The following constitute version 1 of my personal principles of design:

1. Design objects and use materials that become more beautiful with age. When scratches, dirt, and exposure to sunlight lend an object more aesthetic depth and loveability, then one ceases fighting a losing battle against inexorable entropy and can embrace the nuanced aesthetic of age. Synthetic materials, generally speaking, need not apply.
2. Keep required maintenance to an absolute minimum. It is natural and healthy to maintain objects, but poor design translates into disproportionate amounts of time being spent keeping objects usable rather than actually using them.
3. Design in such way that the object holds the potential to adapt to unforeseen future functions. Evolvability insures the object against the yawning, ubiquitous dumpster. It integrates into new and developing circumstances that the user and/or the object may find it/him/herself in.
4. Provide a concrete and elegant framework that conduces to user-customization. Design is valuable insofar as it delineates specific forms and ordered systems from a near infinity of potentialities, but can also be detrimental insofar as it restricts potentialities from emerging naturally. The trick is to strike a balance between elegance of an organizational/structural framework, and the fluidity of possible applications.

This list of principles is by no means done; the above points merely represent my current conscious assumptions from which I am designing and producing.

As much as I’d like to believe one could design a space or craft an item that carried the conceptual and dialectical weight of an entire philosophical system, I can’t see how it’s possible. The more concrete and functional a thing becomes, the less explicit the conceptual content becomes. It might suggest a functional innovation; but with any practical function, the utility overwhelms the concept. Externally considered, the piece in question could have come from any number of diverse conceptual frameworks, or have been crafted independently from any philosophy and merely from aesthetic or practical considerations.

The more utile, the more definitively objective, and objective definition defies the dialectical process I’m interested in engendering.

Perhaps this is the difference between art and craft. Art is ambiguous, while craft is definite. “Functional art” is paradoxical because function necessitates specificity. Effective art necessitates a dialectical ambiguity which clashes with the straightforward aesthetical-functional realm of craft. But can this clash be in itself the dialectical ambiguity necessitated by art? Can the tension between the philosophical framework (in this case dialectical) and the practical function result in an artifact which is both functional and ambiguous?

Function and utility imply an end; if the artifact is, in fact, functional, then it effectively conduces to that end. Could the craftsman not, then, create artifacts conducive to an end other than the typically economic or the domestic? Could an artisan create an object-artifact which conduces to subjective-dialectic ends? The creation of an item functional to the ends of dialectical ambiguity would be an irony in itself. The function becomes dialectical, which defies objective definition, which defies the notion of function.

This, however, brings us back to the initial problem. To term the item functional is either to redefine function or to combine disparate functions (dialectical, practical) into a form indistinguishable from an artifact born of traditional function.

For objective craft to become dialectical art, it needs something more - membership in a diverse corpus, accompanying philosophical text, association (full or partial) with pre-existant systems - it needs a context.

All meaning is in context, and no meaningful artifact can ever be entirely self-sufficient.

It was in Søren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscripts to Philosophical Fragments that I discovered the term “dialectical intrepidity.” I may have extrapolated from this turn of phrase more of what I wanted to hear than what  Kierkegaard himself intended; I may have ran with it, emblazoning it in the margins of countless notebooks, raising it as the symbolic emblem of the imminent and glorious revolution that I felt sure I would foment; I may have ran with this standard, rallying my spineless and aimless notions with a cry of “dialectical intrepidity!”, investing them with structure, purpose, and strategy; I may have abandoned myself to these two words (it made little difference in what order or with what grammatical syntax they appeared - dialectical intrepidity, intrepidly dialectic, dialectically intrepid, intrepid dialectics - whether dialectic took the adjective intrepid or intrepid was modified by dialectic - whether these words were adverbial, adjectival, or nominal was a point of little real substance); I may have embraced the ideal of a philosophical-conversational bravery, imbuing my every pursuit with the nobility afforded by such lofty, inscrutably esoteric philosophy, without even understanding what the author in question intended to convey. The question, perhaps, warrants research.

The substance of the issue at hand is not so much original authorial intent, however, but the nuanced implications of the brand of existential intrepidity which has come to drive my productive process. It is dialectic between subjective self and objective society and space. It lies behind my pursuit of adaptive systems for living, behind my love for the modular. This alleged intrepidity may not be so, however, for intrepidity is bravery, and bravery is meaningless without fear, and against what fearsome antagonist does the dialectically/sociologically/philosophically intrepid individual strive? Social convention is so accustomed to being challenged that the challenge itself has ironically become the convention; when convention is subversion, what good can art do? Revert to archaic conventions which were displaced in their own time? To be intrepid, one must fear. To be truly dialectical, one must be intrepid.

Intrepidity is the ideal, and cowardice is par. Intrepidity must be intentional, and must be defining. To live with intention - thorough intention - is to dialectically engage the objective realities of space, society, culture, fashion. The intrepid individual engages  the objective with intention, and responds with intention.

As I strive to develop objective spatial systems, I strive for subjective intrepidity.