September/October 1984 RAIN Page 7 before us of simple minded, straightforward, and sensitive people,” according to Paul Jacques Grillo in his book form. Function and Design (1960,1975, 238 pp., $6 from: Dover Publications, 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014). Grillo gives examples of good design— primarily in architecture—to prove his point. For example, the peasant invented the overhang at the side of the farmhouse because he had to work outside as well as inside. “For every case, every climate, and every material, [the peasant] has found the most elegant soluhon." The numerous examples of vernacular architecture suited to site, climate, and use attest to this. (Christopher Alexander argues eloquently for the genius of vernacular architecture in The Timeless Way of Building, 1979, $37.50 cloth from: Oxford University Press, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.) Grillo says that "design is everybody's business ... it affects everybody, at all times, in our lives. Unless we gain a better understanding of design, we shall witness our environment getting steadily worse, in spite of the constant improvement of our machines and tools." More than any other culture, the Japanese seem to have been aware of the importance of design in shaping their lives. Ralph Caplan makes a similar claim in his book By Design: Why there are no locks on the bathroom doors in the Hotel Louis XIVand other object lessons (1982, 208 pp., $6.95 from: McGraw-Hill, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020). Caplan writes, "For design is a process for making things right, for shaping what people need." The point of the book is that "design, which is now directed largely to superficial ends, is appropriate to our most significant human activities, and belongs to them." To Caplan, the products of design include not only chairs and vacuum cleaners, but also films, books, government legislation, and protest strategies. Caplan knows we can do better: "There have always been indifferent or poor craftsmen who made inferior objects, but we may be living in the first period in history in which goods that can be well made are not." He says that "industrial designers are trained or experienced in a process appropriate to significant problems. In wasting them—with their collusion—we waste not only our resources, but ourselves." (Victor Papanek has argued these points extensively in Design for the Real World [1972,1982, 312 pp., $5.95 from: Academy Chicago Ltd., 425 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611]. Papanek critiques specifics of current manufactured items, and suggests alternative designs.) Furthermore, Caplan believes that technology requires art: "Above and beyond the maker's inshnct for beauty, and the sales manager's instinct for something different and hence 'better,' probably only through art can we manage to live sanely with our machines. Design is a means of restraining our mastery over the machine and of forbidding its mastery over us. The industrial civilization that once relegated art to the museum would, paradoxically, be intolerable without a regular infusion of art. The oil refinery, the digital computer, the milling machine—each of these needs to be made understandable by art, which comes into the factory not as an afterthought but as a necessity." What Caplan says has relevance to the interdisciplinary perspective of RAIN: "If design is to become a force for making things right, we need to learn more about connections, for making them is intrinsic to every design from submarines to the door hooks in the Hotel Louis XIV. Connections between ... such disparate materials as wood and steel, between such seemingly alien disciplines as physics and painting, between clowns and mathematical concepts, between people—architects and mathematicians and poets and philosophers and corporate executives." Caplan also discusses the work of designers Charles and Ray Fames. Charles Fames has said, "The concept of 'appropriateness,' this 'how-it-should-be- ness,' has equal value in the circus, in the making of a work of art, and in science." Caplan adds, "A circus is an object lesson in what Fames advised us all to do: take pleasure seriously. The circus looks like self expression and is not; it pushes against limits; it takes its beauty from a disciplined mastery of details and from the con- nechons between them. In these respects it is the classic designed situation." More than any other culture, the Japanese seem to have been aware of the importance of design in shaping their lives. Bernard Rudofsky demonstrates the Japanese taste for aesthetically pleasing surroundings in The Kimono Mind: An Informal Guide to Japan and the Japanese (1965,1982, 288 pp., $9.95 from: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 135 West 50th Street, New York, NY 10020). This is an entertaining, witty, irreverent account of Japanese life, with chapters on kimonology, rice, hedonism for the destitute (bathing), train travel, and more. The Japanese sense of design has had a significant influence on Western art'ever since Westerners discovered it in the mid-1800s. Clay Lancaster documents the streams of thought and aesthetic influence on America in The Japanese Influence on America (1963,1983, 292 pp.. Traditional Japanese border designs
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