DESIGN CONVERSATIONS
[the clients] want, and then I try to twist it into a different statement and then draw it’ (Lawson, 1994). Through this device Eva has managed to produce entirely modern designs with which her clients are quite happy even though they may have originally expressed their wish for historical restoration. Such results are obviously due not only to Eva’s extraordinary talent but also the great care she takes to explain and to educate her clients. However, it seems unlikely that she could achieve these ends by using drawings in her early communications. The verbal description allows her clients to interpret shades of meaning not allowed by the drawing. In the same way we can easily be disappointed by the film of a book we have previously read. During the reading we will have built up our own image of the characters and places which the film has no alternative but to contradict. Careful and sensitive management of the client through this difficult period of imagining the design seems to be one of the hallmarks of successful designers. Designers and design students report quite commonly that they often feel the need not to draw. It seems that when an idea occurs to us we may feel that the drawing will force us to clarify it too quickly. It sometimes seems better to let an idea mature a little before testing it too hard with the drawing. In this context it may be worth recalling the lessons of Chapter 4 in which we saw how ‘design by drawing’ is a relatively recent phenomenon. The vernacular process characteristically involved little or no drawing. In his entertaining account of the life, times and work of a Purbeck stone worker, Eric Benfield (1940) presents almost no drawings at all. Indeed at one point he comments that: Most plans were and are carried in the head, and there are some unlikely looking heads around in Swanage which could tell a good deal about the fields that are now ignorantly being built over.
This may, in our age of the graphical image, seem a rather perverse attitude, after all a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words. However, there are some ways in which a picture can often carry too much information or indicate a degree of precision which may be inappropriate. This is illustrated again by Benfield’s description of how to build a stone bird bath or sundial: A bird bath or sundial should be about two and a half times as high as it is wide in the base; preferably it should have two or three bases, which give the effect of steps usually seen around village crosses, and a shorter tapering pedestal surmounted by a bath smaller than the bases by at least two inches.
In this text-based description Benfield only tells a stone mason that which it is necessary to know and leaves entirely free to the imagination all other detail. This is a remarkably clever and precisely judged transmission of design knowledge. It would be difficult to construct a drawing that did not suggest other features of the form of the finished product which might restrict a future designer. A similar lack of enthusiasm for overprescriptive drawings can be found running through the pages of George Sturt’s description of the designs of cartwheels which was referred to in Chapter 2. These two vernacular designers are following 87