Symbol and Form

A New Vision of Design Education

A T Mann

It is valuable, if not essential, to explore psychological, meditative and interactive feedback techniques of working which are quite new to designers and students, but common to psychotherapeutic work. This bridges the gap between what happens within and what we create in our design work. We can correlate the way our body works with the way our designs evolve. Too often what we design has nothing to do with what is going on with us inside — when there is a link, and then later an intimate connection, the designed objects cease to be disposable, but rather carry meaning that encourages us and the owners or stewards of such objects to nurture them, to care for them and to pass them on as containers of our own personal being.

Symbolism is the language by which our collective cultural unconscious communicates deep experience to our conscious mind through dreams, active imagination, fantasy or guided imagery. When we discover this language, we realize that it is always with us and can be understood, whether outwardly or inwardly, by everyone around us.
In the new design education we may explore a deeper and more profound world and invest our work and life into it. In such design educational work, the following processes emerge:

We experience guided meditations every day that evoke dreamlike images presented in symbolic form. The guided imagery processes provide inner, personal symbols that become the first models and then support or modify the designs as they develop.

We learn about symbols and their unique ability to carry emotional “charges,” deep associations and multiple levels of meaning. We investigate and experience some common symbol interpretation systems such as dreams, the tarot, the Chinese I Ching, the chakras, numerology, the Platonic “four-body model,” and astrology.

We learn how to identify ourselves (spirit, mind, emotions and body) with our designs. Our designs are not outside of us, but begin within us. We work with understanding what our designs say about us as designers, how they express the way that we work and our various cultural, aesthetic, political, religious or spiritual world-views. They allow us a way to see how we might understand them. Our designs are containers of personal meaning as well as expressions of design skill, material use, problem solving, and execution.

We use symbolic relationships to understand what our designs mean to us and to others. The symbols express our feelings, our resistances, ideas we cannot grasp, and potentially open up inner areas we cannot enter. We don’t need to know where our design process is going as long as it comes from within. We can discover whether our designs correspond to what we feel, or not. We discover whether they are spiritually satisfying, or not. We discover whether they carry any meaning other than their existence as designed objects.

We use our mental logical, rational skills to evaluate what arises from symbolic work. By talking and communicating about how we feel, think, and what we expect as we design, we link deeper meanings to what we do outside of ourselves. Can we reflect the inside outside?

These new techniques, borrowed from what is often called the “Perennial Philosophy,” a merging of Eastern and Western religions and philosophy, will create an inner, more human ecology of design and thought and feeling that will bring another dimension to design work and its appreciation.

Hudson, New York, 2004
atmann@atmann.net
www.atmann.net