Flush — A Design Blog by Ivan W. Lam at ivanwlam.com

It has taken me pretty much a week to finally catch up with my life after my relatives visited the States (two of whom for the first time) for three weeks. During that time, I was only able to churn out three entries, which pathetically was also the total for the month of November. That, however, doesn’t mean I didn’t think about design for the entire time. In fact, I had collected a good number of entry ideas that I will probably shoot out in a relatively short about of time.

In the mad dash of visiting one or two local destinations of interest every single day to make great use of my relatives’ time here, the family and I went to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose more than two weeks ago under the impression that it was a haunted house of some sort due to a loss in translation.

Nonetheless, the house was still eerie as it reminded me of a time that only existed in sepia tone. The mansion was designed by a wealthy widow named Sarah Winchester for more than three decades until her death.

Between the Arts & Crafts decoration and the Asian-inspired aesthetics that I was able to recognize from my design history classes during undergrad, the most interesting thing about the house was that Winchester was very picky and selective, almost indecisive, about her designs. She would have people tear down a part of the house because she changed her mind about how a particular part of the room should function or look, and start over, which is why it took forever to build the house, leaving it unfinished as a result of her death.

She was designing the house and living in it along with a crew of servants for whom she would frequently have to provide a new map to the house as her designs changed. As a side note about the servants, even though she paid her servants well, she had the power to fire and hire them on a daily basis, so if a new servant made some comment about the weird design of the house, he or she wouldn’t be working there the next day.

Walking on the tour route and thinking about what the tour guide said about Winchester’s perfectionist approach, I was reminded of my obsession with pure perfection in high school. Since then, I had realized that while quality is certainly important, perfection is not obtainable, but excellence is. I still pay attention to detail, probably still more than most designers I’ve met, but I also consider the usual design constraints, primarily time and budget, and sometimes resources. I wouldn’t ask the printers to throw away 1,000 copies of some book I designed just because one paragraph didn’t indent, not that the printers would do it anyway (without me paying them a lot more to do a rush order).

The tour guide’s narration about Miss Winchester as a designer reminded me of, again from the design history classes, architects in the early 1900s who designed every single unit of the house, requesting the owner to wear a particular outfit for being in the living room, and another one for the dining room, and then another one just to answer the door. In today’s world of audience participation and interactivity, especially on the web, designers have less and less control over how their designs are viewed and used.

This somewhat creates a similar but different challenge from the architects of the past, where those architects had to design every single thing, including the lamps and colored glass windows and silverware to match the design of the house, whereas now designers have to put just as much effort to accommodate for the most common, if not all, of the possible ways that the audience will experience the designs.

Cascading style sheets (CSS) come to mind. In an experiment to expand my CSS knowledge, I recently created a temporary web portfolio, TP107, to test how my portfolio would look on mobile devices, in printed form, and with no styles at all. Due to time constraints, I was not able to write an aural style sheet as well for the vision-impaired; a quick research revealed that there is a good amount of page element properties consideration for aural style sheets. Still, I would like to get into that in a future project.

Before I sidetrack any more, I’m going to wrap up this entry and conclude that Sarah Winchester was one crazy lady, figuratively speaking.

Flush.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 11:50 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.