wears away its sharp lines, degrades its finish, and so diminishes the quality of the copies it can be used to make. In the course of manufacturing, each new example, bit by bit, loses the precision that the mould began with, and results in less and less perfect versions of the original. It is in this phenomenon that the concept of the limited edition has its origins. To make just nine examples of an object, or a print, is to guarantee that each of them will have a certain quality. Conversely, irregularity has been understood as synonymous with the less-than-perfect, and so with the inferior. Mass production has looked to find ways to maintain the perfection of every piece that comes out of the mould.

For a designer the most difficult thing about looking for the positive qualities in imperfection is the demand that it places on them to justify every aesthetic decision they make. It introduces the possibility of subjective as well as objective qualities in design.

The possibility of perfection implies the existence of an original, with the special qualities that implies, to which copies can only aspire. But mass-produced objects are the outcome of industrial processes in which, though there may be a prototype, or prototypes, there is no original on which all subsequent copies are more or less accurately based. There is only the tool, or the idea. There is no single ideal object, with what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’ of art, creating a category of object to distinguish it in an age of mechanical reproduction from the limitless copies. It is the mass-produced nature of the object that is the point of the exercise. It means that every Volkswagen Polo from a particular production run is exactly the same as every other Polo. Aside from the optional extras, any deviation from the car’s specification represents a defect. And to be defective is not the same as to be imperfect. Each car has the same characteristics, the characteristics of the particular model, just as each sheet of paper in a notebook is the same as every other sheet, and every copy of a given edition of a newspaper is identical to every other copy.

It is in many ways a characteristic that is antithetical to the human desire for the distinctive and the individual, the instinctive desire to make our possessions our own. Or the impulse that the carpet weavers of the Muslim world had to build imperfection into their work with loving care as an expression of religious humility in the face of the Almighty.

Interestingly, in the case of a banknote, the guarantee of the genuine and the perfect is in ensuring that each note is not quite the same as every other note; each serial number is unique. Counterfeiting finds this more difficult to deal with than copying detail.

To explore the attractions of imperfection puts the designer in a more exposed position than attempting to achieve perfection. Every step of the design process demands making a decision without, as it were, a safety net. It is the way that Hella Jongerius, one of the more influential designers of her generation, works. She is not an artisan maker, shaping objects one at a time, to a specific brief, for a specific user, each one showing the distinctive mark of the making process, the hand and the countless individual decisions on which it depends. She works within the framework of the industrial system, and all that it has to offer in terms of the potential to spread the costs of tooling across unlimited production runs. She appreciates the way in which our understanding of the material world is informed by our familiarity with the potential of industrial production. But she is also interested in using industrial production with a new level of sophistication. It is not that she wants to use a machine to make an object that looks as if it were made by hand - something that has been a subtext to manufacturing since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nor is her approach to be understood as a manifestation of the familiar idea of the customized, and perhaps somewhat inauthentic, outcome of multiple options for consumers. The latest incarnation of this is what is described as mass customization. It is a development that is driven by new production techniques that do away with the need for costly tooling, and instead rely on digital printing techniques that build complex forms without moulds or tools, and so remove the purpose and the benefits of uniformity.

When there is no mould, there is no need to make large numbers of identical objects that look exactly the same simply in order to amortize costs over a long production run. When the quality of production can be taken for granted, there is no purpose in pursuing precision or repetition for its own sake. It becomes possible to introduce the potential of variation from a perceived norm into the process. Jongerius loves mixing craft methods with new materials: porcelain vases, finished in spray paint and lacquer; making fabrics that combine felt and wool.

Jongerius explores ways to make something new out of the manufacturing process: so shiny, glossy surfaces can be replaced by lesser degrees of polish. Pure geometry is not the only possible formal language. Pure colour can give way to muddy mixes. Symmetry is not the only option. It’s an attitude that she shares with older designers such as Gaetano Pesce, who looked to find ways of working with artisans and workshops to make pieces in series or batches that were not identical but which offered the potential of individual variations instead.

Attempting to exploit the possibilities of imperfection by tinkering with mass-production methods offers the opportunity to soften and domesticate industrially made objects and to give them the charisma of the individual and the original. It is to suggest that a particular vase, glass or chair is not the same as all the others, and so can be understood as distinctively personal, or, to use a word which has more positive connotations than imperfect, to be unique.

Imperfection can be suggested by the traces of the loom, or the process marks required by colour-printing textiles, or the use of upholstery buttons that do not match, or by deconstructing the glass-making process in order to show the marks of the hand.

This is not to be confused with the skill of the craft maker. It is closer in a way to what Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese fashion designer, once described as her continual search to introduce special qualities to the fabrics woven for her garments, even, if necessary, by tampering with the machinery of the looms that made them.

Imperfection is a new take on old ideas. It is the concept of wabi-sabi, which still underpins Japanese culture’s view of aesthetic quality. Wabi is the quality of rusticity; it suggests the potential to find resonance in the accidents of construction. Sabi refers to the patina of age and wear. Wabi-sabi is the acceptance that perfection is elusive, and that beauty is to be found in its absence. Wabi-sabi is a form of the aristocratic preference that many cultures share for the old and weathered set against the vulgarity of the new.

On one level the post-industrial interest in imperfection is a reflection of the cult of imperfection that has its roots in the West in the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris. They railed against the tyranny of the machine, and the straightjacketed perfection that it imposed on the craftsman. Ruskin was equally outspoken in his attacks against the constraining hand of the designer who insisted on a precise and lifeless delineation of every detail, thereby removing any possibility of self-expression by the artisan.

In The Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin suggested that, in pursuit of imperfection, ‘the laying of colour by a mechanical hand, and its toning under a vulgar eye, are far more offensive than rudeness in cutting the stone. The latter is imperfection only; the former deadness or discordance.’ He continues later with:

[H]and-work might always be known from machine-work; observing, however, at the same time, that it was possible for men to turn themselves into machines, and to reduce their labour to the machine level; but so long as men work as men, putting their heart into what they do, and doing their best, it matters not how bad workmen they may be, there will be that in the handling which is above all price: it will be plainly seen that some places have been delighted in more than others - that there have been a pause, and a care about them; and then there will come careless bits, and fast bits; and here the chisel will have struck hard, and there lightly, and anon timidly; and if the man’s mind as well as his heart went with his work, all this will be in the right places, and each part will set off the other; and the effect of the whole, as compared with the same design cut by a machine or a lifeless hand, will be like that of poetry well read and deeply felt to that of the same verses jangled by rote … it is not coarse cutting, it is not blunt cutting, that is necessarily bad, but it is cold cutting - the look of equal trouble everywhere - the smooth, diffused tranquillity of heartless pains - the regularity of a plough in a level field. The chill is more likely, indeed, to show itself in finished work than in any other - men cool and tire as they complete: and if completeness is thought to be vested in polish, and to be attainable by help of sand paper, we may as well give the work to the engine lathe at once.

Ruskin did not escape ridicule. The economist Thorsten Veblen mounted a frontal assault on Ruskin’s idea of imperfection in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. ‘A limited edition is in effect a guarantee - somewhat crude, it is true - that this book is scarce, and that it therefore is costly and lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer,’ he wrote. ‘Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time.’

But Ruskin had many enthusiasts. His essential point was distilled by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (from an observation by the architect J D Sedding) in his characteristic font: ‘There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.’ The same idea was repeated much later, in the 1970s, by Christopher Alexander, semi-mystical architect. His advice to the designer, as he writes in his essay ‘The Perfection of Imperfection’, was: ‘To get wholeness you must try instead to strive for this kind of perfection, where things that don’t matter are left rough and unimportant and the things that really matter are given deep attention. This is a perfection that seems imperfect. But it is a far deeper thing.’

Now that we live in a world where we are close to the point when we will all be able to download the digital specifications that will allow us to print a door handle or a spare part on a three-dimensional printer, the characteristics of perfection and imperfection are qualities that require another reassessment.

When there is no tool needed to make an object, then it is no longer credible to continue to depend on the intellectual equipment developed to deal with mass production. Designers used to create shapes that could be formed using factory tools, things that could be made by moulding metal, or pushing molten plastic through tubes. The shapes and tools created a visual language for design that designers worked in. It creates a vocabulary of finishes. That is a vocabulary that is based on the past. We are in the middle of creating a new one. And it is the changing idea of the relationship between perfection and imperfection that will define it.