Center for Design Research, Stanford University
We are in a trough between late spring rains, a still day, a day that seems patient, waiting. And I, and pretty much everyone else in this area, know what the waiting is for -- after a few more stretches of cool, then warming rain, divided by a few more magnificent spring days, the oncoming and infamous Kyoto summer: thick, almost swimmable heat; handkerchiefs and shirts damp with perspiration; air conditioners straining; the leisure classes escaping into the shaded hills as they have for more than a thousand years.
Traditionally in Japan, so I have heard, letters of correspondence to friends and family start by conjuring the writer's location -- the time of year and the geography, the flora and fauna, or even the dress of passersby and the food people are enjoying. I've indulged myself in the above (perhaps overextended) description to try to convey some of the tone of similar place-and-season focused passages that I have read. One of my longer-term impressions of Japan is that there is a stronger undercurrent of awareness of the passage of time and cycles of seasons, and of one's physical surroundings and their history, than found in the U.S. Sometimes this is expressed almost unconsciously, and sometimes it is used as leverage on people's sentiments in the selling of things, but in any case, it is deeply rooted.
Much of the short poetry I have read is similarly canted: the rules of haiku and renga demand a seasonal reference. Were I actually knowledgeable about these things, I might evoke this month and this location in storied Kyoto with just a sentence, or even just a word or two, and the knowledgeable reader would have a whole setting drawn to mind. And of course -- and here is a central point -- for this location in Kyoto, for late May, I would have to do this in Japanese. I may even need to use words and inflections from a Kyoto dialect. Any amount of verbiage in any other language, no matter how well chosen, would pale against the resonance of the language whose roots are so deeply planted here.
I have taught a class here for several years on engineering design to Stanford students and a few local Japanese students. Design is often defined as the grappling with and effectively responding to problems that don't have an exact definition, and which therefore don't have a uniquely correct solution. I include many of the common lessons about design: finding needs, negotiating goals with the customer, developing risky and more conservative ideas, modelling to predict the performance of a proposed design, communicating ideas and understanding feedback, finding the make-or-break issues early, iterating through failure to success, studying previous similar work, thinking visually and kinesthetically, and so on. Many of these practices have several lessons to teach about design, and if repeated over time can enhance ones technical judgement, one's ability to make decisions, and one's creativity.
But there is a lesson that is valuable in design that is perhaps experienced and learned in no better way than by crossing into another culture. And it runs counter to a worldview that most students in engineering and the physical sciences absorb during their education. The worldview we (usually implicitly) receive, emphasizes that the physical universe is one, consistent place, and that this is all there is to reality. Any differences between people's interpretation of this world, any variances in what we expect to come from a given situation, are simply a result of imperfect or incomplete understandings of that reality. Too often, we take that framework with us into the perhaps more abstracted, but certainly much more consciously present, realms of our concerns as people -- into our everyday world, with our day-to-day cares and interactions and longer-term plans and hopes.
Something we technically-oriented people often fail to learn about in school is that the former reality -- the one we take to be consistent, with an existence that stands apart from us -- both constrains and enables what and how we design, and more generally how we act on our plans and hopes over time. But it is not the only worldview we should be conversant with if we hope to improve our abilities to 'grapple with and effectively respond to' ill-defined problems -- problems that count. Design -- whether it be in art, science, engineering, business, or any field -- is in other terms the effort to see, comprehend, and meet a need, and in any need there is much of the purely human -- and there is much in what makes us human that we inherit from the cultures we are a part of. A need, a want, a hope, a goal, and the judgement of what constitutes an adequate response to these, can be as subjective and as rich as the various people and cultures in which they emerge. By itself, a worldview that presumes a single best way to comprehend reality is not preparation enough for coping with these.
This needs to be understood, and not just as a theory is understood through traditional classroom work. It needs to be experienced, and needs to be reflected in the mental tools and methods, the cognitive capabilities we bring to bear in design.
Much of the time in engineering, there are clearly better and worse tools or methods for accomplishing a task. But in the realm of human concerns that occupy most of our consciousness, it is far less often (many would say never, in an absolute and universal sense) that we can say that this or that method, social structure, tool, law, etc. is better than another. This is a taken-for-granted, a commonplace, even a foundation of many fields of study. But it is a concept that isn't even considered by too large a number of students in Engineering or the Physical and Biological sciences and similar fields. And even if it is encountered, it is at least in my experience, received with only brief notice, or even blank incomprehension.
This is then one of the unique opportunities that study and experience in another country offers to the technically trained. It will, if embraced, teach us trivial and radical concepts that our own culture can't teach us. A language, perhaps the most powerful tool and expression of culture, gives us words that may be translated a dozen different ways into our own tongue, none of which are really good enough; it gives us associations between abstract concepts that are found in one culture but not another, that affect our perceptions of what is normal and what is taboo; it gives us unfamiliar idioms that can condense a slice of life in dramatically revealing ways. There is no word in English that completely serves as a translation for as simple, mundane an item as 'tatami;' if you have seen one, walked on one, slept on one, then you know what the word means. Otherwise, a translation attempt like 'thick, woven grass floor mat' is either an awkward and puzzling hint, for anyone who doesn't know the everyday Japanese floor covering, or is simply annoyingly weak and unevocative.
A truly elegant solution to a design problem can be just as foreign to one's own previous ways of thinking as the words and concepts from another culture. And the working out of such a solution is often similar to (perhaps even identical to, at some physiological level) the 'aha!' process that accompanies the new comprehension of an important concept from another culture, or new learning of a difficult verb.
It is clear, without need for argument or proof: to learn another culture is to learn a another way of thinking, another way of comprehending the world. Another culture may differ only slightly from the one you were raised in, or it may differ in ways that are profound but which are only glimpsed with great insight and effort. But the ability to slip in and out of one's old accustomed ways of thinking is a skill that is, I think, vital to both the professional training, and perhaps more importantly the humanization, of all of us.
In closing, let me quote one of the haiku poet Basho's most well-known verses. Maybe it's a bit hackneyed for me to do so here, but it was written at a place in the north which I have visited a few times, and so has far more resonance for me than, for example, the wordy way I introduced this little essay. I'll include a translation, but of course if you want it to mean for you something like Basho intended it to, you'll have to enter this culture, and visit the place.
Shizukasa ya iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe
Quietness: seeping into the rocks, the cicada's voice
