The Process of Design

Inspiration for invention can occur anywhere at any time in any circumstance.  However, a most common time for mental invention is when a designer’s mind is at rest, for instance, upon initially awakening or while drifting into sleep or during daydreaming.  My most creative “inventing” time is while I am NordicTracking each morning.  I spend that hour alternating between firmly focused and freely unfocused thinking about my writing day. 

 In addition to appealing shapes and geometrical patterns, quiltmakers are inspired to design quilts by alluring, unusual, and sometimes unexpected colour combinations, and, therewith, motivate other quilters to design similar and, at the same time, different quilts.  Does this speak of quilting  intertextuality, or merely of the highly contagious “quilting fever”? 

Similarly, writers are inspired by curious or compelling or charming, or otherwise remarkable, concepts with which we engage our readers.  Or, perhaps, the concepts themselves are not quite remarkable, but rather, the style and structure used by the author? 

What the audience sees and what the designer sees and wants his audience to see may not be the same.  Sometimes what is unspoken speaks loudest.  In this regard, memory and delivery are very involved with invention.

Texture is a part of invention.  Fabric texture can be felt.  What, then, is writing texture?  The texture of a text is the tone, or feeling, conveyed to its readers.  An essay, for example, can be leisurely or delightful or exaggerated or rich or thin textured.

As a designer visualizes his invention, he sets it forth in some sort of arrangement.  Seeing his vision, or a part of it, materialize into an arrangement, or structure, enables the designer to “invent” further and to delete the less meaningful parts.  Starting the structure can be messy, but revising—adding and deleting—strengthens the structural design.

Shade contrasts in quiltmaking and content contrasts in writing permit supportive portions to provide a background for the key elements, helping them to appear as the main attraction of a piece.  Not everything can, or should be, highlighted.  The most significant aspects can depreciate in importance if every section of a quilt or every statement of a text is of equal value.  Envision a quilt that is constructed wholly of navy blue and black fabrics;  what do you see?  Can you discern one small square or triangle from another?  The entirety is only a large dark mass.  Just as a light background fabric “sets off” a dark feature fabric, contrasts in writing provide varying values—which offer much more meaning to the audience.

Content contrasts, among which are antitheses in word choices or in descriptions of personalities and physical traits, focus audience attention onto the main point of a text.  For instance, the element of time can facilitate numerous arrangements, some of which are more interesting than others:  chronological order (a common narrative arrangement), reverse chronology (the news media arrangement), flashbacks (often used in biographical accounts), and flash-forwards (frequent science fiction structure).  Why do memoirs and biographies often use flashbacks?  Starting at some point that is not the beginning, and then providing glimpses of the past throughout the piece, can be much more engaging than a simple chronological account of a person’s life, particularly if the author is pursuing a certain theme threading through the subject’s life story;  the desired theme can, in that manner (of contrasting times), become the focal point of the narrative, stitching together the stages of a lifetime.

The invention and the arrangement come together to make the style.  If the invention and the arrangement do not adhere to each other, for instance, if they are rough against each other’s edges and fail to make a smooth seam, the style may be fractured so that it is not recognizable as any kind of style.  Compatibility of all elements of a quilt or of a text is essential for a successful, identifiable style.  Style is related to rhetor as well as to audience:  (1) Consistent style can be a “trademark” of an author;  (2) The purpose(s) for the targeted audience(s) may affect the style employed by the rhetor in any particular product.

Quiltmaking styles range from formally sculptured and classically designed country to neatly constructed traditional and wildly devised contemporary to fascinatingly created folkart and totally unplanned patchwork.

Universal writing styles include conversational, humorous, academic, technical, scholarly, scientific with specific field terminology, and too many more to mention at this moment, as well as individual writing styles of authors’ personal idiosyncrasies, such as Charles Lamb’s use of outdated diction. 

Personal writing styles evolve with practice and experience, and are, more often than not, deeply dependent on the style most commonly read by an author—due to the data deposited in the mind of a reader.  The read information manufactures memories which make meaning in the reader’s mind and give coherence and style to his succeeding authorial activities.

Making meaning connects memory and delivery.  People who join a particular audience generally do so in order to make meaning together.  Our foremost interests—work positions, leisure activities, family involvements, health conditions, special diets and exercise programs—our very lifestyles--enable unique, but likeminded, individuals to make meaning with each other. 

Memories—the images in our minds—give us understanding, or a lack thereof, of each other.  According to personal memories, audience members accept delivery of, and respond and react to, quilts and writings.

Audiences are dynamic and rather like a river:  water continually flows in and out, with some drops lingering longer than others.  Individuals are always entering and exiting different audiences, and we regularly maintain simultaneous memberships in multiple audiences, according to our memories’ meaning-making.  Different memories, then, are packaged for delivery to diverse audiences.

Memory and delivery, in the end, have to do with meaning-making:  using memory to make delivery.

For commentary more specific to writing design  and  quilting design, visit the appropriate pages.   To synthesize the material, study both pages.

*Quoted from my article "Teaching the Tools of the Five Classical Canons of Rhetoric to Composition Students through the Quiltmaking Design Process"--copyrighted 2006.