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| From the Editor
I love home improvement shows. Not the extreme variety, though-not the wreck-an-entire-house-and-build-a-new-one-in-a-day type, but the kind that takes you through the decision-making process with the home owners, builders, architects, designers and decorators. I want to know about the guts of the house and how a problem can be solved in an elegant, efficient, aesthetically sensitive manner. I don't even necessarily like the finished product sometimes, but I do enjoy seeing the planning and the process unfold. That said, so many seem to jump over the process and just show the results. These are usually hosted by an overly perky television personality and their scripts are peppered with phrases like "splash of color" and "focal point." Some of these should just be called home change shows.
For me, whether it's a house or a mug (I've been making a lot of mugs lately), it's an issue of intent and purposefulness. Why does something need to be changed, and how do specific changes actually make it better? I bet you can guess, if you read the front cover or contents page of this issue, that what I'm getting at here is the basis of object design.
Now, the word design means a lot of things depending on the context. If you take your definition from some of those cable television shows I just mentioned, it can mean rearranging the furniture and painting the walls-but that's not what we're talking about here. We are talking about a given need, problem, shortcoming, etc., that can be made better by the intentional, focused application of human intellect-arriving ultimately at a better mouse trap, an object that better serves a human need.
Whether you are making an object of utility or an object of concept, getting it into physical form requires the intellectual act of designing as well as the physical act of making. And I think it's fair to say that the most successful examples of design in handmade ceramics are where the two are executed in harmony with each other; one does not necessarily dictate the other.
We all love the ceramic process, and we all love the objects that result from that process, but in ceramics there is so much to learn about the technical side of creating that we often get caught up in technique to the point of losing sight of the reasons and motivations for making objects in the first place-improving upon the design of the objects in our lives. If we are not actively designing the objects we make, then we are simply making mudpies.
And let's not forget a very important partner of design that is particularly suited to ceramics: experimentation. Yes, there are those "happy" kiln accidents we love to praise, which conveniently remove the blame-and the responsibility-for our results from us and attribute it to some kind of "magic" in the process. But what I mean is that starting without a complete plan can sometimes provide information we didn't even know we were looking for. Such experiments are not likely to yield the final answer to our questions, but they make it possible for us to return to our design problems with new information. The authors and subjects of our focus articles this month understand this distinction, and have very specific ideas for what design means and what it might mean to the future of studio ceramics. I'd like to think of it as a "studio improvement" issue.
Sherman Hall
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