Curious About…Designing Absence.
I’m interested in what I am calling ‘designed absence’ - the removal of excess and a suggestion of the presence of something. Of course in Japan they don’t only have a word for this, but an entire philosophy. Wikipedia describes Ma thus: “Ma (間) is a Japanese word which can be roughly translated as “gap”, “space”, “pause” or “the space between two structural parts.” In Japanese, ma, the word for space, suggests interval. It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision.”
Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. I love this idea - to me, similar to reading a good book where the power lies not in what the author says, but what they do not: leaving room for your interpretation rather than explicitly stating something.
In his 2001 book The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher discusses the importance of exemplifying “space” as a substance: “Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space”. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note - silences which give the form”… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.”
What Of It? As I said before, I have always been more interested in the idea of projecting myself into a context than being told what to think, feel or do, so the concept of Ma resonates with me on that level. Giving the spaces between things equal weight to the things themselves is an interesting concept, not unique to the Japanese, but of course like many things, highly rarified here. In an age where everything we do as designers has to be perfected (and therefore often overworked) to the nth degree, it’s interesting to ponder how to give what we don’t say or do equal weight to what we do. I love the Giacometti definition of sculpture: “Taking the fat off space.”
I Am Curious about design philosophies and where and how they originated, about the pendulum of excessive and understated design and how to marry the best of both, about the beauty of absence and how it truly does make the heart grow fonder.
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