We still radically separate ornament from style and meaning, treating it as superfluous and superficial, yet it is the primary experience we have of much of our artifactual world – surface treatment.

After the likes of Owen Jones (Grammar of Ornament -[Link]), there are few works like Gombrich’s Sense of Order [Link] that take pattern seriously and liberate it from the fine art :: decorative craft distinction. (Though I also constantly return to Alois Riegl, Henri Focillon and George Kubler.)

The topic fascinated me in my own study of ancient Corinthian ceramics (at the beginnings of the Mediterranean city state), where I refused the distinction and dealt with surface treatment, including both figurative painting as well as geometric and floral pattern, in a contextual study of design [Link]. My broad point now is that ornament/pattern is precisely the worked ground against which subject matter is set, even to the point where ground is more significant and eclipses apparent subject matter (this a variation on my obsession with signal-noise relationships in the history of design).

But how can so much be encompassed in a single synoptic view? Diana and Christina offer a bold thematics, set in a timeline, from antiquity to modernity. Their wonderful topics include: flamboyant gothic, glowing grotesques, the dramatic and the divine, floral perfection, compositions of refinement, patterns of richness, bold colors and abstracts, tartan grids, all accompanied by acute commentary and contextual reference.

This is a reminder of just how much analytic attention we still need to apply to the world of design and making, and how hampered we are by the narrowness of art and design history, even when they mobilize the likes of semiotics (as Tilley and I attempted as part of our contribution to the emerging field of material culture studies in the 80s [Link]).

Around Lordenshaws, across from the market town of Rothbury, are many carved rock surfaces, typically associated with farming communities from the fourth to and millennia BCE, maybe earlier and maybe later.

Birky Hill

I met Stan Beckensall, school teacher in Rothbury, rock art enthusiast, some thirty years ago – his lifetime’s recording of Northumberland’s rock art is available online – [Link] See also the superb work of the Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot (NADRAP) Project (managed by Northumberland and Durham County Councils and funded by English Heritage). Their website and database (English Rock Art – ERA) build on and incorporate the Newcastle University Beckensall Archive.

INORA, the International Newsletter on Rock Art is available online – [Link]

Staying with Christina (Unwin) and Richard (Hingley).

I made a visit to IDEO last week, the design consultancy with its head office in downtown Palo Alto, by Stanford. I’m teaching a class next term with one of its founders, Bill Moggridge. It’s called “Transformative Design” and is run through the Hasso-Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford – the d.school. Bernie Roth from Mechanical Engineering is with us as one of the original teaching team. I am joining this year with Megghan Dryer, also of IDEO.

The d.school’s mission is quite clear – to promote “design thinking” – the process of human-centered design at the heart of IDEO’s very successful consultancy. I am fascinated with this juxtaposition – IDEO’s distillation of design practice with the interpretive understanding and analytics at the core of archaeological and anthropological approaches to material culture.

[Link to class website]

David Kelley, Tom Kelley, Tim Brown and Bill himself have written much about IDEO’s method, the use of ethnographic observation, brainstorming, prototyping and narrative. I’ll be elaborating on all this through the course of the class.

[Link] – Bill’s book – “Designing Interactions”

[Link] – Tim Brown’s blog on design thinking

My line is that archaeologists offer unique insights into both creativity and innovation in the history of design, and, as modernity’s key memory practice, archaeology is itself a design practice, working on what is left of the past, crafting and modeling.

[Link] – archaeology as design in contemporary “risk society”.

An insight came straight out of this recent visit.

I picked up a couple of books in the IDEO collection. “Thoughtless Acts” is a photographic documentary of intuitive everyday “design” – when people adapt things and environments to needs and desires often unforeseen.

Improvization.

IDEO people have also produced two travel guides – on London and New York.

They are called “eyes open” and celebrate experience, ambience and character, rather than overdramatized tourist “attractions”.

There is so much value in making manifest what is tacit, overlooked, assumed.

The quotidian – the everyday, the unnoticed, the ambient – is at the heart of human experience. The quotidian constitutes our sense of “presence”, of really being there. The quotidian is a core of an archaeological imagination.

For me, the flow of everyday experience always and already implies a question of attention, about “what matters” – on what should we focus, what is really happening? It is the question of the relationship between signal and noise, figure and ground.

More notes – Figure and Ground

Daguerreotype c 1850. Oblique view.

See the project Ghosts in the machine.

Dawn.

For Christina Unwin and Richard Hingley.

Northumberland UK

drag – pan | shift – zoom in | control- zoom out

Beneath the hill fort; around from the rock carvings.

(Please be patient with a long load time – I think it is worth it)

Bamburgh, Northumberland

In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007

September 9 1513: in the low rolling hills of north Northumberland an invading Scottish army was defeated in the bloodiest ever encounter between England and Scotland. James IV, King of the Scots, nine of his Earls, fourteen Lords of Parliament, five Highland Chiefs and 10,000 men at arms fell between 4 and 6 o’clock that afternoon.

We’ll hae nae mair lilting, at the yowe-milking,
Women and bairns are dowie and wae.
Sighing and moaning, on ilka green loaning,
The flowers of the forest are all wede away.

Jean Elliot “Flowers of the Forest” 1755

Site of the court of the Kingdom of Northumbria – at its height in the seventh and eighth centuries.

In the graveyard of Saint Aidan’s church – built in the 13th century. Founded c635.