1. Introduction
European culture – and by extension, Western civilisation – has its initial foundation in Greece, specifically in the Athens of the 5th century B.C. Today, twenty-five centuries later, at the beginning of the third millennium, the influence of this foundation continues to permeate innumerable aspects of our daily life. Architecture, thought, religion and our conception of the world in general all owe a debt to Greek culture, whose heritage emerges even in everyday speech. Many words in European languages come from the Greek, including, for example, the word “strategy”, which forms a part of the title of this essay. It comes from “strátegos”, which means general, army leader.

Highlighting here the pre-eminence of Athens as the birthplace of European culture does not mean ignoring or underestimating the heritage of the poets, thinkers and physicists of the Greek colonies on the Ionian cost or in southern Italy (the Magna Grecia), nor the contribution to our civilisation made by other peoples of Antiquity. What distinguishes Athens from the other city-states is that it was there that for the first time in history the “kratos” of the “demos”, democracy, the exercise of power by the people, was tried out and came to flourish. And this first attempt at a “government of the many” was made during a period in which the norm was the exercise of power by one single man, king or tyrant, or by the few, oligarchs or aristocrats. In Athens, the access of new social classes to power and their participation in the shaping of the character and destiny of the city, unleashed, in the course of relatively few years, an extraordinary collective creativity. All that led to the amazing display of the Attic-Athenian spirit, immortalised by men like Solon, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Phidias and many others, who confronted the fundamental questions that are still present in contemporary thought and intellectual speculation. The flowering of this spirit made Athens a city open to the world and to ideas, a melting pot where native and foreign converged, the centre of the great synthesis of East and West.

The flourishing of this spirit, and what it meant for the subsequent development of what is today Europe, was possible because the Greeks succeeded, at the beginning of the 5th century, in conquering the mortal danger that threatened them. Between 490 and 479 B.C. the Persian Wars took place, during which the Eastern invader repeatedly attempted to subjugate the Greeks and make them part of their vast empire. Herodotus recounts the details of these events in his Histories.

In this great war between Persians and Hellenes, which was the first great struggle between East and West on European soil, many battles were fought, some of them major – such as Salamis, Platea, Marathon and others – such as Thermopylae, where Leonidas, king of Sparta, with a handful of men held in check a contingent of tens of thousands of Persians – all of them decisive not just for the destiny of Athens and Hellas, but also for the evolution of what was later to become Europe.

When the person who takes an interest in these battles is a designer, whose intellect has been shaped by the practice of his profession, the battle of Marathon attracts him in a unique way, since the planning of the battle reveals the workings of a kind of thinking analogous to the one which can be applied to problems of design. In no other battle of that period can we observe so clearly how this form of strategic thought worked. The analogy between Design and Strategy that appears here poses questions such as: Does a strategist design? Or, inversely, can a designer be considered a strategist? If this is so, what does it mean for design as such?

In order to clarify this question, the battle of Marathon will serve as an example.
To understand how it was planned, in other words, how the strategic thinking that designed it worked, it will be necessary to recall how and under what circumstances the battle took place.

The plain of Marathon

2. Description of the Battle of Marathon (12 September, 490 B.C.)
Marathon is a plain located 42 km. from Athens, on the northeast coast of Attica. It extends like a half-moon 9 km. long on a northeast-southwest axis and is between 2.5 and 4 km. wide. In the east it is bounded by the sea; on the west, by hills about 300 m. high. The plain ends at Mount Agrikili, in the southeast, and at Drakonera, a low hill in the northeast. From this hill a stretch of land, the peninsula of Cynosura, extends out into the sea. Just in front of it, at the foot of Drakonera hill, there was, at the time the battle took place, a great marsh. Another, smaller marsh was situated by the sea, near Agriliki. The River Charadros, which flows through one of the valleys of the western hills, crosses the plain to the sea, dividing it into two approximately equal parts.

In early September 490 B.C., the Persians arrived at Marathon. They had sailed down the Ionian coast and, when crossing the Aegean Sea, had demanded water and earth from various island cities, this being a symbol of submission to their power. The ultimate purpose of this expedition was to punish and subjugate Athens for the aid the Athenians had given, ten years before, to the Ionian cities that had rebelled against the Persian yoke. Due to their common ancestral origin, the Athenians responded to the Ionians’ call for help, which was taken as an insult by the king of the Persians, who found it intolerable for a small city like Athens to have the audacity to interfere in the internal affairs of his empire. Since up to then no one had dared to confront his immense power, he sent a punitive expedition, convinced that beating the Athenians would be an easy matter.

Marathon was the ideal place for the fleet to drop anchor near Athens and for the army to disembark. The ships anchored in the northeast part of the bay, off the Cynosura peninsula on the south side and in front of the large marsh. The position protected the fleet from possible inclement weather. Between the marsh and the shore, where the ships were moored, there was a stretch of land that permitted the landing of a Persian army consisting, depending on the sources, of from 20,000 to 30,000 men, some venture even 48,000. Once they had disembarked, the Persians forded the marsh and camped, further south, on the plain. From there, looking southward, the Persians could see Mount Agriliki where the Athenians were to camp and thus had the ships and the great marsh behind them.

The Persian army consisted chiefly of archers and had a cavalry of about 5,000 men. Though the infantry, apart from their bows and arrows, were armed with short swords, they were not accustomed to hand-to-hand combat but to fighting at the range of the bowshot. They were skilful with the bow and could hit their target at 500 metres, though they were most accurate at 200 metres. In a very short time they could shoot thousands of arrows at the enemy which, once part of it had been decimated by the archers, the rest would have to face the cavalry who had the task of finishing it off. The Persians did not know any other way of waging war and it was by fighting in this way that they had won their empire.

However, in spite of having brought with them a reputation of being invincible, they did not have the same motivation for the battle as the Athenians. Democracy in Athens had emerged 20 years before and the decision to confront the invasion of the “barbarians” had been taken by the citizens in assembly so that those who went to Marathon knew that the survival of Athens was at stake and were prepared to give their lives for its freedom. The invading army, on the other hand, was made up of men from diverse points of the vast Persian Empire, many of which had been forced to take up arms. It is significant that its military leaders took up their positions, whip in hand, in the rearguard, to urge on the soldiers to advance against the enemy and ensure that they did not yield to the temptation to abandon the fight. Thus the two armies confronted each other with totally different attitudes, fears and hopes.

When news reached the Athenians that the Persians had landed at Marathon, they decided to meet them there rather than wait until they arrived at the gates of their city. At the same time they agreed to send a long distance runner to Sparta to ask for help in this fateful hour but the Spartans took several days to leave their city since they were in the midst of celebrating one of their religious festivals. The Athenians therefore had to meet the enemy alone.

Athens sent an army of about 10,000 men to the battlefield, led by 10 “stratigoi”, or generals. Among them was Themistocles – who ten years later would be the hero of the battle of Salamina – and the military genius Miltiades with Callimachus as commander in chief. They had no cavalry. Later they were joined by a contingent of about 1000 men from the allied city of Platea. The Greek warrior of the time, the hoplite, was armed with a long spear and a sword. He wore a helmet, shield and pieces of bronze armour to protect chest and legs. In contrast with the Persian soldier, he had been trained for hand to hand fighting.

On arriving at Marathon, the Athenian army camped on the slopes of Mount Agriliki which afforded them safety from the Persian cavalry, the main reason for which the Athenians did not go into battle for several days, since, without cavalry and outnumbered, they could not risk a confrontation as the situation was unfavourable and the Greek generals decided to wait.

They had reached Marathon at the beginning of September but several days passed before they met the Persians in battle. The generals could not reach an agreement. Half of them were of the opinion that they should wait for the Spartans to get there, while the other half, led by Miltiades, thought the opposite, in other words, that they should attack when the opportunity presented itself without waiting for reinforcements. Of all the generals, Miltiades seemed to have had the clearest idea as to the strategy to be followed. He convinced Callimachus – whose vote and influence were decisive – of the advantages of confronting the enemy as soon as possible and was for that reason elected commander in chief. When he defended the idea of not putting off the battle, there were undoubtedly other factors that weighed on Miltiades’ mind: the morale of his men, camping on the hill with nothing to do, the problem of supplies for the army and the risk of possible betrayal by the pro-Persian faction in Athens.

The occasion Miltiades was waiting for presented itself on the 12th of September (this date is disputed, some historians indicate an earlier, some a later date.) According to some authors the Persians, apparently fed up with the Athenians’ unwillingness to go into battle, seem to have sent most of their cavalry to Athens, thinking that they could take the city since it had been left without a defensive force. Whatever the reasons for the apparent absence of the cavalry, according to several authors, it did not participate in the battle.

Miltiades then prepared his men to go into combat. He deployed them so that the front line of his army was as broad as that of the opposing army and with the flanks reinforced so that they would not be able to surround them. As a consequence, the centre was weakened, with less ranks of warriors.

Herodotus recounts that when the Persians saw the Athenian army charging upon them, they thought they had gone mad since, without archers or horsemen and outnumbered, they seemed to be racing toward death. They were soon to change their minds. The two armies fought “for a long time” according to Herodotus, until the weak Athenian centre was forced to retreat before the powerful advance of the enemy. On the other hand, the Greek flanks not only held fast but even forced back the Persian flanks that finally fled in confusion, running in terror for the safety of their ships.
Instead of giving pursuit in order to destroy them, the two Athenian flanks fell back, reordered and fell from behind upon the centre of the Persian army that had forced the Athenian centre to retreat. This centre then halted their withdrawal and stood firm against the thrust of the enemy forces. The Persians, seeing the pincer movement closing in upon them, retreated toward the ships – and the great marsh that barred their way. It seems that many of them drowned there, unable to reach their ships since the Athenians had cut them off, leaving the Persians at the mercy of their enemies and of the swamp.

There was fierce fighting near the ships, seven of which were captured by the Athenians. The poet Aeschylus fought at Marathon, and his brother died in this last stage of the battle. In any case, what was left of the Persian army was able to set course toward Cape Sunion and from there on to Athens. Miltiades, fearing this possibility, ordered his men to head for the city “as fast as their legs could carry them” to defend it. When the Persians finally reached Phaleron, Athens’s port, they saw the Athenian army before the gates of the city, ready to give them yet another beating. They considered it wiser to give up and retreat.

6,400 Persians and 192 Athenians died at Marathon. The tiny Athenian army’s victory over the invincible Persians was considered such a prodigious feat that the fallen Athenians were buried on the battlefield as the ultimate homage to their courage and sacrifice. The burial mound that covers their remains still exists today.

3. Analysis of the battle
Various authors who have made an extensive study of the battle of Marathon coincide in attributing an extraordinary importance to it. This seems to reside in both its military characteristics and in the historic consequences. It is a classic example of military strategy in the history of war, and, furthermore, it is believed that if the Athenians had not succeeded in gaining a victory over the Persians, the history of Europe would have followed very different paths.

Some historians insist that the fate of the Western world was sealed on that fateful September day in 490 B.C. on the plains of Marathon, a hypothesis that is not at all implausible when one considers what would have happened had the Persians won the battle. No military power capable of opposing them would have remained. There was Sparta, but it would certainly have been beaten on land and on sea. And since the ambitions of the Persian kings were limitless, on emerging victorious at Marathon they would have subjugated the whole of Greece, then Italy and, possibly, the rest of Europe. Given the importance of this battle and what it meant to posterity, the study and analysis of it, even outside of the military context, is of great interest to us.

The different versions and interpretations of the battle give the distinct impression that the Athenians had working for their side an intelligence, a way of thinking that was quick and effective in planning the battle and fighting it in the most favourable conditions. The actions of the Athenians in the different phases of the battle suggest that they were guided by a plan, by a project.
What was at stake on that September day in 490 was the very survival of Athens and Hellas. Their existence and freedom or destruction and the yoke of slavery were to be decided at Marathon. Their life thus depended on the excellence of the strategic conception that was to guide the battle and this conception, this project, in order to be effective, had to be thought out, designed, in other words, in order to bring about the defeat of the invader.

As in all design projects, Miltiades had to incorporate into his project the circumstances that would condition its realisation. There were basically two: the geographical characteristics of the place and the character and numerical superiority of the enemy. With regard to geographic aspects, the first thing that Miltiades had to consider was whether or not the plain would be an ideal area for the deployment of the Persian cavalry. Since it was a geographical situation favourable to the enemy, he decided not to go into battle and to wait.

The significance and strategic importance of the second geographical situation must have been immediately evident to the mind of Miltiades: this was the presence of the large marsh in the north-eastern part of the plain. The fact that the enemy fleet was anchored at the same level and to the right must at once have suggested to the Athenian general the basic idea of his ultimate purpose: if he could manage to drive the Persians from the plain, their safety would apparently be at the ships, but there too would lie their potential downfall in the marsh, given the proximity of the two.
However, in order for the marsh to become a factor favourable to the Athenian strategy, it was first necessary to defeat the Persian army in order to be able to drive them precisely in that direction. This question concerns Miltiades’s second conditioning point of his strategic project: the character and numerical superiority of the Persian army.

In any case, before clarifying this aspect of his strategy, it is advisable to consider another question that can help us to understand the thought of the Athenian general: the deployment of the armies on the day of the battle. There are two theories in this respect, but no certainty. To establish a hypothesis as to what Miltiades’ choice could have been between the two possibilities, it is necessary to ask the following: Supposing that he could choose between the two positions, which one, from the strategic point of view, was the most suitable for his men to enable them to execute his plan?

The two theories relative to this hypothetical deployment differ in that they maintain that the battle was fought on different directional axes.
Positioning of the two armies according to the first theory

The first theory maintains that the Persians positioned themselves with their backs to the sea, more or less parallel to the coastline, while the Athenians faced them with the mountains behind them, on the west side of the plain, so that the battle would have taken place on a west-east axis. But if this theory were true, it would not provide as satisfactory a reason as the second theory for the large number of Persians who drowned in the marsh at the northwest point of the plain. Why, with their camp on the River Charadros, would the Persians have crossed in a southeastern direction to place themselves with their backs to the sea? Such a strange manoeuvre could only be explained if the Athenian army had forced it, which is highly improbable. Those who defend this hypothesis claim that a part of the Persian fleet was not anchored by the peninsula of Cynosura, but more to the south, where the burial mound of the dead Athenians is now to be found. The location of the burial mound, according to them, is due to the fact that the Persian fleet was anchored close to this place and that it was precisely there that many of the 192 Athenian fell, victims of the Persians’ fierce defence. But the funerary mound is far from the marsh, so that this explanation does not clarify why so many Persian warriors died in it. This theory would only stand if there had been two battlefronts, one where the mound is and the other in the area of the marsh, but neither Herodotus nor Pausanias make any mention of this. Thus the hypothesis of a confrontation on an east-west axis does not really provide a satisfactory explanation of Miltiades’ strategic thought.
Positioning of the two armies according to the second theory

The second theory, endorsed by the majority of scholars, seems more plausible: the battle took place with the two armies positioned at right angles to the coast, in other words, on a northeast-southwest axis, the Persians having the great marsh and the fleet at their backs and the Athenians with the slope of Mount Agriliki at theirs.

Miltiades had powerful strategic motives for camping on the wooded hillside. From that height he could observe the movements of the Persian forces with ease. The woods protected his men from the onslaught of the enemy cavalry and there was a river nearby to supply them with water. In addition, positioned there, the route that led to Athens was barred to the Persians. It is thus most likely that they camped on this spot, a position that supports the second theory, since in a certain way it forced the battle to be fought to Miltiades advantage, on a southwest-northeast axis. Only in this way could the marsh be kept at the Persians’ backs, thus becoming a natural ally of the Athenians, as long as Miltiades could manage to drive them toward it.

Since the battle took place in the morning, there is another factor that, from a strategic point of view, argues against a hypothetical alignment of the two armies on an east-west axis: the Athenians, with the westerly hills behind them, would have had to fight facing the east, with the sun in their eyes, something that was not at all favourable.

Herodotus does not say precisely at what time of day the battle took place; he only says that “it went on a long time.” However, there are clear indications that it took place in the morning. It seems that at the end of the battle bright signals were observed high on one of the hills, 300 metres above sea level on the west side of the plain. The Athenians supposed that this was a message being sent to the enemy fleet by someone from the pro-Persian party in Athens with a burnished bronze shield that reflected the sunlight. In order to make such signals toward the east, where the fleet was, the sun must not have been very high, because if it was its rays could not have been reflected in the bronze “mirror”.

Herodotus recounts that after the defeat what was left of the Persian army sailed for Athens, rounding Cape Sunion, with the intention of taking the undefended city. Miltiades however, anticipating this move, ordered his men to return as rapidly as possible to Athens to defend it. Taking into account that in an Olympic competition today a Marathon runner takes more than two hours to run 42 km, that army of 10,000 heavily armed men walking fast must have taken about eight hours to cover the distance. If, as Herodotus says, the army reached Athens before the Persian fleet and that once anchored it was there for a while without doing anything “before departing for Asia”, one must assume that all this took place in daylight, that is, roughly in mid-or late afternoon.
If we assume as a hypothesis that the battle took place on September 12, then, according to The Sky Map 6, by Chris Marriots, the sun came up that day in Greece in 490 B.C., at 05:57h in the morning and went down at 18:48h that evening. If we further accept Hammond’s claim that the battle was initiated by the Athenians at daybreak in order to surprise the Persians, then we can assume the following: if the Athenian army was in front of the city to defend it, say at 18:00h, this would mean that it must have left the plain of Marathon at around 10:00h in the morning, this based on the assumption of an eight hour march. This again means that the battle was finished somewhat before the Athenian army left, say 09:00h and therefore must have lasted three hours. This maybe is what Herodotus means when he says that the two armies “fought for a long time.”

With this point clarified, we must now recall the question of the numerical superiority of the Persian army and consider the decisions that Miltiades took with regard to it.

There can be no doubt that the valiant, heroic spirit of the Athenians, their love for their city and their freedom, their willingness to die rather than surrender, were decisive factors in swinging the battle in their favour. However, this did not depend solely on the excellent morale of the army but, above all, on good strategy and planning, on a design that would make victory possible.

Given the numerical superiority of the enemy, Miltiades could not think of wiping them out but rather of designing a strategy to drive them from the plain of Marathon in the same direction from which they had come, toward the sea. Accomplishing that alone was in itself a major victory.
Faced with the powerful machine of destruction that was the Persian army, Miltiades had to find the solution to the two major problems the Athenians were going to meet: the enemy’s numerical superiority and the range of their arrows. In order to minimise the murderous efficiency of the enemy’s archery, the strategy had to ensure that his army was exposed to it for as short a time as possible. To accomplish that, he ordered his men, when they were within bowshot range, to rush at the enemy and attack. There may have been a secondary motive for this order. It seems that at that time just the mention of the name of the invader – they called them Medes or Persians – or the sight of their costumes, filled the Hellenes with terror. Thus by making his men run against the enemy he attempted at the same time to avoid allowing time enough for panic to take hold and cool their warlike enthusiasm.

To solve the problem of the enemy’s numerical superiority, Miltiades redesigned the usual combat deployment of his army, an element of extraordinary importance if we take into account that battles were then fought between armies made up of ranks of warriors lined up one behind the other.
Usual formation of two armies facing one another on the battlefield

The length of the ranks was the same in the entire formation, so that the army formed a compact, solid rectangle. At Marathon, the Persian army was made up of more or less 20 ranks of men presenting a front about 1,600 m. long. Miltiades, with an army two or three times smaller, had to distribute his men along a front of the same length to prevent the enemy outflanking him. On this point Herodotus says that the Athenian battle line was as long as that of the Medes, and therefore (emphasis added) the centre consisted of very few ranks of warriors, due to which it was extremely vulnerable while, on the other hand, the two flanks were
The new combat deployment of the Athenian army and the conventional formation of the Persians reinforced by numerous ranks of warriors. From Herodotus’ account it appears that the weakness of the Athenian centre was the consequence of having to create a front line of the same length as that of the Persian army and reinforcing his flanks. This may have been one, but certainly not the only reason. The reorganisation of the usual combat deployment of the Athenian army undoubtedly corresponded to another carefully thought out plan as the subsequent course of the battle demonstrates. This reorganisation of deployment for combat in the way described here was a carefully thought out plan, a design, guided by an intention, the form of which was adapted to the specific situation on the battlefield.

In fact Miltiades distributed his men so as to form two strong flanks of about 8 ranks and a weak centre of possibly 4. On each flank there thus must have been about 4,000 men, with about 2,000 in the centre. The fear of being surrounded by the enemy was surely one of the reasons for reinforcing his flanks, but the idea of a weak centre must have corresponded to a definite intention. Miltiades must have assumed that this centre would not hold against the onslaught of the Persians and would be obliged to fall back in retreat. He therefore put his faith completely in his flanks. They had not only to stand firm but to throw back the enemy at any price, forcing them into a retreat. What could the Athenian general have been the thinking when he introduced this weakness in his army? Given the numerical superiority of the Persians, it was clear that the Athenian army could not fight them on equal terms. The redesign of deployment for combat could mean only one thing. The enemy centre was “invited”, so to speak, to strike the Athenian army at its weakest point, succeeding in this way in dividing the monolithic enemy army in three parts, disrupting its internal unity. Athenian weakness was thus transformed into a deadly trap for the force of the Persian army. This would seem to be the central idea of the project.

Break-up of the Persian army and the rout of its flanks

The idea of introducing a weakness in one’s own army is of an incredible audacity, since it means the inversion of fundamental assumptions: it comes to suggest that Miltiades proposed to beat strength with weakness. In other words, the vulnerability intentionally introduced in his army was transformed into a strength that undermined the power of the enemy, which was revealed in this case, precisely to be their weakness.

The audacity of such an approach is the fruit of a thinking radically different from that of the oriental adversary. An historian has written that “…the Greeks did not follow well-travelled paths or recognise limitations. They thought vigorously and boldly on the subjects that concerned them, and the novelty of a speculation constituted a particular source of intellectual interest for their minds.” This is indicative of the creativity, openness of spirit and the new “world view” with which they approached their concerns, whatever the field might be.

In this case the problem was of a military nature. The new design of the deployment for combat of the Athenian army, its specific form, shows what its purpose and intention were: to allow itself to be penetrated in order to thus dismantle the strong and compact with the weak. The most significant aspect of Miltiades thinking is that he saw the army in a way that was different from his adversaries, not as a monolithic steamroller but as a weapon of a variable structure that can be adapted to the conditions of a specific situation. He thought creatively.

Of all that has been recounted up to now, if we were to emphasize what tipped the scales in favour of the Athenians, we would have to point precisely to the redesigning of the combat deployment of the army. It was thanks to this central idea, to its design, that the enemy army was divided into three parts, which undoubtedly had a devastating effect on the Persian warriors already fighting without much motivation.

During the second phase of the battle, the Athenian army also fought split up in order to cover three different parts of the plain of Marathon, but this division had been designed as a weapon, with the parts of the army united by a common intention, an overall conception that linked and coordinated the entirety of these actions toward one and the same goal, which was to drive out the invader.
Miltiades, like Themistocles ten years later at Salamína, was the man of the hour, the great strategist-designer in a moment of supreme danger. He represented, in its highest form, the Attic-Athenian spirit: a man that was strong, bold, wise and gifted with great discernment. He questioned and rethought everything that had been, up to then, the norm.

4. Intention-Design-Strategy
The data provided up to this point on the different aspects of the battle present a picture that reveals, essentially, what Miltiades’ considerations were before the situation he was faced with at Marathon, considerations that make it possible to understand the intrinsic nature of strategic thought, in other words, the process that goes from the formulation of a problem to the conception of its solution. What has been presented up to now suggests that the Athenian general had to take into account the following basic questions in order to design his military project:

1. General knowledge of the situation
A. Knowledge of the enemy
Herodotus and Pausanias provide abundant biographical information on Miltiades. They tell how, years before the battle of Marathon, he had fought as a mercenary in one of the campaigns of the Persian King Darius against the Scythians. He was thus familiar with the adversary; he knew its army, its arms, its combat strategy, composition and degree of efficiency. And he also knew their way of thinking.

Thus on arriving at Marathon, Miltiades was able to gauge, on the basis of his experience, the relation of power between his army and the Persians, their position, that of the fleet and the presence of the cavalry.

Thus he had a complete knowledge of his adversary.

B. Knowledge of the geographic layout
The plain could only be reached by sea or by the road from Athens – situated between the sea and Mount Agriliki – which was under the control of the Athenians. The Persian objective, to take the city of Athens, could only be achieved by going down that road. On the opposite side, at the foot of Mount Drakonera, was the great marsh. The hills and the sea bounded the plain on the west and east. It thus formed a closed area with only two entrances/exits, the sea and the road. In such a geographical context, the specific location of the Persian fleet and army constituted, in a certain way, another “geographic circumstance” which was to determine how the battle was to be fought. In fact the confrontation would have been quite different if it had taken place on a west-east axis or if the fleet had been anchored in a place different from the one indicated by Pausanias. The position of the Persian army and that of its fleet established relationships of proximity-distance with the geographical surroundings that were clearly of vital significance  with regards to the decisions taken by Miltiades when he prepared his military project and determined his choice of the most favourable spot on which to locate the Athenian camp.

C. The weather
The bad/good weather must have been a conditioning factor. In September temperatures are still relatively high in those latitudes, so it could be considered that the relative coolness of the morning might favour the endurance of the warriors.

D. Morale of the two armies
The invading army had made a long voyage, were weary and found themselves in a land they did not know. However, although many Persian warriors were forced to fight, they must have taken their victory for granted because until then they had won every battle. The Athenians, who came to the struggle with powerful motivations – the defence of their homeland, their city and their lives – were in terms of morale without doubt in better shape for the fight than their adversaries. These considerations, added to those concerning the different forms of combat – the Persians at a distance with their archery, the Athenians trained in hand to hand fighting – should also be taken as decisive aspects for the design of the military project.

2. Evaluation of the knowledge
In the evaluation of all the factors that one side or the other had for and against them, those that were prejudicial to the invading adversary were worth special attention. Analysis and evaluation of the data led necessarily to the formulation of the primary and fundamental objective of the military project, in other words, the formulation of the end to be achieved, of its intention: the expulsion of the enemy by the same way he had come. This had to be the guiding idea around which the project was conceived.

The intention is “a look that aims at something,” it is a will that contemplates the attainment of the end proposed. In the case we are concerned with, Miltiades weighed up the specific circumstances that came together at Marathon in order to accomplish his intention.

3. The project
The project consists in designing a means which will make possible the attainment the intention aims at. A project – its form or nature – is determined by the characteristics of the problem it must resolve and the means that support it. Through the design project, the intention appears as a figure, as a sign, and this signifies to the spectator the end it is aiming at. At Marathon, the means to accomplish the expulsion of the enemy was the redesigning of the combat deployment of the Athenian army. One of the authors consulted indicates that another of the reasons that Miltiades urged his men to rush upon the adversary was that, in the event that the enemy saw and understood the purpose of the new Athenian deployment for combat, they would not have had time to adapt their strategy to this unusual situation. This new combat deployment, considered visually, as a sign, made it possible to see Miltiades intentions. If this design worked so well it was because it was perfectly adapted to the use that was to be made of it and the goal that it was meant to achieve.

4. Strategic thought
Strategy is a concept that pertains, initially, to the military world. It means the systematic planning and carrying out of an action of war with the intention of defeating the adversary, by making use of the means available. It is the formulation of a theory having to do with waging war, which will be put into practice.

But of course strategy is applied to and used in other fields as well, perhaps because any conduct that aims at a specific end must design/develop strategies to accomplish that end. Chess is a kind of “war game” in which the two adversaries each develop strategies to checkmate the other.

Advertising, an example of “peaceful war”, even makes use of military terms (briefing, campaign, target). The signs, messages and slogans that it produces are but the “ammunition” it fights with.
From what has been recounted up to this point, it is possible to perceive the basic and essential structure of what strategy is and to formulate it in a more universal sense. Leaving aside the warlike origin of the concept, the combination of actions that define strategy can be stated based on four guiding concepts:

• The end/intention
• The project/design
• The means
• The action to achieve the end

This means that the process of thought used by both the strategist and the designer are based on these four mainstays: the overall knowledge of a given problem-situation in which one or the other is called upon to act leads to the formulation of the end/intention, or solution, that is to be achieved. In order for its attainment to be feasible, a project/design is prepared, based on the means available. The characteristics of these means and the use that is made of them are essentially determined by the end that is being sought, by the overall concept that guides and moves (action) the project towards its completion.

Having formulated the four aspects on which strategic action is based, we can see that the analogy between strategy and design, glimpsed at the beginning of this investigation, is real. The two operate in an analogous fashion. In both cases, when they act to solve a problem, they find themselves faced with a given situation of greater or lesser complexity or danger: in the case of the strategist, a geographical situation, one’s own army and that of the adversary, arms and methods of fighting; in the case of the designer, a market, a customer/company, a public, the competition (the “adversary”), and a repertoire of means. Both are concerned with the need to obtain all the information possible about the nature of the problem to be solved that might help them to formulate the intention to be carried out and to devise a project. It is characteristic of the ways of thinking of both that they strategically interrelate the four steps in order to successfully attain their intention with the minimum possible effort.

This perspective on the design-strategy relationship makes it possible to formulate that the designer-strategist is anyone who, regardless of the kind of intention he or she wishes to carry out, follows a thinking process directed at shaping a project that, making use of available, suitable means, makes that intention feasible.

To conclude it is still worth considering the specific significance of this design-strategy relationship for design, taken in the sense of an activity that devises and forms objects for daily use.
It corresponds to this creative activity to, as Heidegger put it, “make a thing come into presence from no-presence”. In the act of designing the object is becoming concrete, “made present”, through representation. In representation it takes on form, becomes visible and is defined as a figure, its identity being shaped in this way.

In the process of projecting, the object – its figure – tends to be perceived most of all in terms of “aesthesis”. This word, Greek in origin, is usually translated as aesthetics, which the dictionary defines as: “The science that deals with beauty and the theory of art.” Aesthetics, thus understood, as beauty, tends to be the predominant criterion in all decisions taken while a project is being taken to its conclusion.

However, etymologically speaking, the word “aesthesis” means “capable of being perceived by the senses. Perception, knowledge.” This definition says nothing about beauty. In Greek the concept of beauty is expressed by “oraios, ómorfos”. On the other hand, in German, a language that is closer to Greek than Latin languages, “aesthesis” is translated as “Wahrnehmung”. This word means “to see”, but is composed of “wahr” – true – and “nehmen” – take – so that it could be said that “aesthesis” is knowledge obtained by “taking-truth-in-seeing”. Thus, when an object appears to us in its “aesthesis”, it does not reveal to us so much its beauty but its “truth” through its figure, through its specific being as it is.

The usefulness of strategic thinking resides in the fact that it is not based on beauty but on effectiveness. This means that the choice or design of the parts that make up the whole of a project should be considered according to this parameter. In other words, the designer-strategist should not wonder if what he is doing is aesthetic but rather, if the design of this form, of this sign, the choice of this material or this colour is effective for the end that he is attempting to achieve. And this objective cannot be other than to shape objects as “beings-for…” ideally adapted in all aspects to fulfil the purpose they have been assigned, which is their “usefulness-for…” When an object has been designed according to the parameter of effectiveness and, in the process of its projecting, the different parts that make it up have been integrated in a harmonic fashion, then it will be a beautiful object. As Plato said, “… the beautiful will be for us that which is useful…”
(Greater Hippias, 19.2)

Sources:
Herodotus: Histories, Book VI, 105-117
Pausanias: Descripción de Grecia, Vol 1., books I y II. Biblioteca Clásica, Gredos
Konstantinos P. Kontorlis: The Battle of Marathon, Athens 1973
Victor Ehrenberg: From Solon to Socrates, Methuen & Co. Ltd. London 1967
M. Rostovzeff: Greece. University Press. New York 1963.
Edward Sheperd Creasy: Fifteen decisive battles of the world. From Marathon to Waterloo.
Barnes & Noble, New York 1995.
Basil Petrakos: Marathon, The Archaeological Society at Athens, 1996.
Istoría tou Ellynikou Ethnous, Ekdotiki Athenon (16 vols.)
H. G. L. Hammond, The campaign and the battle of Marathon, Studies in Greek History
Oxford 1973
The Persian Wars, Prof. Livio Stecchini,

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/persian_wars4.php

Chris Marriots, Sky Map 6

The semantic content that a sign must transmit is predetermined and is explained in words in the briefing. The words can give a great deal of nuance to the concepts they enunciate, something a sign cannot do. The production of the sign occurs through a reductionist process and the result is a semantic compression, its contents have been synthesised and the nuances of the outset information have been reduced; the sign thus expresses the essence of this information because it can only signify a minimum of semantic concepts to a spectator. That is why the process for its production begins with the analysis of the verbal information that reveals the meaning the sign is supposed to transmit, and in this process this information is gradually “essentialised”, reducing it to a few verbal concepts that are later combined in a semantic chain that constitutes the basic statement that the sign must transmit to a spectator-interpreter. The factual execution of the sign begins with the transformation or translation of the verbal concepts from this semantic chain into a sign or signs, in such a way that its final appearance or configuration will be capable of revealing the meanaing of the verbal concepts to a spectator-interpretor.
The production of a sign is also determined and conditioned by the  context in which it is called to work. The context is an environment, a specific situation that is given at the outset, where there are innumerable other signs already present which this one must join on an equal footing. That is, if one sees the packaging of a perfume product, a cigarette carton or a wine label as a mega-sign, it will end up on the shelf of a perfumery shop, a tobacco dispenser or a wine cellar, together with other mega-signs with similar signage characteristics. In a given context, each one of these mega-signs shares with all the other ones certain visual, formal and material characteristics that give them all a common air, allowing them to be considered as part of the same visual language, or product language. Each mega-sign to be produced must therefore be configured in accordance with the syntactic rules of the language of each contexto to thus obtain the basic identity of, say, a wine label, a cigarette carton or a perfume product. It is in these contexts and faced with these languages where ultimately the reader-interpreter carries out the interpretation of the sign. Therefore the production of a sign must take into account not only the information relative to the meaning it must transport, not only all the necessary the necessary knowledge of the context and of its own anguage, but also that of the spectator-interpreter to whom the mega-sign is addressed to.
The information supplied in the brief on this interpreter of the sign is usually sparse or non-existent with regard to this aspect, even though it is the one that might be of the greatest interest for the producer of this sign; this information is usually of a sociological order: it indicates the social class to which the spectator-interpreter belongs, his income, his age, his gender, his consumer habits and what he expects of the product or service that is being sold to him through the sign. But iy indicates nothing at all about hs relationship with signs in general or how he interprets hem, so that the designer is forced to begin his work on the basis of suppositions about the meaning that a particular spectator will attribute to a specific sign. Given this situation, and because of this lack of knowledge in the signage habits of a specific interpreter, the prioduction process faces in this aspect a large degree of uncertainty, which is why certain projects are often subjected to a public poll in order to find out if the sign or signs in question are being interpreted in the way they are inended. Inorder to illustrate this problem, we show below a practical example of the production of a sign and its interpretation.

The case of Aena

Aena, Aeropuertos Españoles y Navegación Aérea (Spanish Airports and Air Navigation), is the company that manages all the airports in Spain. The verbal concepts that served as a base for interpreting them into signs, were those of its name: Spanish / airports / air navigation /.
The context into which this symbol was to be placed was all the airports and the company’s entire communications system. The reader-interpreter of the signs was the public in general who travels and uses airport services.
Afterwards, each sign is analysed with regard to its other possible meanings and, at the end, the signs are superimposed to thus produce the symbol.

The pre-production of signs
A non-customary way of producing signs consists in pre-producing them. Pre-production means that signs are produced without knowing what they will mean. The constitute a databank of possibilities and only when the three above mentioned parameters occur can it be verified whether one of the several possibilities is susceptible of expressing the communication concept in each case.

The programme for the pre-production of symbols for Aena illustrates this case. Sometime after the approval of the symbol and after its implementation had been carried out, the company undertook a policy of creating companies in airport areas throughout Spain. At the time it was not yet clearly known what kind of companies were going to be created, but what was clear is that they were going to have a connection with one or other of the multiple airport services. With regard to the corporate image of each one of these future companies, it was decided that, insofar as their respective symbols went, the aim was for each one to have its own rather than that of the mother company. However, what was required was a common family air for all of them tha would visually connect it to the mother symbol.
The principle adopted in the pre-production of these symbols consisted in designing a programme through which signs could be produced, almost in the manner of a factory production line, through the formal variations on a given theme, that of the mother symbol. The two basic visual traits of this symbol are, on the one hand, its triangular appearance and, on the other, the two colours, blue (top shape) and green (bottom shape, the “tail”). In order to achieve a visual connection between the mother symbol and the others, the latter also needed to reflect this triangular appearance and feature both colours.

A program for the production of symbols:

Interpretation of the Aena symbol

Of the three verbal concepts, respectively their corresponding signs – Spanish / airports / air navigation /, only two of them, airports / air navigation / configure the symbol. To signify the concept / Spanish / the red and yellow colours from the flag should have been introduced. But these have other meanings that are perhaps more potent and immediate than Spanishness. The chromatic interpretation of each verbal concept and of the visual signs lead to the choice of blue as the basic colour. Green was introduced because in the aeronautical field this colour is the safety code. A symbol thus arose constituted by two colours. It was interpreted as “aerodyne.”
As well as being constituted by the two signs / runway / compass /, its outstanding structural characteristic is its symmetrical shape, which satys in perfect balance on its point (notion of safety). On the other hand it could be assumed that that the colour blue was going to be interpreted as the colour of the sky and could perhaps at the same time suggest a sense of calm and security. A green, chosen for the reason mentioned above, could perhaps be understood to be allusive to the “environmental” concept.

Interpretation of the signs produced by the Aena programme of symbols.
Cargo Centre
One of the first companies created by Aena was the “Cargo Centre of Madrid.” The Cargo Centre is the place that centralises the reception of any merchandise that is going to be sent from  Madrid to a variiety of destinations. The activity of this comapny is thus characterised by two movements: incoming goods and outgoing goods.

One of the symbols in the programme reflects this double movement to perfection.

Narrow triangular shapes with sharp points pointing towards the centre of this symbol (incoming movement) while going from the centre outwards (outgoing movement). The meaning of the company name and the meaning of the sign coincide fully. There is no question of a misnomer or of the spectators-interpreters reading a wrong meaning into it.

Airport shops
A similar case occurred with the creation of the so-called “Airport Shops”. Ther one can acquire typical products sold in airport all over the world. As in the previous case, the meaning of the basic concepts of / shopping / shop / are a pretty good match with chosen sign.
The triangular shape set on its point, open above, with pointy triangular shapes distributed regularly above this base and pointing to its centre easily evokes the conept of “bag” and the act of putting “something” into it.

Aena Foundation
In this example there is less clarity or coincidence between the meaning of the company activity and the meaning of the sign. This institution, the Aena Foundation, is dedicated to administering the art funds of the company and to publishing technical books on aviation and related subjects.

Of all the signs available in the programme of symbols, the client chose this one as the most appropriate one to represent the visual identity of the Foundation. The pointy shapes superimposed on each other configure a semicircular gesture that, one could suppose, points to a circular concept in itself, to a notion of totality, of universality. It is difficult to assign a clear significance to it.

IADA: Institute for the Apprenticeship and Development of Aena
As the name itself says, IADA is an institute where the students obtain a formation and the knowledge which their studies require. The client chose this symbol becuase it evoked to him
the concept of “tree”, which he at the same time associated with the “tree of knowledge”. Another possible concept which the symbol could suggest is the “lighthouse”, in other words, “that which guides”, the “reference point”.

Intro
This analysis of the design of graphic corporate images and non-graphic images, proposes an in-depth review of the concept of design. The differences between the image a company transmits and how it is actually perceived shows that it is possible to design aspects other than just signs and objects.

The design of the graphic and the non-graphic corporate image
All of us have, for different reasons related to our everyday lives, some form of contact with companies, banks, institutions, department stores and municipal or government offices, in order to buy something, pay a debt, learn about public events, or for multiple other reasons. It may be face-to-face contact between a citizen and an employee or official of a company or institution of some sorts, or it may be communication by phone or in writing.

The company approached is usually not the only one in its sector; all banks or department stores offer basically the same goods or services. These companies within a same sector compete with each other for the favour of the citizen-customer and they resort to different strategies to achieve their aim, among them the design of their corporate image, also called corporate identity. However, these competing companies are not the only ones to resort to this visual medium in order to promote their interests. Non competitive institutions such a municipalities, governments, railroad lines or airport managing companies, also use corporate images to create a positive attitude on the part of the general public. The primary function of this corporate image is to represent symbolically the identity of the company or institution and, through it, create a “favourable image” which will attract the citizen to their interests.

However, as often as not, when visiting a company or institution, the visitor leaves often feeling irritated or offended by the treatment received by its employees or officials, and this even in the case of companies or institutions which have good, even very good, graphic corporate images. On such occasions the citizen may well ask himself: what is the point of a good graphic image when direct and personal contact with the company produces a “negative image”? When this happens, he will be justified in thinking that the pretty and aesthetic graphic corporate image is merely a cosmetic operation, since direct contact has demonstrated the discordance between how the company actually is and how it represents itself symbolically. This other image is here described as the “non-graphic image.”

Now, the subtitle of these reflections: “The design of the graphic and non-graphic corporate image,” implies that this image, which is not based on normal graphic signs, can be designed. This proposition will undoubtedly seem odd to a designer, since a corporate image is not normally viewed as anything more than a collection of graphic signs and the norms regulating their application and use. However, if the end pursued is the design of something that does not have the nature of either a graphic sign or a material object, it will be necessary to reflect on the very concept of “design” as understood by the professional establishment and attempt to determine the very basic concepts which guide its exercise and which would enable a more universal definition of this activity and on the basis of which then to approach a task of this nature. First and foremost: how do designers themselves define design? One such definition within the world of graphic and industrial design could be something like this: “design, designing, is a process of work delimited from its inception by a number of different conditioning factors, whose aim is to determine the defining aspects (material, technical, semiotic, communicational, of use, etc.) of an object, be it physical or a sign, destined for a predetermined use and which is materially produced, or reproduced, in greater or lesser quantities by means of some technical procedure.” This definition is, possibly, sufficiently comprehensive to correctly explain what these disciplines conceive to be the nature of design. Nonetheless, nothing in this definition enables us to discern the existence of design in a non-graphic image. This definition – and other similar ones – explains a specific function of design and, hence, is ineffective in terms of explaining, in a broader sense, what we are presently attempting to clarify. It is necessary to go into greater depth to identify a more universal definition capable of embracing other forms of design.

During the 1980s the word “design” emerged from the almost total ignorance that surrounded its meaning and invaded the everyday language of the general public and communication media. The connotations of the word were mostly negative as a result of a phenomenon known as “design objects,” which caused design to be perceived as something cosmetic, superficial, as beautifying adornment, applied aesthetics analogous to applied art, but in essence vacuous and lacking substance. Nevertheless, in recent years this negative meaning has changed for the better and today we find comments in the press suggesting that almost anything is capable of being designed. For example:

“The European Space Agency designs its global strategy for 2002-2006.”
“Design of a quantum network wherein the messages are undecipherable.”
“Giscard d’Estaing presides the convention that will design (…) the Europe of the future.”
“The Government submitted (…) a bill designed with the sole objective of cutting off terrorism’s sources of financing and its support.”
“Citizens, everywhere, take for granted that political programs are designed in order to win the elections.”

These are just a few examples illustrating the current popularity of this expression.

The design of these strategies and political programs, among others, may appear alien to the professional designer whose designs are always for physical, material objects, which mankind uses to achieve specific aims, and the use of the term can therefore be found to be surprising in contexts where the objects designed are very different to everyday objects, in particular because they lack a specific material nature. What is the object “political program” like? What is its shape? What is its design? After all, “designing a political program”, a strategy or an attitude is, from whatever the angle it is viewed, a correct statement because it can actually be designed always providing that design is interpreted in a universal sense and not strictly circumscribed to the above mentioned professional activities.

The great difference between objects designed in accordance with standard graphic or industrial design procedures, on one hand, and the concept of design as per the previously stated examples, on the other, is evident and leads to the immediate question: if the common denominator between these disciplines and the examples offered is design, what definition is capable of encompassing both and at the same time recognizing their differences? To achieve this goal we must get to the very roots of the matter and ask ourselves what are, in their most fundamental sense, the meanings underlying what is universally understood as design. Once defined, these basic meanings could provide a basic conceptual framework to assist the process of comprehension of other work processes, equal or similar to design – interpreted in its conventional sense – even if neither of these processes nor the objects they produce are usually defined as design.

Any clarification process needs a solid basis to sustain its arguments. This basis is speech. Any exchange of meanings between a speaker and a listener, between a writer and a reader, and all the understanding of the world and everything in it, takes place with speech. The meaning we issue when speaking lies in the words and their sequence to form phrases. This is how meaning is created, and thus things and the world are made intelligible. Words are, furthermore, filled with meaning and hence are a source of knowledge; they harbour their history and the roots of their origin which reveal their broadest and most profound meaning.

Ethymology states the truth of words. The word, like so many others, comes from the Greek root étimos, “true, real,” and logos, “word.” In other words: ethymo-logy: “the true meaning of a word.” With reference to our present concern, the truth of the word design lies in its origin, it derives from designio, intention, which in turn derives from sign.1 By sign we understand the form, configuration, the essential figure of something, that concrete aspect that permits us to call it what it is.
This root word sign has generated many words to which it confers their essential meaning. For example: signal; signs; signalize; signatory; significance; ensign-flag and others. All these words and their meanings have an essentially visual nature, they refer to a signal, to the something signical, to what is signifying and is, thus, showing itself. Both de-sign and de-signate also refer back to this sign-nature.

The act of endowing something with its proper sign-character, with its essential form, would, therefore, be the showing the identity of that thing. In other words, a thing is its sign and the sign is the thing. These different words, permeated by the notion of sign, also contain references that aim precisely at the notion of identity in that which is signalled, as in ‘identity signs’ or in the ensign-flag, that signals the identity of a country. This reference also occurs, although in a different manner, in the sense of what is signalled and in this way is shown to the world, is revealed to our understanding as what it is, in its identity. Hence the identity of the thing lies in its sign, in its visual appearance. Moreover, such identity signalled by the sign in turn reveals the designio of that thing, that is to say, the intention, purpose or end to be achieved through its use.

Sign and designio, or in other words, “aspect, form, figure” and “finality, end, purpose” are, therefore, identical, they both merge in design. The action of endowing a thing with a sign is, hence, called de-sign.

In days gone by, the word designio was called deseño (in Spanish); the root both words share with design, underlines the intentional nature of the act of designing. Non-canonically, designio could also be interpreted as de-signio, as intención-de-signo (sign-intention), the intention of endowing a thing with its figure, of endowing it with its sign by means of the act of de-signing, in such a way that the pursued designio becomes manifest in the form of a sign; that it becomes factual reality. When this takes place, it means that designio, the intention, has become design, it has taken form, has acquired its sign, has become visible and exhibits its being. According to this line of reasoning, the basic concepts leading to a universal definition of design would be: sign-designio-design, on the basis of which the following formula may be proposed:

Design is intention become sign

Thus, in the degree to which a de-sign is the fruit and consequence of a de-signio that informs its being, this de-sign is designio become sign, an intention turned form, figure which, upon signalling itself, identifies itself with the sign which is its identity. This definition would thus be the conceptual framework mentioned at the beginning of this essay and which underlies every design producing process.

From the perspective of the proposed formula, it may be observed that there are numerous activities that involve design, even if none of them are necessarily described as design. Victor Papanek2 goes as far as stating that every human action involves design. Interpreted in the sense that design is designio turned sign, it could be said that this statement is true, although from another perspective it is possible to criticize it, although this is another kettle of fish. Be it as it may, all these different forms of design and designing may be perfectly understood as such on the basis of the universal definition proposed.

3.
Having reached this point, and before getting more deeply involved in the subject of non-graphic corporate image, it is necessary to clarify the two forms of describing it. Some call it “corporate image” while others prefer “corporate identity.” Both definitions involve basically the same: designing the diverse graphic signs, such as symbols or logotypes, choosing colours, corporate typeface, illustration typology, copy composition styles, etc., and conferring an overall coherent image to all the communication items in such a way that the image can transmit the desired communication concepts and, as a whole, be the best possible symbolic representation of what the company is, its identity, thus achieving a favourable attitude on the part of the general public.

Yet this company identity does not manifest itself solely in the form of graphic corporate image signs. The recipient of such corporate images is never a passive subject. As already indicated, the treatment a citizen-customer receives from an employee of a company or a city hall or a government civil servant, will produce an emotional reaction that the recipient will consciously or not experience as a “good / bad image.” Since the experience is direct and personal, it is more real than the graphic representation of the corporate image. Sometimes the behaviour of just one employee can evoke the notion in a client’s head, that the whole of the company acts as this one. A personal one-time experience tends to be generalized to define the whole.

A specific behaviour or attitude is communicated by means of signs. A face and its expression, a mouth and its words, hands and their gestures, all issue signs: a smiling face or a sullen demeanour, a pleasant or aloof expression, a friendly or brusque gesture, a warm or cool tone of voice, clear or unintelligible speech, etc., all are signs. The sum of these signs creates a spontaneous, positive or negative, emotional response in the customer as to the “real” identity of the company for him. And if, upon entering into actual contact with the company, this experience does not coincide with what the corporate graphic image communicates, both that image and the company cease to be believable.

Hence, this situation gives rise to the question whether it would also be possible to “design” attitudes and behaviours of company employees in accordance with the graphic corporate images being designed. On this matter, Villem Vossenkuhl, author of the prologue to Otl Aicher’s book Analogical and digital,3 states:

“Aicher’s philosophic considerations are a propaedeutic theory of design and development. In his opinion there is nothing that cannot be designed or developed and this is applicable to one’s actual being, to one’s coexistence with others and nature, to the objects of everyday life, to life and to thought. The capacity to project, to design, is learned by doing it. What we do and in which sector we do it is secondary, the only thing we must not do is allow ourselves to be guided by pre-established parameters and plans.”

According to this perception of design, it would be possible to design oneself, one’s way of thinking, “one’s coexistence with others,” one’s relations with people. If this is so, it is worth thinking that even if the contact between a customer and a company employee may be just a brief “coexistence” – though it may be repetitive since the average citizen frequently visits his favourite department store, his bank, or uses a public service, etc. – the company should be concerned that its customer’s attitude will be as positive as possible, in order to ensure his satisfaction and his loyalty and, thus, transmit a good image.

A great number of companies have good graphic corporate images, yet most of them fail insofar as their non-graphic image is concerned. The exception is the rule. Therefore, a corporate image design project should envisage both aspects and the corresponding action programs should be designed to ensure that this image be a true reflection of the company, that the graphic and non-graphic images form a cohesive unit. This will enable the company to achieve credibility.

4.
Now, with regard to the possibility of designing attitudes, which would be tantamount to designing the non-graphic image of a company, and even if it were just for a theoretical speculation, we may take the proposed design definition as point of departure.

Design is an intention converted into a sign

To start, an attempt should be made to clarify the relationship between the concepts of this definition and the design of what we will, generically, call “attitude.” This term encompasses a broad concept that includes the behaviour or the stance of an individual, both with respect to the things that happen around him and those that happen to the individual himself; his reactions, thoughts and feelings in the face of the many, positive or negative, impacts or impulses which accost him and affect him in one way or another throughout his day.

The intention
On the basis of the proposed basic definition, there is no intrinsic difference between the design of a product, a symbol or a corporate image, and that of something that does not have a material nature, such as an attitude. The subject can become a project. As in any design project, the first step in the process leading to the definition or formulation of the intention, of the purpose or end desired, consists of a prior analysis of the problem, the fundamental reason why a change, i.e. the design of a new attitude, is considered necessary. It is essential to establish clearly what it is of the attitude one wants to modify or re-do, so as to be able to design the means to achieve this intention. The fundamental aspect to be borne in mind in this respect, is that a given attitude one wants to modify, is always the product of a way of thinking, a way of perceiving oneself, the world and things in general.

Focussing on a change of attitude, hence, presupposes modifying the way of thinking that has led to the unsatisfactory situation that needs to be changed. This means going beyond the mere representation of a role during an eight-hour office day; it implies a much more far reaching change.

The design
The sign must be designed in order for the intention to become reality, for a sign to take shape, for it to acquire permanent form. Since we are here considering a change in attitude, in other words, designing something immaterial, something mental, this change can only be achieved by means of some kind of programmed action, training, daily practice. This is what sportsmen do: they train each day to reach their established goals. Repeated practice is what creates a new model attitude. This daily practice, this work is veritably the design process, the process of self-design. However, practice, daily training, is time consuming, and the time required will vary in each case. This will involve reorganizing everyday schedules and making room for a period of time to be devoted to such training.

The sign
The repetition of each exercise will contribute to the progressive configuration of the sign, and the final format it will take. The sign, in this case the new attitude, will be configured and complete when the point is reached where living is the exercise itself, when the intention and the form, the intention and the sign, have merged into one.

Notes
1. Zimmermann, Yves. ¿Qué es el diseño? (What is design?), Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2002.
2. Papanek, Victor. Design for the real world, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991.
3. Otl Aicher, Analógico y digital (Analogical and digital), Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2001.
(Originally published in German, Analog un digital, by Ernst & Sohn.)

As every year, the Graphic Design Association ADG-FAD of Barcelona, Spain, has emitted a call to designers, illustrators and advertising agencies to present projects for the competition of the well-known Laus Award.

This past February the names of the award winners of the different categories were made public. It has to be said here, that not too long ago a clear difference has finally – and fortunately – been established between graphic design and advertising projects, which has led to the constitution of a double jury, one for each of these disciplines. This shows that the nature of graphic design and of advertising, though pursuing similar ends, start from different inicial assumptions, has finally seen the light in the professional establishment. The merit to have been able to make this absolutely necessary distinction, is entirely due to the ADG-FAD Association.

When a jury makes public its decision of the award winning projects, it does not only proclaim the names of the winners, but in an implicit way, exhibits also its own criteria and perception of the profession. And, as a background to this, one has to take into account that Barcelona has lately been proclaimed from all the rooftops as the “capital city” of design; a PR operation whose efficiency anyone can verify who during the last years has travelled outside of Spain: we, from Barcelona, are looked at as the “design city”. If this corresponds to any reality is not something we are going to elucidate here. What interests us here specifically is this year’s Golden Laus Award which has been awarded to what some call a brand, others, more correctly, a symbol, and still others, not too well informed, a logotype. Our interest is not awakened by the fact that it is one or other symbol, one or other designer, but the fact that, in 1991, a symbol, alone, has deserved the Laus Award.

As is well known, or should be known, a designer designs a symbol in order to make a symbolic self-representation of a company or institution: it represents itself, or its activity through this symbol. Now, this symbol never appears alone in any communication’s support, such as a letterhead, a visiting card, an advertisement, a publication, etc. Next to, or with it, appear texts, colours, photographs, illustrations or other communication elements which constitute a given communication support directed at a specific public or target. Each one of these supports does not only transmit to a person a specific information or content through the visual and written elements, but the way these communication elements – texts, photographs, illustrations, headlines, etc. – are disposed, their reiterated and coherent use in the space of a given sommunication support, makes present the emitter of them. To conjugate these different visual elements, to systematize their use in such a way that, even though the communication supports are very varied, one may immediately recognise the presence of the same emitter, this has been called the corporate image.

This corporate image manifests itself in a great variety of communication supports: institutional and operative stationery; in different kinds of publications; in advertising; on vehicles; on facades; in television, etc. According to the ability and coherence with which the designer is capable to implement the different basic visual elements in or on the different supports, so much more efficient will be the communication of this corporate image.

What has to be underlined here, is the fact that a symbol is one of the different graphic signs which make up the image of a company or institution and which, sometimes, is not even the most important element. However, nowadays, with the inflation of images of all kinds and the saturation of information, it turns out to be useless to speak of corporate image within the limited area of graphic design, because designers understand normally this image as an “aesthetization” of an company’s or institution’s reality, without even questioning how it is inside, in other words, its being, its identity or essence.

Seen from this point of view, to give an award to a symbol is to award merely a piece belonging to an ensemble and without which the symbol is nothing since it can only be effective in this ensemble. Isolated it is merely an aesthetic object which might be visually attractive or not, which one may like, or not. So, the jury, by giving an award to a isolated symbol, it has manifested publicly at least three aspects:

· it has an antiquated concept of the design profession: it gives an award to the “artistry” of an isolated sign which, by definition is part of a system;
· it has not taken into account how this isolated sign has been applied in its natural context, which is what the receptor will see and who is not a designer.
· it does not foster a better knowledge of our profession by making public such a decision.

A jury is naturally free to judge and to award whatever seems best to it, but at this point, and in a city which is presumably the “capital city of design”, one has to assume the responsbilty which this entails. In short, what the jury has made clear is that it was a questsion of a beauty contest (as usual). This year “Miss Symbol” won the contest. Congratulations.

Whoever has gone to Athens will no doubt have visited the National Archaeological Museum, where some of the greatest works of art of ancient Greece are exhibited. The breathtaking collection of cycladic art, with the small lute player as an absolute masterpiece, is a delight for the eyes and the spirit. The golden jewels and masks found by Schliemann in the royal graves of Mykene give testimony that Homer did not exagerate when he sang the power and wealth of Agamemnon. In another room the incomparable Poseidon of 460 B.C., is the majestic symbol of the plenitude of the golden Periclean age of Athens. As to the rest, the oeuvres exhibited in the other rooms, such as the archaic sculptures, the ceramics of the geometric period or the numerous bronzen pieces and sculptures evidences that this is one of the great museums of the world.

At the Acropolis another museum dazzles the visitor. There, the gazes from the marmoreal faces of the old deities still contemplate us. The Thinking Athena, a marbre relief of modest dimension where the Godess leans with her staff against the base of a low stone wall, has been described as the oeuvre which most purely represents the Attic-Athenian spirit which thinks the limits (Martin Heidegger). Nothing can quench the luminous youth and beauty of the ancient protectoress of Athens, not even the undignified place which has been assigned to the Godess in this museum.
The Benakis museum offers another aspect of Greek culture to the visitor. It shelters oeuvres from all periods of Greek history. Cycladic sculptures; votive figures; religious paintings from the Byzantine period; weavings from the Middle East; handwritten Bibles and a great number of traditional clothes from the islands and various regions of continental Greece.

For the visitor interested in the military and strategic aspects of the ancestral fight of the Greeks for their independence against the perpetual invaders from the East, there is a War Museum where, with the help of maps and mock-ups, one can understand and see, for example, in what geographic surroundigs and in which way the decisive battles against the Persians were fought at Marathon, Salamis and Thermopilas.

There are a great number of other museums of interest, in Athens itself as well as in the rest of Greece, but the visitor will notice a common feature in all of them: the bad way to exhibit the works of art they contain. As a general rule these are exhibited without any kind of explanation. In the very few cases when there is one, it is written in Greek and is very scarce, so that if the visitor is not a student of ancient Greek art, or has no previous knowledge of the exhibited pieces nor knowldege of the Greek language, he will see much beauty but he will not know nor be able to locate what he has seen in any historic period or cultural context. This lack of information is frustrating for one who, apart from seeing, would like to know what he is seeing. It is incredible, for example, that the National Museum of Archaeology has no exhaustive catalogue of the exhibited works of art. On the other hand, another common feature of these museums is that the illumination and the materials which serve as a background to the exhibited works, has neither been conceived nor adapted to the needs for their best viewing. This state of affairs is common in the State-owned museums as well as in those which are privately funded of which there are a surprising number.

One of these, inaugurated in 1986, is the Nicholas P. Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art. A visit there reveals the serious defects of the rest of the Greek museums, precisely because in this case the way the pieces are exhibited, are iluminated and the information about each piece, written in Greek and English, is modelic. The visit, furthermore, is gratifying because of its architecture. It is located in the center of Athens, a few minutes walk from the Syntagme square, in the Odos Neofitou Douka, in the quiet neighbourhood of Kolonaki.

The pieces exhibited on a surface of 1300m2 constitute probably the best collection of ancient Cycladic and Greek art in the world. The quality of the objects and the astounding number of masterpieces are evidence of an exquisite selection criteria (and of unusual economic resources). The existence of such a collection, created by a private citizen, is understood by its founder as a civic-patriotic act to restitute to his country the works of art of antiquity, “exiled” abroad, as Melina Mercouri, the ex-minister of culture, would call it.

Greece, due to its geographic location and its antique greatness, has been assaulted all along its extraordinary history. Even today, the hostility with its Eastern neighbour is a permenent reminder that the Occident, Europe, ends here, in Greece. It was, and still is a frontier country. Occupied and subjected, it has been expoliated of the cultural rests of its past. None of the great occupying nations of Europe can be saved from the accusation of cultural vandalism. The British Museum, the Louvre and other museums is where the loot of the plunderers of the Greek cultural heritage can be found; here you will find the trophys uprooted by the conquerors from their place of origin. They are mummies enclosed in the sarcophagus of culture, they lack what originally gave them their sense and meaning: the countryside of Greece, the light of Greece, their context. But the vandalism does not desist of its affronts; even today old tumbs are being raped, old settlements illegally excavated and the findings sold to art dealers, these ending up in the great international auctions.

It is with this background in mind of the permanent danger for the vestiges of the ancient Greek culture, that this act of salvation is based, and which culminates, first, in the creation of the collection and, later, in the construction of its permanent seat: the Nicholas P. Goulandris Foundation. This man was an important shipowner, industrialist and philanthropist, though he never achieved the notoriety of some of his colleagues. During twenty-five years he and his wife used their fortune to buy and repatriate many of the oeuvres which had been taken out of Greece. The fruit of this passion is the astounding collection of Cycladic and ancient Greek art exhibited at the Foundation.

The ensemble of the collection comprehends more than 500 pieces which represent the principal Greek cultural epochs; from the earliest sculptures of cycladic art of 3.200 B.C., to the ceramics, the bronzes, the golden jewels, the funerary tombstones of the hellenistic period and the Roman glassworks of the VI century a.C. All of the pieces are in an excellent state of conservation. The wealth and variety of the cycladic pieces throws a new light upon an art principally known for their characteristic sculptures of femenine figures, generally of small dimensions, initially in the form of a guitar, later on with human features extremly synthesized, or “essentialised”. The most recent acquisition of a femenine figure of marble is, in comparison, enormous since it is 1,4 meter high. The collection contains furthermore a great variety of tools and instruments in bronze, small figures, like talismans, jars, bowls of different dimensions, all carved in marbre, with walls not more than 3 or 4 millimetres thick. In a round bowl of 40 cms diametre and a wall of about 5 cms height, there are disposed a succesion of doves all in one line and very stylised, which cross over from one side to the other the base of the bowl, and all this carved in one piece of marble! Astounding.

The director of the British Museum has said, “Apart from the National Museum of Archaeology of Athens there is no museum which has a collection of cycladic antiquities comparable in rank and quality to the Goulandris collection”. After having been exhibited in London, Paris, Tokio, Kyoto, Houston and Brussels, the Nicholas P. Goulandris collection found its permanent abode in the building of the Neofitou Douka street, designed by Yannis Vikelas, a prominent Athenian architect. The Goulandris matrimony entrusted the design of the building directly to Vikelas due to the great quality of his architecture. And, in effect, when one dedicates some time to walk across the Greek capital searching for good architecture, one will discover in the architectural caos of this city, that numerous buildings of real quality are designed by him.

The Goulandris museum is a masterpiece of coherence. Nothing in it escapes a rigorous criteria. Throughout the visit one perceives the manifestation of an evident rigour in the architectural environment which understands the building as an integral whole, from the facade down to the entrance ticket. The graphic and written information on the ground floor, which puts the visitor into the cultural and historic context of the cycladic and ancient Greek art, is excellent in its formal aspect as well as in its realization. The explanations, in Greek and English, are extensive and typographically well resolved. This ground floor enjoys natural light from an adjacent patio court and the glass door which opens towards it, gives access to a space full of plants and flowers; a young vine hangs up towards a metallic grid which, in the future, will make a vegetal roof in this garden, an ideal place to drink a coffee. At the left of this door there is a shop which sells excellent publications about Cycladic and ancient Greek art. The pieces of the Goulandris collection are very well photographed and reproduced on different kinds of supports. The graphic corporate image present on different communicational supports constitute a coherent discourse with that of the architecture.

From the ground floor, one reaches the upper floors by lift or by a white marble staircase. The signange on each floor is designed with the same criterion of clarity and discretion as the information panels. On the first floor is the collection of Cycladic art. The exhibition room is dark. The entire visual climate is one of great visual stillness. This darkness is understood when one sees the works: one has to rest the sight, “de-excite” it; purify it before being able to apprehend these works in their virginal splendour, a seeing with no interference of any kind of that which comes to us from the beginning of time and which – at the same time – are strangely contemporary.

The room is designed for a U-shaped route. All the works are arranged behind protective showcases and the only lights are directed onto the works. These thus emerge in a dark, virgin space which, in turn, highlights their purity. They play a leading role thanks to surroundings voluntarily relegated to darkness, of a uniform colour, and to an interior architecture which does not compete with the uniqueness of the works of art. Both combine to shape the visual silence which reigns supreme in this room. Floor, ceilings, walls and backgrounds are, with rare exceptions, the same blue-dark grey tone. The showcases and elements of support are of refined carpentry work. Each case has a number indicating the chronologial order of the route, and each piece has a number referring to an explanation in Greek and English.

Most of the works are in honey-coloured marble. The dim light tends to be yellow and harmonises with them. Each period of the evolution of this art is represented by one or several works, all of stunning beauty. Many are genuine masterpieces. The marble heads are brought to such a degree of expressive purity that one would say that the very spirit of what they represent has become materialised.

The vist to the second floor is a different visual experience. Here is the collection of Anciet Greek art. The works span a historical era from 2000 BC to the 6th century AD. The different periods of Ancient Greek art – Minoan, Mycenaean, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic – are represented, like the Cycladic art, by dazzling, well-preserved works. The second floor also houses the Lambros Evtaxias Collection of bronze objects.

The route around this room is also U-shaped. And the interior architecture likewise follows identical criteria of discretion. The design of the installation, lighting and colouring of both floors is the work of the North Americans Gordon Anson and Elroy Quenroe. They were chosen on the strength of their work on the design of the exhibition of the National Washington Art Gallery Collection. The chromatic range of the pottery, bronzes, sculptures, gold jewellry, funeral stele covers all the shades of earth: grey-yellow-brown-beige. The surroundings are also in these tones: the background to the works, the showcases, supprts, walls, floor and ceiling. On this floor all is light, there is no darkness. And here, too, the architecture dissolves, but this time into light; there is no visual break between work and support: the are intimately integrated.

The third floor is a large space, broad and generous, which is not subdivided like the previous ones; it enjoys natural light. It houses temporary exhibitions. On its four walls are devices for hanging pictures and a mobile system for lighting the works on display.

The Goulandris Foundation is a living place, offering permanent programmes of lectures and symposiums which take place on the top floor of the building. This is equipped with a modern infrastructure enabling approximately fifty spectators to view any type of audiovisual system. In the basement is a small cafeteria; the rest of the space is devoted to a permanent educational exhibition for children.

When one leaves the building and emerges into the street, to the city with its noise and visual clutter, one feels within oneself the stillness of the place one has just left, a stillness which envelops the works and keeps them pure within the memory. One also feels gratitude and admiration for the authors of this magnificent building, because they have known how to shape an architecture “at the service of” the works and the visitor. Unlike what occurs in much of contemporary architecture, where “overdesigning” prevails, the authors have here known how to repress any urge to create a monument to their ego.

The Foundation’s interior architecture has been conceived in order to “disappear”, so to speak, from the visitor’s perception, employing for this purpose darkness in one case, luminosity in another. Which would confirm that the best designed object is the one which does not appear to have been designed.

Two constants seem to characterise the work of Vikelas, spanning the period from 1969 to 1985. With regard to materials, the frequent use of glass-black mirror, alone or in combination with white marble, with the consequent presence of the relationship black/white, light and non-light. In formal terms, a refined rationalism which powerfully stands out from the architectural mediocrity of Athen’s “modern” buildings. Some of his works are incorporated in the urban surroundings only because they are mirror-buildings, which reflect everything around them. They are screen-buildings of pure, sensual, sensitive lines.

In the works after 1985 an evolution can be discerned: classical references appear. In an important white marble office building in Vassilis Sofias Street, this visual structure of the facade displays a symmetrical, classical conception, and – above and beside the wiondows – appears as a marble relief the symbol-figure of Post-Modern architecture: the triangular gable. In another project, still under study, the presence of classical elements in a building clearly an heir of Rationalism is still more evident: in the front of a black glass L-shaped building arise porticos formed by fragments of gables upon columns. The idea it suggests, is that of the building of ruins. In a recent project, not yet realised, these classical elements are directly incorporated in the building, also of mirror-glass. However, it has to be admitted that a modern building bearing classical references in Athens is a different propostion to such a building in New York or Paris, for the meaning and justification are given by the context: columns and the remains of Classical Athens are to be found all over the city.

When Vikelas began to think about the Foundation building, it was very tempting to to turn to the “neoclassical” style, he says, because – in addition – it implied no risk. It would have been a “coherent” and “logical” solution considering its contents. However he felt it necessary to search and create something which might be more than a commonly acceptable form because, in the field of architecture, the relationship with the past – through repetition and imitation – “tends to be a morbid nostalgia”. Vikelas himself says, “We believe that the essence (soul) of a nation and of its peoples endures in the values of art and not in its changing forms, through what is in the background of the creative imagination of its peoples, nourished by their history”.

“The austere style and geometry of the formes of the internationally famous collection of Cycladic art (…) decided the aesthetic line of the building. (…) We hope that this work has been conceived in accordance withe the ideas of our country; the harmonious proportions of form and surface, the contrast of chiaroscuro, the connection between the whole and the detail and, finally, in accordance with the dialectical relationship of the daring and the discreet, the old and the new”. Propositions which, as any visitor may ascertain, have been materialised outstandingly in this exquisite work.

1.
Art manifests itself in different ways through human oeuvres, singularly through music, poetry, sculpture, painting, etc. Each one of these different art forms need the intervention of the human being in order to manifest itself. For example, for music to become manifest it needs a composer to write it, an interpreter to play or a singer who gives it the voice. And so with the other arts. The art of painting needs a painter or an illustrator to make present in the form of a visual representation on the canvas or paper, an objective and existing reality, or, in the case of non-figurative painting of the 20th century, new figures or forms not necessarily subject to objective criteria.

In the middle of the 19th century, artist-painters such as Toulouse-Lautrec and others, were asked to create posters in order to promote the sale of one or other product. The poster, as a substitute of the canvas, is the first example of what came to be known as advertising art, that is, applied art. The process which led the so-called free art (freie Kunst) to be converted into applied art has been described and explained in different publications. What is of interest here is that at a certain moment, this new activty of the artist-painter led to the development of professional disciplines which, later on, were grouped under the generic concept of design.

With the passage of time these diciplines profiled their own identity according to the social, commercial and industrial requirements, and in this way evolving into special disciplines: graphic design; industrial design; textile design, etc. Each one of these disciplines projects different “objects”: signs, images, typefaces, in graphic design; three-dimensional objects in indutrial design; textiles and fabrics in textile design, etc. The signs, objects and materials serve different ends but they have in common to be the fruits of design and that they are utilitarian objects, whose essential characteristic is that they all serve humans to attain certain specific ends.

Given the provenance of these disciplines it is comprehensible that this relation between art and design has given cause to much discussion, some affirming that design is art, others who reject this relationship. Of all the different disciplines with the denomination of design, it is in graphic design and its oeuvres that this relationship with its origin is most clearly visible, since, like in painting, it uses colours, images and signs of all kinds as a means of expression and creating meaning. In its origins this design discipline was a manual craft and the projects were elaborated and materially realised in a very similar fashion as the artist realised his oeuvres. For this reason, no doubt, the graphic design projects were evaluated by the same aesthetic criteria as the one applied to works of art, since there were no other evaluation criterias at hand than this one. During the sixties and seventies in Barcelona one could see graphic design projects painted on canvases and framed just like any artistic painting.

Nevertheless, different circumstances, sociological changes, technological revolutions such as the emergence of the new medias, affected and transformed the ways of doing and thinking of this profession. Until about the sixties and seventies of the past century, the assignment to a designer was made without any briefing. One expected simply something original, creative and beautiful: a work of artistic creativity with a commercial function (in the USA a designer was called a commercial artist). The designer enjoyed a creative liberty similar to the one of the artist painter. In the 80ies the economy flourished and the enterprises endowed themselves with new resources to favour the sales of their products or services. This is the period when marketing makes its appearance and which from then on is in charge of questions related to design and communication.

To start a design project of a product, an object, a packaging or a corporate identity, plus the manufacture and distribution or implementation, requires an important financial investment on the part of a company, and she of course hopes to locate its object-product in a good position in its market and to make benefits with it. In order to achieve these ends, the object-product became the center of attention of the marketing departments. New criterias for the evaluation of a design proposal were introduced and the artistic consideration passed on to a second plane. Now a design had to attend to all kinds of conditioning factors, not only to its physical realization but also to functional and communicational criterias. On many occasions the design of an object or a sign was even submitted to a public poll in order to ascertain if that which is pretended with it, is postively understood by the market segment it is aimed at. This compelled the designer to have to adapt to a new reality and to think his activity in a different way. Design was not anymore a means to express oneself as an artist. Nevertheless, even though they felt constrained in their creativity and did not have the same liberty as the artist painter, very many designers considered, and continue nowadays to consider themselves as artists: they believe that to design is to produce art.

This question with respect to the relationship of art and design had been much discussed during the sixties in the legendary Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. There they established a clear difference between the two. They dilucidated if painting was the “mother” of all the other visual arts, a position defended by Max Bill, the first director of this school, a postion which was quite comprehensible since he was, apart from other things, a famed painter in the line of concrete art. At last, it is significative that he abandoned the school after having directed it during one year, when a more pragmatic criteria became the norm, a position defended, apart from others, by Otl Aicher, who understood design as an activity detached from the proper preocupations of art, and more specifically from painting. They understood design as an activity with its own problems and singular requirements, characteristic of its exercise and the specific ends it pursues. They considered, furthermore, that this profession had reached its maturity and did not need the concourse of art in order to manage itself.

Years later this same question of art-design was discussed in a publication whose title significantly was Art and Graphics1. The discussion turned around the question if graphic design, and not design in general, is art, which is comprehensible since, as commented, this discipline was the one which in its beginning was most closely related to art, to painting. Though this book has been published over 25 years ago, the subject has not lost interest. The relation or no relation between graphic design and art always comes up again in conferences, interviews, discussions, in the client-designer relationship, and not even between designers is there a unanimity about this question. And this, without mentioning those schools of art and design who with this title suggest that both concepts seem to be sufficiently akin so as to be able to teach them as synonyms.

Art and Graphics consists of a large introduction by Willy Rotzler, co-author of the book together with Jacques Garamond, of the opinions of ten well known designers on this subject, plus reproductions of the works of each one of them. The introduction consists of a historic retrospective about the role of the artist-painters and describes their historic dependency on their church and royalty “clients” up to their gradual process of independence until they achieved their status of free creators. It also explains the historic reasons why painters, since the middle of the 19th century, dedicated themselves to advertising art. From here on the discourse raises the question about free art and applied art, and, consequently, if design is art. The author of this introduction pretends to doubt the differentiation between the two, though at some moments he sees himself obliged to admit that a design project has to be subject to different conditioning factors than in the case of a work of art. This admitted, the subject is somehow floating in ambiguity: it is admitted that the starting point for a work of art is different from the starting point of a work of design, but it is considered that the creative process is the same. This is the predominant attitude in the opinions of the designers quoted in the book. They are synthetically represented in the words of Herbert Bayer: “The so-called free arts are generally put on a higher level than the other forms of configuration. However, if one is of the opinion that the creative process is more or less the same for the artist and the designer, then the designer must also be considered an artist. As a consequence, the free artists, the designers and the architects should be valued the same way. Since free art is determined from the inside and design from the outside, there can only be a difference in the quality of a work but not because there is initially a different starting position”. This affirmation raises the question: how can a work of “free art” be evaluated in the same way as a work of “applied art” if, precisely, the initial conditions for their realization are different? It would certainly seem that it is different to start working on a project with imposed conditions than from freely elected conditions. While no explanation is given in the book as to which these conditions are, the internal and external ones, and in which way they are similar or different, such an affirmation has no validity. Just as meaningful as the answers given by the designers are their works reproduced in the book. The great majority of these are “free works”, “art works” and which don’t correspond to any assignment from a client. In other cases the reproduced works are posters, generally designed for some cultural event (again the poster as substitute for the canvas). But none of them shows projects typical for graphic design: a packaging, a logotype, a corporate identity. Some of these designers admit that they prefer to work for cultural events because then they can be more “free”. They seem to have no doubts: a designer is an artist.

Then, in the eighties of the 20th century the question came up again with the debut of design in society. Until then design lived pretty much in the shade of public attention and the term was only used when one was mentioning one or other of its disciplines. But design became famous when the so-called “design objects” started appearing on the public scenario. They called attention to themselves because they were very different from the traditional objects everbody was familiar with. Many of these novelties had unusual forms, they were coloured and very modern. For many people they became status symbols and design became a subject of social interst. Articles and commentaries started to proliferate in the press and on television, the word design was installed in the daily language and many things adopted the attribute of design. Design and designers were sudenly everywhere. Those traditionally called modists changed their denomination to fashion designers. The press, after an election won by the Spanish socialists, informed that Felipe Gonzalez, then prime minister, was designing his cabinet. The children born through artificial insemination were called design children. And, with regards to design objects, the reviewers and art critics naturally underlined its “artistic” character, establishing analogies with tendencies in art and, in this way, linked the concepts of art and design as practically synonymous.

Nevertheless, with the passage of time, the term “design” was acquiring a negative, even pejorative connotation. Design was seen as the “cosmetics” of objects and signs; it only creates beautiful outside appearance but behind that there is nothing worthwile. This change of meaning became manifest in the political debate, for example. In an election campaign in Barcelona, an important politician accused publicly an adversary to have “a design discourse, hollow and empty”. Or, in the press, an article in a reputed journal had the following title: “A centre of design”. Contrary to what it suggests, especially to a designer, the article was not about a Design Centre, understood as an institution which takes care of questions related to design, but referred to the “turn to the centre” of the Partido Popular, a right-wing political party which had proclaimed that it was going to move to the centre of the political spectrum. The article implied that this “centre” was a fake, pure outward appearance, it was not real because it was a “design” centre.

The use and abuse of the concept of design in contexts alien to what until then was understood as design, doesen’t seem to have been only limited to Spain. The German magazine Der Spiegel had an issue on transgenic food and its cover title was “Designer’s food”. In London one could buy “Designer’s socks; in Switzerland certain hotels offered “designer’s rooms,” and in Germany one could admire a poster with the image of a beautiful naked lady with the slogan “Body design.” And design was even related to sex, such as in a little advertisement of erotic services in a newspaper one could read that a young lady offered a “design coitus”!

2.
With the aforementioned considerations as a background, we now have to consider two questions in order to elucidate the relationship, respectively non-relationship of art and design:

1. The question about the change of the original meaning of the concept of design to a negative perception of it which has installed itself in daily speech.
2. The question if it is precisely the relation of art and design as the ultimate responsible of the loss of prestige of design.

With respect to the first point the question is obvious: which is the cause that the concept of design has acquired this negative, even depreciatory meaning? The previous quotes, only a few samples of how this word has installed itself in daily speech with its negative meaning, are only some illustrations of a much larger phenomenon. It would seem consistent to reason to suppose that if this negative meaning has installed itself in the daily speech of people, it means that a community of users of “design-objects”, coincide in such a negative valuation and which has deposited in this word their negative experiencies with design.

The period of the 1980ies in which this change of meaning has ocurred, was characterised by a economic-financial euphoria which animated the consumption and the creation of new products, and by the change of the cultural reference with the advent of post-modernism. For most people this new reference made itself visible especially in the works of architecture. In these one could observe a complete rupture with the modern movement; many projects of postmodernism were sign-objects, architectural objects in which the “sign” acquired a predominant relevance, many times at the cost of other basic aspects of an architectural work. And design was not alien to the dynamism which this generated. On the contrary, design was recognised as the new pillar of the consumer culture and there were exhibitions and design awards to demonstrate it.

The fact to confer such a predominant and overaestheticised sign-character to the architectural and design objects, has its probable roots in the context of the transformations which have taken place in the arts. In a recent article2 about an exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany, with the title Icon-collision, the author exposes what traditionally the history of art repeats, that “… the black squares and circles of Malewitsch’s paintings swallow the images which one could still see in the normal paintings, when painting was still representation; in suprematism the figurative art swallows itself so to speak […] To this explanation one has to add that the obects, which now are not “represented” anymore, exhibit themselves as real in the exhibition rooms… for example, the ready-made.” In other words: the objects, not being represented on canvases anymore, but being taken out of them in order to occupy their place on the pedestal of art, and having thus achieved the status of art, they were surrounded by its halo which fertilised the ground for the reception of the design-objects, which, in turn, were surrounded by the halo of design as the supreme value of modernity.

Now, it is obvious that the principal reason for the existence of these design objects was not to be the banners of a new design culture but, rather, the principal reason for an object consists in the service it lends to its user. Inasmuch as even a design object is an utilitarian object it will have to be submitted to the definite proof of its usability by their users. And it is certainly here where these objects, which previously had seduced the buyers, now defrauded them. The users must have become aware that they had not been conceived adequately to comply with its fundamental raison d’être. If the evaluation of these facts and circumstances is plausible, then, at the root of the problem, lies the classic antagonism between “aspect and use”, the old question of “form and function”. The negative qualification already mentioned which adhere to these “design-objects”, must have been aroused by the dysfunction observed between its aspect (sign, form, Gestalt) and its no-suitability to its use, a condition to which no utilitarian object cannot withdraw from. The aspect, the form of these objects sources of deception, did not indicate the use anymore which could be made of them, but signalled to themselves as the aesthetic sign-spectacle; they became self-referential and not objects with which to achieve some end or purpose. As already mentioned, the predominant relevance of their sign-character constituted its exclusive content.

Against this background we have to ask ourselves: inasmuch as the objects of our daily surrounding owe their aspect precisely to those who created them, that is, the designers, how come that they did not project them so as to comply with their first and essential purpose but, instead, designed objects which, in the last instance, conferred its bad reputation to design? Everything indicates that those who projected them dispensed with the questions relative to the use which a user is going make with them. On the contrary, they had the notion that these objects could be considered cultural supports to be converted into sign-representations in accordance with the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Their models must have been the architects, who “culturised” the buildings they projected by introducing in them clear references to classical antiquity. In any case, what seems clear is that these designers relegated to a secondary plane the essential notion that objects have to serve or achieve some purpose. In this way, the use-function of the object was displaced by the sign-function, especially by the signs of the age. Design degenerated it this way to a passing fashion phenomenon, into something transient.

The bad reputation design may still have dates from that period, and the responsability that this concept has turned into such a negative perception, is in the last instance due to the designers themselves and to the intellectual environment which produced the cause of this bad reputation.

From what has been said up to now, the two questions stated at the beginning of this exposé have been answered. What remains pending for elucidation is the change of the concept of design to a negative valuation. And the context in which an object which used to figure as a representation in a work of art, now self-represents itself as art, constitutes the background upon which design commits adultery with art by not attending to the primordial prerequisites of an object but rather pretending to convert it into a work of art.

3.
Having arrived at this point of our reflection, it will now be of interest to probe more profoundly into the possible relationship, respectively no-relationship, between art and design. To do so it is convenient to agree first on what we mean or understand by art and what by design, and then also, how is a work of art and how is a work of design being produced

What can be understood by art we can read it in the dictionary. It gives four different definitions:
1. Art is the ability to do something
2. Art is that which is being produced through the skill or ability of man
3. Art is the ensemble of the rules to do a thing well
4. Art is an act through which man imitates or expresses what is material or invisible making use of matter and its sentient properties.

Of these four definitions the first three are of such ample interpretation that almost everything can be admitted under its roof. If anything is done with ability, skill and with the ensemble of rules to do something well, very many things can be considered as art: paint paintings; produce happenings; manufacture sausages; build houses; publish newspapers; cook bread; make design and so on. This is how the Beaubourg Museum in Paris seems to have understood it. There (october 2001) an exhibtion on modern art was shown on one floor with paintings and sculptures of the 20th century until about 1960, and on another floor the works done after this date: paintings, sculptures, carpets, chairs, machines, computers, architectural mock-ups, objects of daily use of all kinds, etc. If all these objects, exhibited together and next to works of art, are also considered works of art as the exhibition seems to pretend, then one could affirm that everything in general is art, for where is one going to draw the divisory line between art and no-art? This perception of art coincides with the first three foregoing definitions of what is art. However, if this were so, that is, that everything is art, why then the concept of art? If the whole world, with everything it contains would be red, for example, what sense would there be in the concepto of “red”? It is obvious that it exists because it permits to distinguish between different visual phenomenas, “red” from the concept of “blue”, “green” or “yellow”. The same happens with the concept of “art”. The existence of concepts permit the differentiation of the phenomenas, it makes them intelligibles. In this sense the concept “art” means, therefore, that certain things are considered art and others not.

What we contemporaries can understand as art ist best expressed by the fourth definition:
Art is an act through which man imitates or expresses
what is material or invisible making use of matter and its
sentient properties.

Here the word “invisible” points toward what we could call an “elevated” or “metaphysical”
character which is usually associated with the concept of art, inasmuch as it is beyond, “metá”, of what is visible, of what is physical reality. The great painter Paul Klee said in one of his writings: “Art does not reproduce what is visible, art makes visible.” According to this, art unveils what is invisible. Now, how is this “act” realised “through which man imitates or expresses what is material or invisible…”? How does an artist work, how does he produce his art?.
To the question of what does he do, feel or think when he stands in front of an empty canvas, a well known barcelonese painter answered:

“I am a non-figurative painter; a figurative painter might well answer differently. Every time I had mentally imagined something and then painted it, I found it unsatisfactory. I have learned that in front of the empty canvas I also have to empty myself of any kind of image or idea. When I believe to have achieved it, I take the brush, depose it onto the canvas and then the painting paints itself.”

This answer, which coincides with the experience of other artists, suggests that he should first of all achieve a state of “emptiness”, a state of abandoning any act of will before starting to paint. This state to which the answer is pointing, has a clear analogy with Buddhist thinking as well as
with a text in Martin Heidegger’s book Serenity. In this reflection he proposes that true thinking
is not a representation anymore, understood as a vorstellen, literally “to put in front of oneself” the thing to be thought, which would depend on a “wanting” in the sense of a “will”, but authentic thinking would consist in a “waiting”, though not an “expectant” waiting, in which one lets that which is to be thought come to reveal itself to understanding. The key concept for this to happen is “let go” (in German loslassen; the original title is Gelassenheit, which is translated as serenity, but is literally the state of letting go. Serenity understood in this way, is a state of no-intention. Such a state would therefore also be the one from which artistic creation takes place: the artist abandons any kind of will or concrete idea of representation so that “it”, (whatever this may be) may make use of him so as to manifest itself as oeuvre. Seen from this perspective, the artist would be a “means” or “channel” for something which does not proceed from his will, but from the “invisible” to manifest itself precisely as oeuvre.

A similar sense of “no-intention” is suggested by a brief commentary about the act of painting in the work of the Amercan painter Jackson Pollock:

“At a certain moment, the canvas seemd to appear to one American painter after another like the arena in which to act rather than reproduce, redesign, analyse or express an object, actual or imagined. What had to happen on the canvas was not an image but an event.

The painter did not approach the canvas anymore with an image in his mind; he went towards it with some material in his hand so as to do someting to this other piece of material [the canvas] in front of him. The image would be the result of his encounter.”
Harold Rosenberg, 1952.

On the other hand, the Swiss painter Helmuth Federle, is of the opinion that art should be “a place of orientation of the human being. And this is, in the widest sense of the word, a philosophical-spiritual magnitude – the work of art as a place of orientation of being in the view of death.” And to a question with regards to his way of working, he said that he encounters solutions through “no-intention” (Absichtslosigkeit). This no-intention also takes place in other areas of art. Borges, poet and writer, says in one of his essays: “In art nothing is as secondary as the intention of the author.” And Mozart himself mentioned in one of his letters, that music “comes to me”, it sounds in his head and when a work is completed in his head, he limits himself to transscribe “it” on paper. This may be the reason that there is apparently not one errata or correction in his musical scores. There is no intention in these cases either. It seems that the work of art has to occur through the human being without him having a specific intention to configure it. He is only the executor.

All these commentaries coincide in different aspects. The artist seems to void himself of any idea or will of representation: he works from a thematic void and puts himself in a disposition to realise his work without bearing in mind how or what will be the result. From this letting go of the will and the corresponding no-intention, the artist produces an oeuvre where all kinds of events are taking place. If the art is visual, painting or sculpture, there occur forms, volumes, materials, colours, lights, textures, contrasts, relations; if it is a musical work, sounds, rythms, harmonies, etc. Such a work of art is not used as an ordinary “object”; it is destined for contemplation or audition and can affect an spectator or a listener in his intellectual or emotional texture. It has no practical end in view, such as a tool, for example. It is generally a unique oeuvre which cannot be repeated. The meaning of a work of art, if it has any, is not predetermind but appears and is formed in the process of becoming a material-visual object and, furthermore, this meaning may mean different things to different persons.

The artist is not bound to any exigence of communicability. This doesen’t mean, naturally, that art does not communicate, but what the artist pursues first of all, is to produce an event. And he can express himself in his work without conditioning factors except those he chooses or those which the technical means will impose in its realization.

The artist does not deal with clients who, for example, present him with a problem of communication with a briefing and, furthermore, indications of how to proceed according to his desires. The artist is his own client and he is the one who determines the rules of the game. And he doesen’t realise his work for a preexistent market with competitive products; he, his work is creating its own market. Each artist creates his own, therefore he doesen’t have to take into account if those who buy his art are going to be men or women, young or elders, he is therefore not bound by such conditioning factors when he is creating his work.

When a painter wants to put up his work for sale, he exhibits it in a gallery or a museum. There his works will be exhibited alone, without competitors. In this case, whoever goes to visit the exhibition with the intention to buy a work, will not have the election between one or other artist, but only between one or other work of art of the same artist. The works produced by an artist are considered in many cases as cultural, even cult objects, and enjoy high esteem. In the case of the work of a painter one could maybe say that that his cultural value resides in its unique character, in the quality of its execution but, especially in its aperture and revelation of new perceptions and of new visual universes.

4.
Having elucidated the meaning what is being understood by art and how a work of art is being produced, we have now to ask what we understand by design and how a work of design is being produced. The dictionary gives a very brief definition of this concept: “Design: delineation of a building or of a figure”. This definition is obviously insufficient since it limits itself only to one aspect of design. Therefore we shall quote two definitions by two persons, both located in both worlds of design and art.

What can be understood by design, understood in its universal meaning, is explained by Victor Papanek in a text titled “Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order”. (1947)

“All people are designers. Everything we do almost all the time, is design, because design is fundamental to all human activity. The planification and structuring of any act towards a desired and foreseeable end, constitutes the design process. (Emphasis added). Any intent to separate design, to convert it into a thing in itself, goes against the primary matrix which underlies life.

On the other hand, Dieter Rahms, the ex-chief of designer of the well known electrodomestic products of the Braun enterprise, explains in a more concrete manner what according to him is design, in a text titled “Omit what is not important”, (circa 1984):
“One of the fundamental principles of design is to omit what is not important so as to emphasize what is. The moment has come to rediscover again our surroundings and to return to the simple and basic aspects, for example to the items which have an obvious functionalism, not restrictive either in a physical or psychological sense. The products should therefore be well designed and to be as neutral and open as possible, leaving space for the self-expression of those who use them. Good design means the least possible design. (emphasis added). Not for convenience or reasons of economy. To achieve a harmonious and convincing form is certainly a difficult task. To do it in another way is simpler, though it may seem paradoxical; sometimes it is even cheaper but lacking reflection with regards to its production. Complicated and unnecessary forms are nothing but escapes from the designer which function as self-expressions instead of communicating the functions of the product. This is due to the fact that design is used in order to obtain a superficial redundancy… Design is the effort to make products in such a way thet they may be useful for people. It is more rational than irrational; more than resigned, cinical and indifferent; it is optimistic and projected towards the future. Design means to be persevering and progressive instead of escape and abandon. In a historic phase in which the external world has become less natural and more and more artificial and commercial, the value of design increases. The labour of designers can contribute in a more concrete and efficient way to a more human existence in the future”.
The previously indicated phrase by Victor Papanek, “The planification and structuring of any act towards a desired and foreseeable end, constitute the design process”, signifies that there is intention and will in this process (these two concepts are underlying the notions of planification and structuring). As has been exposed before, this is an entirely different case with regards to the artist. On the other hand, the concept of intention coincides with the ethymological meaning of design. This word has its origin in the italian disegno which, in turn, derives directly from the latin designio, the intention one pretends to realize. This last word contains design, which in English means design as well as intention, and it is always the context in which the word appears which will clarify which of the two meanings is the correct one.

From the text of Dieter Rams we underline the following statement, “good design mean the less possible design”. Design is not something which is added to an object, it is not a process in which art is being applied. Design must solve a problem and should disappear in its solution; it must never be the protagonist of an object. A designed object is a means to achieve some end and, as Papanek says, it must never be an end in itself. The object which is being designed is an object for something, to achieve some specific end, so it should be conceived in such a way as to facilitate its attainment in the most satisfactory way.

If we start from this notion of design, then we have to ask, as we did before in the case of the artist, how does a designer work in order to configure this kind of object? At the start of a project, does the designer also void/empty himself of any image and does he abandon any will of representation, such as the artist?

A design project always presuposes an assignment, which implies some kind of briefing in which the demands with which a design has to comply with are explained: the market in which it will be inserted; its competitors; its price; the material with which it will be industrially produced, etc. Another of the requirements is the communicability of the object to be designed. It must be able to transmit or communicate some specific concepts through its formal aspect. These concepts are expressed through words in the briefing and have their meaning in the area of language. But design has to express these verbal concepts through its colours, signs, forms, materials, textures, etc., so that they are evoked to the receiver. In other words: the designer translates these verbal concepts to is corresponding visual signs, just as a translator translates a text from one language to another.
Apart from very few exceptions, a designer does not work for himself but for persons or companies who have the necessity to produce an object, a product, an image of some kind. These persons or companies resort to a designer so that he may develop a solution for them. In order to do that he needs to know all the information and problems related to the object to be designed. The situation of a designer in front of a problem to which he has to find a solution, is not at all comparable to the situation of an artist who, as has been mentioned before, has to void himself of any will, image or idea. The contrary happens here in the case of the designer: to approach a project a designer needs much information, he has to understand the problems which a given design has resolve. What the designer has to conceive is the model of what shall be then produced, respectively reproduced in series. This also means that its viability as object also depends on the technical means for its material realization. To produce means series, serial production, all examples equal to the model. Here there is no unique work or oeuvre as in the case of the artist.

As has already been mentioned, a designer does not create a project for himslef, but for a client and this means an enterprise and a specific market. Any design project is done for a given market and this market can be for men, women, children of one or other social class, with specific cultural levels, incomes and habits. All this necessary information conditions from the beginning the focus a project has to start with and which determines and delimits the creative liberty.

Then, the design object, once inserted into the pre-existent market, will confront the competition of other design objects, with similar or same forms or functions, directed at the same target-public. It also has to be taken into account that the products of a specific market segment usually share certain sign typologies. There are pre-existing visual languages, with its own grammar and syntax, such as, for example, wine labels, perfume packaging, pharmaceutical products sold by medical prescription, etc. The great majority of them have in common the use of certain signs (roman typefaces, capital letters, heraldic shields, drawings, etc.) as well as the use of certain materials (kinds of paper, gold or silver stamping, embossings) which make comprehensible at first sight what they are and its appurtenance to a specific species of products. There are other visual languages: the flascs and packagings of perfume products; the corporate identities of banks; banknotes, etc. At the beginning of a design project the designer must take into account the existence of such pre-existing visual languages and adapt his project to these basic language-characteristics.

In conclusion: contrary to the quoted affirmation of Herbert Bayer, that the creative process of the designer and of the artist are “more or less the same”, in view of the arguments exposed here, it has become evident that the starting point of the processes which produce either a work of art or a work of design, are completely different. And this difference is determined precisely by the different starting points en each case, therefore, to make art and to make design are two different activities with different functions and purposes. Art is art, design is design.

5.
These considerations on the subject of the relationship art-design, point to the fact that at a certain moment of a given economic and cultural context, such as the eighties and the bad practice, or a erroneous concept of the design profession, has brought it to the situation described before, a grave situation inasmuch as it affects the credibility of design as such in society. Here we have pointed to a probable cause: the transgression of design by projecting objects  which aspired to share the pedestal of art together with objects already having become art, with the consequent sign-confusion for its users (as in the case of the objects of the Memphis movement, for example.)

If one probes deeper into this question, travelling the road from the described effects to its probable causes, one reaches the fundaments of the profession: the formation of the designer. And here one confronts the question if the last and ultimate cause of this problem is how and, also, who teaches design.

Previously the concept of “translation” has been mentioned in order to describe what characterises the design process. The designer could then be considered as a translator. This perception could be a starting point to re-think what a designer does when he designs and would suppose to evaluate the consequences of this approach with respect to the teaching of design. It would have at least one salutary consequence: it would disentail design and its teaching from its attachment to aesthetics, to the “personal” and artistic expression, and would lead the design-formation to fields of knowledge which are not taught nowadays. A designer, now understood as “translator”, would certainly need a different kind of practical and theoretical formation from the one he receives now. He evidently should also receive a visual formation, but it should be subordinated to the requirements of the specificty of design. An “artistic” formation which conduces to the designer’s “self-expression” should be completely rejected.

What has been exposed here points to the possibility to rethink the profession and which could lead to a salutary change of mentality, not only in the professional designer or student, but especially in the teacher. Here is where everything starts, since it is in the professional formation where it is being decided what kind of designers are being forged and those who are responsible of it are those who teach. In this sense one could also cuestion who is apt, or not, to teach. A good measuring rod to establish the suitability to teach and learn, is expressed in the words of the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his book What is a thing, (Die Frage nach dem Ding):

“Thus, this true learning is a kind of taking, in which the one who takes only takes what he already has. To this learning corresponds also teaching. To teach is to give, to propose; but in teaching one does not so much propose what can be learned, but proposes to the student to take for himself what he already has. If the student only takes what is proposed to him, he does not learn; there is only true learning when he becomes aware that he already has that which he takes; there is only true learning when that which one takes is a giving-to-oneself and when is is experienced as such. To teach, therefore, means to let others learn: to lead each other to learn.

It is more difficult to learn than to teach, only who really can learn, and only while he can, only this one can truly teach. The true teacher differentiates himself from the student only because he knows better how to learn and wants truly to learn. In any teaching, the one who most learns, is the teacher.”

1 Art and Graphics, ABC Verlag, Zurich 1983
2 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 18/19, 2002
3 Diccionario ideológico de la lengua española Julio Casares, 2nd edition
4 Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding  (What is a Thing), Max
Niemeyer Verlag, Thübingen

The scarce knowledge in our latitudes of this eminent design master is due to various reasons. On the one hand, “italianess” and “englishness” always seemed to be more kindred or “in tune” to Spanish sensiblity than “germaness”. (This may be the reason why the teachings of the Ulm school has had practically no echo at all in Spain.) On the other hand, he is barely known as an author either, even though he has published several books in German and English; a few of which have been published in Spanish. But the basic reason for the scarce knowledge of this personality is due to the man himself. He shuns any kind of spot light and refuses to appear in the mass-media. He doesn’t give any interviews and one can count on one hand the times he has been present at congresses or big meetings. Recently he even refused the highest award with which the German government honours outstanding citizens.

This attitude-rectitude is in stark contrast with the common tendency of our epoch to arduously seek personal recognition, to find a nest for the particular “I”, the ego, in Universal History, a nest for posterity. The designers and architects of our latitudes are no exceptions in this sense: the yearning for the “I” and contempt for the “We”; the promotion of the Individual and disdain for the Cause. Though little known in professional circles, Otl Aicher is one of the great personalities of European design and one who has most contributed to its theoretical and pedagogical expression. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that his fame is inversely proportional to his importance in the history of design of the twentieth century.

Otl Aicher is now 69 years old and works and lives with his wife, Inge Scholl, in Rotis (Germany). In a private publication, he described Rotis as a place “with an extension of 4 hectares, one of which is a forest, one with houses and two hectares are grassland and is 625-655 meters above sea level.” It has three inhabitants: himself, his wife and a daughter.

Own water, energy and orchards guarantee them independence, an outstanding feature in the life and work of this man who claims to be a Celt. These tree dwellers understand their territory to be an autonomous republic, located between two Länder in the south of Germany. As in the case of other countries, this republic has its own political program:

· Promotion of liberty of speech, thinking and meeting

· Elimination of noise produced by aircraft

· Development of counter-models with respect to actual politics and centralized economy.

Apart from political goals, the cultural ones are no less clear and forceful:

· Elimination of the difference between culture and civilization

· Rehabilitation of concreteness. Its value resides in its use and not in some superior concept or ideal.

Otl Aicher embodies a way of thinking which is permanently in motion, which is not established, that is to say, not connected with the ordinary run-of-the-mill, and this may well be the reason why one will hardly find his name in the official establishment of his country. Aicher’s thinking doesn’t nurture itself so much with theory – in this sense he is not an “intellectual” – than from the daily relationship he establishes with that which is concrete and real. And what could be more real and concrete than the things which surround us in day to day life: objects of all kinds or the paraphernalia of signs which litter the horizon of the urban animal? That which is concrete and real, that which has this aspect and which is useful in this or that circumstance, all this which in itself comes to interpellate him, is what incites Aicher to think, or rather, orders him to think. In the relationship between man and that which is real and concrete, between subject and object, vision is, of all the human senses, that which most competently accounts for concreteness and reality. In contrast to the Cartesian affirmation which refutes sensitive evidence (“appearances deceive”) and which proclaims that only in pure thinking resides reality, Aicher affirms: to see is to think and to think is to see.

With this “simple” and forceful affirmation Aicher abruptly catapults us from our daily opinions about this and that, to a place of origin which is always prior to any discourse: to see is a priori; culture is a product of the fact that human beings see.

Some of the basic notions from the ancient Greeks, such as theous, God, théatro, theater, the place where the god made his apparition; theoretikós, the one who knows how to see with intelligence, etc., share the same verbal root: theo/thea: to see, the view. This indicates that vision was to them a fundamental concept in any kind of relationship between man and the world, and inasmuch as that which has been thought, imagined, built by them, constitutes the basis of European culture, vision, to see, continues to be basic and makes possible this relationship. Aicher’s affirmation, that to see is to think and to think is to see, is even more significant if we take into account that for these same Greeks the alyhteia, the truth, is that which reveals itself and becomes presence, and since any presence has an appearance, it offers itself to vision, to be seen. Vision recognises truth. In Aicher’s language, German, to see is called sehen, but also wahrnehmen, wahr=true, nehmen=to take, literally to take-truth-in-seeing. And truth, in this same language, is called Wahrheit. As a designer who thinks, Aicher feels interpellated precisely by this fact, that to see, is to see truth. As a consequence we could say that the designer, when he designs one or other entity, he endows it with an appearance (to see) and inasmuch as it is a being-at-hand (object) or a being-at-view (sign), this entity carries its truth to the encounter with its user or spectator. To design would therefore be to confer shape to the truth of an object or sign.

When Aicher affirms that to see is to think, he obviously doesn’t refer to our daily and accustomed seeing, which does not know how to reflect on things and to see them in their being-so. He refers rather to a reposed looking and seeing, a meditative seeing which leads one to think, that is, to ask: what is, in its fundament, that which reveals itself to vision? What is that the seen entity reveals with regards to its being-so? This question leads Aicher to think further: once understood the raison d’être of an object, its “function”, he asks: how can we make it more efficient? These considerations lead him to a kind of “essentialist” way of thinking about the design of objects, to the concept of a formal despoilment which favours the coming to presence (appearance) of the proper nature of the object. The signs and objects designed by Aicher are characterised by this common feature and have, in this sense, a kinship with the traditional Japanese objects: formal purification, matter converted to service.

Otl Aicher is author of several books on a wide range of subjects. Some of them are professional books, such as the already mentioned Sign systems in visual communication, The world as a project, The kitchen for cooking, (all of them published by Gustavo Gili Publisher, Barcelona). A recent book of his is about the alphabetic type face system called Rotis. This alphabet, designed by him, is something of a novelty in the field of typography, similar to that which in its day was Frutiger’s Univers program. Up to now the different kinds of typefaces were clearly delimited: the family of sans-serif types (Futura, Helvetica, Univers, etc.) the family of roman type faces: (Times, Garamond, Bodoni, etc.), the family of gothic type faces, etc. However, the Rotis system encompasses two different typographic families, a sans-serif and a roman one, with two intermediary types, a kind of “romanised” sans-serif, and a “sans-serifised” roman.

Another aspect of Aicher’s ideology is his use of the German language in his writings. As one may be aware, the substantive words in this language all begin with a capital letter; for example: the Man, the House, the Car, the Sun, the Book, etc. But since Aicher’s ideology does not accept the notion of authority in any aspect, he has abolished the capital letters in his writings since this, to him, is precisely a symbol of authority, so he writes everything in lower case, and he does it even after the dot of the last word of a sentence, and the following word of a new sentence also starts with a letter in lower case. All of this, and said with due respect, does not exactly allow for a fluid reading. In the translation into Spanish of his book the world as a project, this unusual way of writing German has confused three translators claiming to speak perfect German… So much for the Italian proverb: traduttore = tradittore (translator = traitor)

Other literary works are of a more personal character, such as innenseiten des krieges, (interiorities of the war, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1985,) in which he talks about his life under Hitler’s Nazi regime and his experiences during the Second World War. In another book, gehen in der wüste, (walking in the desert, ex-libris publisher, Zürich 1982) he relates his walking-trips in the desert of North Africa. The photographs which accompany his text reveal landscapes of such utter beauty that one understands that they must have constituted a kind of “absolute” experience for him. Along the innumerable steps walked for days and nights in these deserted landscapes, devoid of the habitual visual references, in these extreme conditions of the surroundings, Aicher must have experienced the concrete and real in a compelling way. There his thinking is directed to the most immediate reality: the shoes, the clothes, the materials, protection, eating, drinking: he submits to rigorous examination everything he wears, what he has in his backpack, because his life could depend on the efficiency of each object whether utensil or clothes. In his design work, Aicher proceeds with the same characteristic rigour and independence. Not all entrepreneurs could aspire to become his clients. His refusal to work for one or other of them may often have been motivated by the fact that he considered the client’s product unacceptable or contrary to public interest. To more than one of these with whom he refused to work, this attitude impressed them to the point that they returned to Aicher, asking him to resolve precisely that which had motivated his refusal to collaborate with them. Aicher not only designed objects and signs, but also the philosophy and the public attitudes of the companies he worked for, endowing them with a new way of being in the world.

His critical and independent thinking corresponds with another of his characteristic traits: integrity. Though this may suggest some moralistic connotation it must be understood in its original sense: the state of being whole, entire; that which restores something to its integrity, to its wholeness. In his article The eye: medicine and communication, (ON magazine no. 121), Aicher concludes his reflection saying: “…we have to expand the culture of calculation with the culture of vision.” With these words he points to the disequilibrium existing between two worlds of understanding what is real and concrete and to the necessity to make whole again that which is separate; to restore integrity to the relationship of man with the world, with things and with other human beings.

Published in ON magazine (1991)

In order to introduce a common currency to all the countries pertaining to the European Union, on February 1996 the European Monetary Institute (EMI), predecessor of the Central European Bank, presented a competition for the design of the new banknotes. Not everybody could participate. Only members countries of the European Union had the authority to invite in each case three designers, the great majority of which had never designed banknotes in their professional life.

All the chosen participants were invited to a meeting in Frankfurt, official seat of the EMI, where technicians explained to them the extraordinarily complex material producton of banknotes, the process to be followed for the delivery of the projects and, also, the proceedure chosen to determine which would be the winning project.

Each participant received two briefings: one conceptual and the other technical. The first one expressed the two communication concepts on which a project should be based, and one could choose one or the other or could present a project for each of the two concepts. The first of these was “Ages and styles of Europe”. The period which had to be represented in each of the seven banknotes, was indicated in the briefing as well as its corresponding colour:

• € 5   —   grey   —   Athens, Rome
• € 10   —   red   —   Romanic
• € 20   —   blue   —   Gothic
• € 50   —   orange   —   Renaissance
• € 100   —   green   —   Baroque
• € 200   —   ochre   —   19th century
• € 500   —    violet   —   20th century

The second communication concept was “abstract-modern”. This concept, of very broad interpretation, actually left the choice of the concrete theme for the design of the seven banknotes to the designer himself who chose to work on this concept. For both communication concepts, however, there were a great number of limitations and conditioning factors, one of them being the fact, that the content of an image chosen to represent an age, had to be unidentifiable. In other words, if one chose a portrait, for example, the portrayed person should not be identifiable, nor its painter nor the museum where it was exhibited. The reason for this norm was dictated by the politicians, who, as usual, put their political foot in things, declaring: “… we don’t want to create nationalisms between the European countries…”, because, supposing that, for example, someone would choose the portrait of the Mona Lisa to portray an age, that would immediately evoke the name of Leonardo da Vinci and, consequently, Italy, which, according to these gentlemen, would “discriminate” other countries of Europe…

The technical briefing, on the other hand, represented a challenge of unusual complexity which conditioned to a very high degree the design of the banknotes. The dispositions which had to be taken into account in order, if not to make impossible, at least make it difficult to falsify the banknotes, were of unprecedented complexity. Similar precautions against falsification are also reflected in the printing of the banknotes, apart from a special paper, four different printing systems are used besides a silver stamping print, with visible and invisible security measures. To satisfy all these technical and conceptual requirements was extraordinarily complex but, at the same time, a very interesting creative and intellectual challenge.
The participants in this competition had a time limit of six months to realize their projects and when the delivery date arrived, one had to send them to a notary in Francfort. Since all these projects were going to be submitted to different commitees who were going to analyse them in terms of their technical feasability and, later, to a jury, one had to take all kinds of precautions so that nothing in the projects would indicate who designed them or from where they proceeded. 27 projects were presented under the concept of “ages and styles of Europe,” and 17 under “abstract-modern.”
Once approved by the technical commitees, the projects were then submitted to the jury whose task consisted in reducing, by different votations, the number of projects of both communicational concepts to 5 in each category. The jury consisted of 15 persons from different countries of the European Union and were experts in the history of art, marketing, design and communication. Later, these 2×5 projects were subjected to a public poll in different capital cities of Europe.

According to Mr. Duisenberg, the then president of the EMI, three projects obtained the same degree of acceptance on the part of that public, though he did not reveal which ones. “So we,” he said, in other words he and his colleagues, ”chose this project [the one now in use] because we like the symbolism…” Ah, but is there a symbolism in these banknotes we use in everday life…? Apparently there is, but unfortunately no one of those who use these banknotes is aware of it…

Now, there exist on the market an endless number of groups of products which can be classified as pertaining to one or other “product language” or established “visual language”. There a groups of products which, even though individual products pertaining to one of such group are different one from another in their visual aspect, they neverteless share common visual features. Examples of such “languages” are, for example, wine labels; perfume packagings; pharmaceutical products which are sold only with a medical presciption, or, precisely, the visual language of banknotes. In a publication in Spanish one can appreciate this “visual language” especially well. In it the banknotes corresponding to 37 countries from all over the world are shown. All, with the exception of three countries, have portraits on the front side. One of these exceptions is South Africa which shows animal “portraits”, and the banknotes of Holland and Hongkong, show only signs of different kinds. The portraits shown may be of a king, a queen, a chief of state, a discoverer, a poet or any other person who is not only important to the country which portrays him, but is also known internationally. This bestows prestige to the country. For example in Spain, on the different pesetas banknotes there was, on one, the portrait of the king Don Juan Carlos, on another, Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America, on yet another, Pizarro and other important figures of the country and also known in the rest of the world. On the reverse side of the notes there was always some illustration which represented some specific or unique aspect of the country.
Practically all the partipants who had cosen the “Ages and styles of Europe” concept, understood this aspect in this same sense, inasmuch as they had chosen the portrait as the main visual feature, as could be seen in the exhibition which later on was organized to show all the projects to the public.
In this respect it is of interest to mention that at the time when the invited designers were working on their projects, the National Bank of Switzerland emitted the series of the new banknotes. On the front side there are portraits of well known cultural personalities who through their oeuvre have not only achieved personal fame but also for their country: Le Corbusier, architect; Giacometti, artist; Honegger, musician; Ramuz, writer; Sophie Täuber Arp, painter; Burckardt, historian. On the reverse side one can see in each case one or other oeuvre of the person. These banknotes transmit an excellent image of Switzerland as a country of culture. To anyone who might have one of these banknotes in his hands, we would recommend him to make a visual “excursion” on any one of them with a thread counter, in order to discover what the eye alone cannot see and one will be utterly astonished. (In its day, a representative of the Bank of Spain qualified them as the Rolls Royce of banknotes, practically impossible to falsify.)
These banknotes, as well as those mentioned before of the different countries, are characterized by the fact that they are graphic self-representations which are self-explanatory. One does not need to make complicated symbolic-mental operations for their understanding; all the visual elements contained in them are clear and comprehensible for the users. The only thing one has to do is to look at them.

These foregoing lines serve as a background for some commentaries about the Euro- banknotes used all over Europe. It doesen’t happen often in a designer’s lifetime, that a graphic design “product” such as the Euro, is being used by hundreds of millions people in the whole of the European continent, and this awakens the interest to know how the citizens see these banknotes and what they think of them.

I was interested to find out what the people’s opinion was, and since the introduction of the Euro in 2002, I made my personal inquiry. Though I have not counted them, I estimate that I must have asked the same question to, roughly, between 100 and 150 persons. These were taxi drivers; Bank employees; professional design colleagues; employees of grocery shops; friends, etc. The question asked was simple: “Could you tell me what image is on the front side of the Euro banknotes and which on the reverse side?” To my stupefaction, not one, I repeat, not one! of the persons was able to answer my question because they had never looked at the banknotes!! The answer in all cases was, “No, I don’t know;” they then took one or other banknote out of their wallet and looked at it. First they looked at the front side and said, “well… a door or a portal…” and turning the note around, “… a bridge… It is a bridge, right?” This question was asked by many of the interrogated people and led me to the conclusion that the bridges on the backside of the 10.-, 20.- and 10.- Euro banknotes are badly drawn. Looking at them it seems that the intention of the designer was to represent the reflection of the upper part of these bridges on the water flowing below them with horizontal lines. But when a bridge is reflected on the water which flows below it, the reflected part is not the same as the superior one, it is blurred due to the movement of the flowing water, but in those mentioned banknotes the symmetry between above and below is such that, curiously, what visually predominates is an empty round shape between the supposed bridge and its supposed reflection which, consequently, confuses the reading of that which pretends to be a bridge.

I still continue to this day with my inquiry and, recently, I asked the same question I had asked all the other people, to three barcelonese friends, and they answered without hesitating a second, “the portrait of our king, Don Juan Carlos!” When I asked them to take out one or other Euro banknote, they were stupefied that there were no portraits on the bills nor the one of the king of Spain…!

Now, in this personal inquiry the most significant point was, that no one asked himself about the why and wherefore of doors, portals or bridges on all the banknotes. As I was told at the Central Bank of Spain, in the poll which was undertaken in different capital cities of Europe in order to find out which was the project most liked, the majority of the people questioned didn’t have any idea of what to think about the presence of these doors, portals or bridges, and they only understood their meaning when the pollsters themselves explained it to them, in other words: open doors or portals? This means that you can go freely through them from one side to the other, therefore = free access from one country to another. Bridges? A bridge unites one shore with another shore, ergo, the bridges pretend to symbolize the union of the different countries. Then, the fact that not one of the people I asked these questions had even looked at the banknotes, has in my view only one possible explanation: its design is of unsurpassed mediocrity. As mentioned, it merits a “Summa cum laude” to one of the greatest mediocrities which have been produced in the area of graphic design.

I don’t pretend that my personal inquiry  has a universal validity, but I do suspect that it is quite probable that very many other persons have not understood these symbolisms either. This result shows beyond any shadow of doubt, that it was the designer’s intent to make a symbolic communication on the subject of “Ages and styles of Europe” on both sides of the banknotes, and that this intention was neither looked at nor understood. Therefore, the communication intention did not have its intended effect, the message has not been understood. This means that the intent to make a symbolic communication on banknotes is, from the point of view of the “visual language”, an error, a grave error, not to say a stupidity. Another grave error was the fact that the decision about which would be the most adequate project was decided by the mentioned Mr. Duisenberg, a banker, of whom one may not expect a great knowledge of semiology, of signs and how they are understood, or not understood. And, finally, the idea of the politicians to anonymize the portraits which could figure on the banknotes “in order not to foment nationalisms,” is another absurd aspect, like many other such decisions by these personages. Nationalisms exist and will exist independently of the fact that there are portraits of a historic personage of one country and not of others. On the contrary, Europe has given birth to great figures in art, music, literature, science, etc., who have contributed to build the foundations of European culture, which, furthermore, has become western civilization; therefore, the portraits of some of these figures really merited  figuring on this European symbol which the euro banknotes are, and in this way to remind everybody who uses them, of what a great and marvellous cultural inheritance we, Europeans, share.

Europe, the cradle of culture, the continent which gave birth to grandiose works of the human spirit, merited a better self-representation than this vulgar mediocrity that we, the Europeans, are condemned to carry in our wallets thanks to the incompetence of  politicians.

The idea of a program, of a system encompassing the entire range of typographic alternatives of a font, was so novel that it could well be classed as an historical milestone. The actual concept of a “program” as a method of work within the field of design has not been given much thought, and even less practice. I recall only one case, apart from the Univers: Otl Aicher’s Rotis typographic family, although, as we know, its approach is very different to that of Univers. Also worthy of mention within this context, is the importance of a “program” in the work of Karl Gerstner, both as designer and painter, in his book Designing programs, whose main motto significantly says: “Instead of solutions to problems, programs for solutions.” This represents a new and intelligent way of conceiving the design process.

To come back to Adrian Frutiger, I met him personally a number of years later. It was in 1960, in Paris. I had just returned from New York and made a stopover in that city to see my lifelong friend André Gürtler who, coincidentally, was working with Adrian at the time. He introduced us and we established an immediate rapport. Shortly after moving to Barcelona in 1961, I began to teach at the recently founded Elisava School of Art and Design. During the four years I taught there, I came to realize that there was no bibliography on design and typography in Spanish. It was imperative that both students and teachers should have access to professional literature. Therefore, one day I visited the editor Gustavo Gili in with the proposition that they publish a collection of books on these subjects. As at the time there were no precedents for this type of publications and design was, moreover, something new and unknown, the editor considered that it would be better to begin with the publication of books covering a broader subject-matter than just design. In this way we started the Visual Communication Collection and during its life we published 45 titles on a wide variety of subjects, such as art, typography, semiology, mass media, photography, design, colour, etc.

Some years later, in 1979 to be precise, and once Gustavo Gili had verified that the books on design published as part of this collection had filled a clear market need, he proposed that I should work on a specific collection on the subject, today known as the GG Diseño Collection. This proposal opened the way to my suggestions that a series of books by the great masters of design and typography  such as, for example, Adrian Frutiger, should be published.

The first of his books to appear in the collection was Zeichen, Schriften, Symbole, Signete, Signale, (signs, typefaces, symbols, logotypes, signals.) Published in 1981, it has since then been continuously reprinted; currently in its ninth edition, it has become a classic in the collection. A second book, En torno a la tipografía (About typography), was published by GG Diseño in 2002; the third one was Adrian Frutigers Buch der Schriften, (Adrian Frutigers book on typefaces) and published as El libro de la tipografía (The book of typography), in 2007, and the last, fourth one, Reflexiones sobre signos y caracteres, (Reflections on signs and types), appeared in 2007.

This editorial activity enabled me to establish frequent both epistolary and personal contacts with Adrian, and over the years we established a cordial friendship which has, of course, been shared with my friend André Gürtler.

Some years ago, Rubén Fontana, a dear friend and editor of the tipoGráfica magazine, advised us that he was planning on organizing a congress on typography in Buenos Aires, and he asked André and me if we thought we could convince Adrian to travel to Argentina to participate as a special guest. This mission involved a visit by both of us to Adrian’s home in Bremgarten, Switzeland. It was the first time I had seen Adrian after a number of years, and it was a very happy occasion. On the main reason for our visit, he commented that due to his health (he recently had several coronary bypasses) it would be impossible for him to travel to Buenos Aires. He nevertheless expressed his willingness to participate through a videoconference, although in the end the idea of the congress did not materialize.

This visit left its mark on me since it revealed an aspect of Adrian Frutiger that I later recognized as my own personal yearning.

During the day we spent with him we talked about a number of subjects, among them, of course, typography, and also about how design is currently being taught, especially in relation to this digital era. In addition we covered subjects such as corporate identity and other professional aspects that led to a rich dialog. We also talked about his latest book, on which he was working and for which he later asked me to write a preface. This book is, precisely, the one I already mentioned, Reflexiones sobre signos y caracteres (Reflections on signs and types).

On my return journey I had a strange physical sensation, one difficult to put into words: feeling a kind of flow of energy, a feeling of well-being or of fulfilment. I was at first unable to define why I felt “fulfilled.” It was only later that I perceived what I was feeling: the dialogue with Adrian, during the long hours we spent together, transmitted something that, once formulated conceptually, I recognized as a vital personal goal: everything he said and everything he did radiated an impressive calmness and peace. His way of speaking, of being, his gestures, his absolute command over what was being talked about, created a mental image that, to put it somehow into words, was ”a source of tranquility,” an image that, because of its similar meaning, I also associated with the concept of “serenity.” The association of “Frutiger” with “serenity” led me to yet another association, with Martin Heidegger’s Serenity, a small philosophical masterpiece that made a strong impression on me years ago and which led me to the folly to translate it into Spanish. In order to try to explain this possibly enigmatic relationship between Adrian and this book, I will make a brief summary of its content.

It’s title in German is Gelassenheit; however, its translation as Serenidad into Spanish, is but a pale reflection of the connotations of the German word. The governing verb of Gelassenheit is lassen, whose basic and essential meaning is “to detach, to abandon, to let go…” This small work consists of two texts; the first is a lecture that the author gave im Messkirch, his native city, on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the birth of the composer Conradin Kreutzer, a regional musician. The second text, and to me the most important one, is entitled Debate on the place of Releasement and consists of a conversation between three persons who discuss the essential nature of thinking. As the German language so marvellously expresses it, the conversation is construed on the bases of words-axes, each of which has the basic meaning of lassen, (release, let go, detach…): ablassen, (to cease, to desist); überlassen, (hand over, leave something to someone); loslassen, (let go, loose, release); zulassen, (literally, to admit, let in); gelassen, (calm, composed, serene), and so on.

The thinking that is questioned in this fascinating text is western thought understood as vorstellen, that ist vor, before, in front of, and stellen, to place, to put; in other words, to place that which is to be thought in front of oneself in order to think it. That action of “to place in front of” is always based on a wanting, on an act of will. The intellectual journey of the three interlocutors as they ponder the matter reaches a point where it becomes evident that there is an inescapable need to abandon, to part with that will in order to reach a state of non-will, since only then would the advent of Serenity be possible. This would involve the loslassen, the releasing, the letting go of or freeing oneself from the habit of this desire, always understood as an act of will.

The things, both real and in our thoughts, that surround us, are always hingestellt, (or “put there”) or also vorgestellt, (“put before”) in a horizon that is also always the contrada. Contrada is an old Castillan word whose basic meaning is “what comes countering from the surroundings of the subject,” such as, for example, in an “encounter” with something or someone. The essence of the contrada would therefore be its contrante, its countering nature. (In another text Heidegger also states that things are “thinging” and the world is “worlding.”) The conclusion reached by the three participants in the conversation is that the real thinking should no longer be a vorstellen, a “placing-before” of the thing, but a Warten, a wait, although not an Erwarten, an expectant awaiting. This wait is the wait of the “contrar de la contrada”, (i. e. The “countering” of the “country”, i.e. that which comes from the surrounding of the subject) the wait for Serenity. It no longer desires to represent, but to wait for the things themselves to reveal their essence, their true being, by means of this “countering” of that which surrounds the subject.

This Loslassen, this letting go, loosing, releasing, in this case of the will in order to permit the advent of the Gelassenheit, fascinated me because I consider that there is a surprising coincidence between it, the Gelassenheit, understood as such, and Buddhist thinking that has the same postulate: to cease suffering it is essential to let-go, release, free oneself from what causes pain and, ultimately, free oneself from everything that ties a human being to the world, since this world is the first and last source of pain. And the calm and detachment I sensed in Adrian was like the incarnation of this Serenity. It matched the mental image I had formed of a “serene” being.

All I have here sketched briefly on this serenity, was the personal and intellectual undercurrent of these notions relating to “tranquility”, “peace”, “detachment”, which I sensed during my meeting with Adrian. They were, deep down, as I already mentioned, a personal yearning. In reply to a letter that referred to this “serenity”, he himself stated: “For many, many years an old postcard with a painting by Anker [a well known Swiss painter] has hung on the wall beside my bed; it depicts a grandfather with his grandson on his knees, and both are asleep. The grandfather’s face radiates peace. That same peace that I yearned for has come to me like a marvellous gift. I cannot give it a name. I do not know with certainty where it comes from nor how I received it. Naturally, I have medical and psychological explanations. What is essential is to be able to accept unquestioningly.”

Before receiving his letter, I had written him to tell a short story that seemed to me an excellent way of describing this calm and serenity that he radiated: “A young girl from a small town was pregnant and her parents wished to know who the father of the baby was, but the girl refused to give his name. Only after a great pressure from her parents, she finally confessed: ‘The monk, there in the monastery, is the father.’ When the child was born, her parents took the baby to the monastery and knocked on the door. When the monk opened it, they said: ‘Here is your child, take care of it.’ All the monk said was ‘Ah!’, took the child in his arms, closed the door and cared for it as if he were the father. Some time later the young girl admitted that another man, and not the monk, was the father. Her parents then hastened to the monastery and again knocked on the door. When the monk opened it, they said: “Give us back the child, you are not the father”. Again, the monk only said ‘Ah!’, fetched the child, returned it to the girl’s parents and shut the door. The story ends with a comment on the spirit of the monk, “which at all times remained as quiet as the surface of a still lake.” In my letter I added: “The monk must have been in a state of ‘non-I’, of lack of ego. Had he had an ego he would have felt insulted by the thought of having fathered the child, and would have sent, like any of us would, its family packing. Possibly this state of ‘non-I’ could, at the same time, be a state of ‘non-time’, a state in which one is simply in the here and now, neither in the yesterday, nor in the before or tomorrow, but in the NOW! And I continue to to suppose that when a person is in this state, in an atemporal ‘now’, and a baby ‘falls’ from the skies, in a manner of saying, and moreover he is told that the baby is his, then it ’simply’ is so, it is what this ‘now’ involves and is unquestionaby accepted. Frutiger dixit.

I feel that this concept of Gelassenheit which Adrian radiated, and which I experienced, is also expressed in his tpographic fonts, in particular Frutiger and Meridien, as I mentioned in the preface to his book. They are my favorite fonts and my texts are always written in one or another of these two families.

I often say that Frutiger’s alphabets were designed for readers. This statement may appear absurd at first sight, since: aren’t all alphabets designed to be read? If in doubt consult a type specimen book in order to convince yourself that this thought isn’t so absurd. Designing an alphabet for readers means that from the very beginning the designer takes a secondary, and not primary role. In a project of this kind, the personal expression of the designer is not at the forefront but, rather, he “places himself at the service of the reader” and attempts to tailer the medium to the purpose it is desired to serve: reading. This is the ideal point in which a well composed text – with no tracking or gigantic white spaces between words – calmly and clearly transmits the content to the spirit of the reader who, once he has read it, will not even recall the lettering with which it was composed. The medium has disappeared, the objective has been achieved. The text has not materialized as an obstacle to the reader, it has not been imposed on him, other than in its need to transmit. Quite the contrary, it has fulfilled its purpose so well that it fades into anonymity. This is design in the purest sense of the word.

There is one further aspect I would like to develop briefly and which occurred to me upon reading Frutiger’s last book, Reflections on signs and characters. As in his other books, it contains many illustrations and what attracted my attention in this case was the profusion of hands, of different hands and in different positions. The reader might find two possible reasons for them: they coud be interpreted as a symbolic appreciation by the author for all his hands have achieved, or they could also be interpreted as “farewell” to the hands, depending from what perspective they are viewed.
Although Adrian’s hands have evidently played a fundamental role in the design of his fonts, it is well to recall, as he himself states in his DVD Adrian Frutiger, Der Mann von Schwarz und Weiss (Adrian Frutiger, the man of black and white) “All my fonts have been drawn by hand,” and we see images of how his hands draw the letters, a gesture that reminds us that for thousands of years man has done everything with his hands and that this experience has nourished his thinking. Without having to go further, until recently, we designers made our mock-ups by hand; copy was composed by hand; it was hands that painted the gouache background colours, etc. This is no longer so. The advent of the digital era has changed all that. In the analogical era hands were everything, however in this digital  era they no longer have the same function. There is no longer a direct relation between doing and thinking: hands produced experiences that were transmitted to the brain, which then decided how to act on that basis. Otl Aicher, in his book Analogical and digital, expressly mentions hands and their relationship with thought. In German this relationship is even more evident when he says: “hands can greifen, (that is to say to take, grab or seize things,) and hence the brain can be-greifen, that is, understand, comprehend”. Undoubtedly it was on the basis of similar reflections that the pre-socratic philosopher Anaxagoras coined the compelling phrase: “We think because we have hands.”

Nowadays, the hands of the typographer or designer no longer fulfill the same role in the exercise of their profession. Today, for any computerised process, the hand grabs a mouse, and leads an arrow to areas on the screen to carry out a variety of operations, such as drawing an alphabet. In such cases the hand no longer generates experiences that are subsequently registered by the brain which, in the course of a process of continuous feedback, decides instant by instant the most convenient actions to be taken. Today, in the digital era, this is no longer the case. I do not mean to say that we do not think when designing, but that this lack of relationship between what the hand does and the head thinks involves a certain distancing from reality and the thinking that used to be the consequence of the action of the person’s hand no longer exists. This is a momentous change and gives rise to questions that go beyond the profession of design or typography. As Bern Guggenberger states in his book The Digital Nirvana: “In the Internet and cyberspace, everything we previously called reality is called information. What does it mean in terms of life and coexistence when things, human beings and nature bid farewell to our most immediate experience? What will be the result of the loss of our original way of seeing on our power of discernment, on the birth of creativity and fantasy?”

From the viewpoint of all that has been said on the disappearance of the relationship between what the hand does and the brain thinks, and to conclude this article, we could well add an appendix to Adrian Frutiger’s successful biography by saying that he is one of the last great masters of typography who drew his alphabets by hand. It is probably necessary to say so, since the all-powerful daily presence of the mass media and in particular the preeminent “imbecilising” television, where everything is news, which provides us with everything to do with the present and erases the perspective of yesterday, of history. It would not be strange if people were shortly to think that hands were only used in the Palaeolithic period…