Design: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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WonderTrade

Jingdezhen, in China's Jiangxi province, has been one of the world's great porcelain centres for centuries. Song Yingxing's 1637 encyclopaedia says a single piece passed through “seventy-two hands” before it was finished, and that even this left out the finer details.

Kaolin, the white clay that porcelain needs, is named after Gaoling, a village near Jingdezhen where it was dug for the city's kilns. The town took its present name in 1004 from the Jingde reign of a Song emperor, and from 1369 the Ming court ran imperial kilns there. Song Yingxing's Tiangong Kaiwu, often translated as The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, described the farming and crafts of his day. His “seventy-two hands” reflects how finely the work was divided among specialists who prepared the clay, shaped, painted, glazed and fired each piece. Blue-and-white ware from Jingdezhen was exported across Asia and to Europe, and inspired Iznik tiles and Delft pottery. Topkapı Palace in Istanbul holds more than ten thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, many of them from Jingdezhen.

Song Yingxing, Tiangong Kaiwu (1637)Read card

WonderArchitecture

Caravanserais were fortified roadside inns built along trade routes across the Middle East, Anatolia and Central Asia. Behind one strong gate, merchants found rooms, storerooms, stables and water, and because the inns stood about a day's journey apart, caravans could plan each stage.

The word comes from Persian: kârvân, a caravan, and sarây, a palace or large building. A typical caravanserai was a courtyard ringed by rooms, with animals and goods kept safely inside the walls at night. Rulers and wealthy patrons built them to encourage trade, and many were supported by charitable foundations. In Anatolia the Seljuks built a dense network in the thirteenth century; the Sultan Han on the Konya–Aksaray road, built in 1229, is one of the largest. In Iran, the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I added many more around 1600, and in 2023 UNESCO listed 54 Persian caravanserais as World Heritage. Besides shelter, they were places to trade, exchange money and hear the news from other cities.

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StillnessArt

Mingei, Japanese for 'folk crafts', is a word the thinker Yanagi Sōetsu and the potters Kawai Kanjirō and Hamada Shōji coined in 1925. They argued that ordinary, useful objects made by unknown craftspeople could be as beautiful as fine art.

The word joins minshū, 'the common people', and kōgei, 'craft'. Yanagi's interest began with Korean ceramics: on a visit to Korea in 1916 he came to admire pots by anonymous potters, and in 1924 he opened a folk art museum in Seoul. Mingei turned attention from signed masterpieces to pottery, baskets, textiles, lacquer and tools shaped by repetition and daily use. In 1936 Yanagi founded the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo. His friend the English potter Bernard Leach spread the ideas in the West and translated Yanagi's essays, published in English in 1972 as The Unknown Craftsman. Historians also note that much of the collecting took place in Korea and Taiwan under Japanese rule, which ties the movement to the history of Japan's empire.

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WonderHistory

Navigators of the Marshall Islands made stick charts that show how ocean swells bend around islands. Curved sticks stand for the swell patterns, and shells or the points where sticks cross mark the islands.

The charts were made from the midribs of coconut palm leaves tied with coconut fibre. Marshallese navigators used three main kinds: a mattang taught the general principle of how swells bend and meet around an island; a meddo showed a few real islands and their swell patterns; a rebbelib covered a whole chain of islands. The knowledge was guarded and passed on within families of navigators. Charts were studied and memorised on land, not carried at sea. Out on the ocean a navigator felt the crossing swells through the motion of the canoe, sometimes lying down in the hull to sense them better, and so could tell where an island lay long before it came into view. Western visitors first described the charts in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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WonderHistory

The Tabula Peutingeriana is a Roman road map drawn on a parchment strip almost seven metres long but only about 35 centimetres high. To fit, it squeezes the shape of the empire so that roads, stopping places and distances stay easy to read.

The surviving map is a medieval copy made around 1200 from an ancient Roman original. It shows some 555 cities and 3,500 other place names from Britain to India; the westernmost section, with Spain and most of Britain, is lost. Its roads and stations reflect the cursus publicus, the Roman state's courier and transport service, which kept roads, inns and fresh horses ready for officials. The scholar Conrad Celtes found the map in 1494 and left it to the Augsburg humanist Konrad Peutinger, whose name it bears. Since 1738 it has been kept in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and in 2007 it was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

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WonderDesign

The Dymaxion map, designed by Buckminster Fuller, spreads the world across the 20 triangular faces of an icosahedron and unfolds them flat. In its best-known layout the continents stay whole and the cuts fall in the oceans.

Every flat map distorts the round Earth somewhere. Fuller's answer was to project the globe onto a solid with flat faces, where each face bends the shapes on it only a little, and then unfold the solid. He first showed the idea in Life magazine in 1943, using a cuboctahedron, a solid with square and triangular faces, and patented it in 1946. In 1954, working with Shoji Sadao, he switched to the twenty-sided icosahedron and published the Airocean World Map, in which the continents appear as one nearly continuous island. Because the triangles can be arranged in different ways, the map has no fixed top or bottom. For Fuller that was the point: north at the top is a habit, not a law of nature. The artist Jasper Johns painted a large version of the map in 1967.

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WonderArt

The American painter Albert Munsell described every colour with three measures: its hue, such as red or blue; its value, how light or dark it is; and its chroma, how intense it is. His system, published in 1905, is still used to match colours.

Munsell was a painter who taught art at the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston. He found everyday colour names too vague to teach with and wanted a rational system based on numbers instead. He began work in 1898 and published it as A Color Notation in 1905. His key step was to space each scale so that equal steps in the numbers look like equal differences to the human eye; measurements by the Optical Society of America in the 1940s later refined the charts. In the 1930s the US Department of Agriculture adopted the system for describing soil, and soil scientists still carry Munsell charts in the field. Dentists use it to match the colour of tooth restorations, and breweries to match the colour of beer.

Munsell color systemRead card

WonderArt

Autochrome, the first widely used colour photography process, went on sale in France in 1907. Invented by the Lumière brothers, it recorded colour on glass through a mosaic of microscopic potato-starch grains dyed red-orange, green and blue-violet.

The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, already famous for their cinema projector, patented the process in 1903. Millions of starch grains, each dyed one of three colours, were spread across a glass plate, the gaps filled with soot, and the whole layer coated with light-sensitive emulsion. Each grain acted as a tiny colour filter. The plate was developed directly into a positive image on the glass, which glowed only when light shone through it or when it was projected. Exposures were far longer than black-and-white plates needed, so sitters had to keep still, and the random mosaic gave pictures a soft, dotted look reminiscent of pointillist painting. Autochrome remained the main colour process until the mid-1930s, when colour films such as Kodachrome replaced it.

Autochrome LumièreRead card

WonderScience

Photogrammetry measures real objects from photographs. By matching the same points in pictures taken from different positions, it calculates distances, shapes and exact 3D positions, and it is how many maps, building surveys and 3D models are made.

When a camera moves, nearby things seem to shift against the background more than distant ones. This effect, called parallax, is also why a finger held close to the face seems to jump when each eye is closed in turn. If the camera positions are known or can be worked out, software matches corresponding points across several views and triangulates where each one sits in space. The French army officer Aimé Laussedat began making maps from photographs in the 1850s and is often called the father of the field; the German architect Albrecht Meydenbauer coined the word “photogrammetry” in 1867 while recording historic buildings. Photographs taken from aircraft later made it the standard way to map large areas. Today it produces maps, building surveys and 3D records of objects too fragile to handle, and drones and phone apps use the same principle.

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