Notes from Drentell Helfand-Faux Science

Science is the new style idiom of choice, with designers everywhere parroting its visual currencies, adopting its formal vocabularies, and stealing its lingo, its acronyms, its cool, cryptic code. But these are cosmetic enhancements, visual conceits that by and large lack a fundamental knowledge of the underlying discipline itself.

For design—a profession that once prided itself on translating form into content—such ignorance is alarming, and the false piety is disturbingly ingenuous

It is as if science offers a kind of credibility that design itself lacks, an instant validation and a seriousness of purpose that, quite possibly design never had in the first place.

This new seeking after scientific style—let’s call it Faux Science—is the antithesis of modernism: it’s form awaiting content, or worse, serious form retrofitted with interchangeable content

Faux Science

Science is all about clarity and specificity and rationalism, about charting DNA strands and analyzing chemical compounds, about physical density and gravitational pull and a reality that is anything but virtual.

We grasp its formal conceits—its systematic language of documentation, its methodical alignments—and parlay them into a visual language that resonate with kick-ass authority.

In today’s anything-goes world of relentless self-expression, science has become the designers’ safe haven. It’s the new “look and feel”

False Authority

everything in its place and a place for everything. Label it information design and it looks serious.Number it and it looks scientific. But it’s a false authority, particularly because we buy into the form so unquestioningly.

Panaceas

the term “morphology” refers to the basic form and structure of organisms without consideration of function.

In the language of numbers, there is mathematical morphology, which concentrates on stochastic geometry, random set theory, and image algebra.

In the lexicon of infertility, there is reproductive morphology,’ or shape (along with mobility, or speed, and motility, or motion).

In linguistics, morphology is the study of the form and structure of words.

Documenting

Combine the urge to collect with the inclination to organize, and the resulting activity offers a unique assortment of scientific pretensions. In documenting, designers dutifully observe the minutiae of their efforts, recording with a detail-consciousness bordering on the absurd.

Cataloguing

Do we strip visual information of its natural scale and emphasis, and in the process, streamline form to negate design’s meaning and message? Or do we just make it look good by making it look clean, orderly, and cross-referential?

In the thesis/ antithesis/ synthesis model of Hegelian dialectics, we easily locate the scientist, who migrates from observation to analysis to discovery. Meanwhile, the designer catalogs the everyday, making thick, wordless books with pictures that jump the gutter.

The New Vernacular

Science represents an enormous opportunity for designers, but not if their contributions remain fundamentally restricted by what they know. At the core of this critique lie serious questions about the role of education. Why don’t design students study music theory? Why aren’t they required to learn a second language? And why, for that matter, don’t they study science?