The traditional role of design, perhaps, is to discover and express meaningful differences, which make the benefits and unique qualities of any object apparent. In this sense, design may become a conduit for establishing semantic connections between objects by expressing their essence, their identity.
As Adam Richardson of Frog Design has pointed out, we are moving from an information age into a recommendation age. What does this mean? As we are faced with making choices from an ever increasing array of options, we seek trusted sources to help us make better decisions. The information itself is simply becoming too complex, too vast to parse on our own, which is why the opinion of a third party to navigate these complexities is becoming more and more important.
The urban environment is a container of information. Anything can be treated as information, in as far as it is quantifiable.
As Aldo Rossi points out in The Architecture of the City, the city consists of Urban Artifacts, the constants in the changing urban fabric. As an adaptive construct, the city contains both constants and variables. The constants, however large or small, tangible or intangible, provide a parametric framework through which the city defines itself.
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The design of information can be understood as visual rhetoric. While often used in the pejorative sense, rhetoric means the art of speech and writing. As Hugues C. Boekraad writes in his essay in Copy Proof, rhetoric lessens or erases the distance between the message and the recipient. That is what communication design, at least in practice, sets out to achieve, and information design should be no different. The quality of the message being communicated is entirely dependent on intent, or, in other words, visual rhetoric.
I am inspired by moments in which a seemingly mundane street scene is interrupted in an unexpected way, and disparate geometries collide, creating tension. These are what I call syncopated moments. They happen when one intent collides with another intent or parameter, resulting in a manifestation of compromise.
Philosophically, I think of these moments as bumps in a smooth space, with a nod to Deleuze and Guattari. Smooth space is the space of the idea, while bumps may occur when the idea comes into contact with parameters: forces acting on or defining a conceptual space. I am interested in this bumpiness, as a container of evidence—evidence of parameters, and of the idea.
Any reasonably dense urban area is filled with syncopated moments, if you only look carefully. From a highway overpass, to a construction scaffold, to a drainpipe, their scale is of little importance. It is the way these moments appear in context that makes them syncopated. They are what makes life in urban areas enjoyable and interesting.