The daily puzzle was discovered in a schedule of games in the New York Times on-line. At the very end of the illustrated list of games offered each day was an unpretentious columned text that looked like credits in a movie, seemingly sundry extra information; a summing up. The list appeared to schedule the names of the puzzles published above with their bold, decoratively graphic identities, but there were more names on the list than this simple repetition, strangely itemised as 'Other Games.' One listing was Soduku, modestly promoted just as a set of black and white letters: the finger touched the word; a game opened and was completed. Directly below this listing was the word Set. Might this be another game? The word was tapped; another game opened.*
Boxes containing unusually different forms appeared, a few of which looked like squashed ovals, with some diamond-shaped, and others illustrated as outlines that looked like squiggly beans or fat, mirrored 'S's. Each form was coloured either red, green, or blue, and was left either empty as an outline, blocked in with parallel-lined shading, or filled solid. The graphic images appeared in what looked like a random set of shapes in an arrangement of twelve rectangles organised as a 4 x 3 grid. What was this muddle all about?
The instructions for the game were perused: one had to discover the sets within the cluster of shapes. An adjacent grid of blank rectangles that was to be filled in, defined the number of sets of three shapes one had to discover. The rules of the game were simple: a set was based on similarity and/or difference. One had to identify three shapes that had common features and/or variations in order to define a set. The variables were the shape, the colour, the shaded infill. The task began.
At first the shambles appeared absurd, silly, incomprehensible, but the more one stared at the mess, the more the idea made sense: a set was found; then another. After a while, another; and again, until the empty boxes had all been filled with a neat accumulation of surprisingly ordered markings. What was astonishing was that such simple sense could be embodied in an apparently ad hoc collection of shapes - a hidden sense of order, with its subtle richness and rigour entwined with its necessity in the apparent shambles.
The experience was mesmerising: the process of identifying sets was mysterious. There was a sense of a logical system that was difficult to identify sufficiently to allow one to apply it with explicit, self-conscious, mathematical rigour to achieve a predictably certain outcome. One's eyes glided over the mix looking for possibilities of sameness and difference at the one time, without knowing exactly how this was happening beyond being aware of the simplicity of the set and its precise interrelationship once one had been found. Why were these connections not more immediately obvious?
The challenge grew increasingly intriguing as more sets were discovered, with one repeatedly rediscovering and looking at the known sets, wondering with some disbelief how there might yet still be others: where could they be? The last set became the most difficult to see as familiar discoveries became more recognisable to the eye. Eventually the last set would be revealed. It might sound something like the muse revealing herself to the poet as has been described by many, but the experience was indeed mystically obscure. One was participating in a strange search that could not really be controlled as a purely self-conscious, predetermined process. The analogy with architecture, design, and experience came to mind. One looked in this manner while working on a project, seeking unknown possibilities and pondering potentials.
Here was an apparently sundry set of seemingly unconnected shapes that held within their collection precise sets of interrelated associations that all complied with the simple rules of sameness and/or difference. The idea that puzzles might form a model for one to try to understand design needs further review. The workings involved in assembling a jigsaw involve design thinking, as do other puzzles that expand the different complex experiences involved. There is the loose, accepting, vague but determined open seeking and sensing that knowingly meanders over unknowns in order to have them revealed as mysterious discoveries that properly fit the functions, be these purpose or its poetics - perhaps both together. While it is difficult to explain in words, the analogy of the puzzle allows parts of the design experience to be identified, re-enacted as it were, and reviewed with some singled- out, aloof awareness. The idea is something similar to looking with a magnifying glass to improve the detail reading of an object: the intrigues become a little more explicit without removing or stifling their mystery or context in the way that ‘design method’ studies do.
Then it became obvious that the experience of the Set puzzle could be used not only for design, but also to help us understand complexity in architecture, and contradiction too, with matters both the same and different being considered together - to sense their embodiment as fact and experience. It seems that words are not enough to try to explain this phenomenon: they are too easily dismissed as elitist, misguided twaddle; they are too remote from the experience itself, changing circumstances by establishing their own unique reality that defines a different set of interests and intrigues. The mix of shapes, hues, and shades in Set represented something like the exoteric and esoteric knowledge spoken of in traditional architecture - the public knowledge and the private knowledge that was both explicit and secretly intertwined in the forms. The first sighting of the 'mess' eventually revealed the inconspicuous order and the shared, intermingled, but separate structuring of the various sets.
This relationship can be used as a model to talk about richness in architecture. One sees the complexity in Wright's work - see https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/12/frank-lloyd-wright-accommodating.html: how the whole is immediately obvious, and how the tiny parts can all form their own inter-meshed rigour, have their own stories, both the same and different. It is a richness that lies in all good building. One sees it clearly in traditional art and architecture - see The Hindu View of Art, where rules define outcomes; rules that relate to social and cultural norms are further layered with meanings comprehended in accordance with one's understanding and knowledge. Here symbolism lies at the heart of order: how, e.g., the lion does not merely represent the sun, but is the sun, one of its aspects (Ananda Coomaraswamy): a sign merely points to the sun; directs one's attention to it, taking over in the same way that the finger pointing to the moon can.
Today we seem happy to indulge ourselves in interesting patterns using, to continue the analogy, the initial framework of the Set game as our singular palette without bothering about any latent complexity of order.# One is asked to admire a Gehry building, or some other 'self-expression,' in the same way as we look at a Hindu temple or a Christian cathedral. We sense, and can experience the superfluous complexities of the older works without really knowing how or why they are so rich, presuming that it might just be age, time that gives the immense, immeasurable depth; but we are asked to peruse and praise new works in the same manner, likewise knowing that the pompous exuberance lacks supporting substance beyond being identified as the new work of 'genius' X. Is the latent assumption that time will make meaning more explicit?
The experience is not unlike the superficial assessments made by those on social media - the flick, flick, flick, . . . next. There is little wonder that our era suffers from mental anguish when nothingness is all we have to live with, admire and discuss: mere hollow shells declaring themselves to hold substance, or asking the observer to create personal meaning out of a phantom - both outcomes being expressions of self-importance, the first where personal expression is promoted as being universally significant; the latter where personal interpretation is seen to be just as important to the world of self, enhancing its self-importance in a self-centred indulgence. One recalls the pretty young lady, alone in a skimpy swimsuit on the beach, posing with the wind blowing her long hair as she takes a selfie; then studies the outcome with admiration, only to repeat the process again and again with modified poses and varying snaps of stylish, chance arrangements created by the breeze in the hope of capturing an image that can be envied by all - as seen on TV, in the movies, or in an advertisement: ME! "Can you believe it?"
We need to rediscover how a rich complexity can be ingrained in our works so that life can be supported on a variety of different, diverse levels of meaning and understanding if we are to truly thrive away from our world of aesthetic surfaces, where things bespoke and different are acclaimed just for their 'interest' and 'originality,' without ever asking or thinking about the concealed sets that make sense out of apparent chaos; elements that shape its structure and give it essential, tangible depth. One thinks of the biblical: May be able to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height - (Ephesians 3:18 KJV).
Experience the Set puzzle, and ponder the possibilities for art and architecture. Consider the difference between a truly 'interesting' random shambles of shapes, and one with six sets of three layered into the mix that might appear similarly ad hoc. This is how puzzles are relevant to architecture and design: they touch on experience in the same way, but in a differently sensed manner.
#
One can envisage an endless variety of manipulations of the shapes, their colours, and their arrangement in rectangles set out on a 4 x 3 grid. The rectangles could be rearranged in numerous orderly ways, in horizontal, vertical, parallel, or askew or wriggly lines; even as hexagons and circles, or just be 'interestingly' jumbled in a random spread: maybe a bit of both too. Then there is the possibility of removing the shapes from their enclosures, perhaps leaving a few in, a few nearly out, and some 'cleverly' completely disembodied, likewise arranged to surprise with the 'originality' and 'creativity' of unique difference. In all of the various games, that could even include new shapes, colours, and even a cagey nothing, the importance is located in the primary visual effect rather than the richness of any internal relationship of sets which is considered an irrelevance to the initial impact, even a nuisance impediment. This is our era that sees no value in the complexity of things apparently simplistic and ordinary: everything has to do with bespoke, visual, impressionable appearances called 'self-expression.' One is asked to make of it what one might, whatever, with an ad hoc approach, somewhat like a Rorschach test, rather than search for any real integrity of ordering. The analogy clearly identifies the problems inherent in our architecture today - and our art too - where literally anything is possible just because it can be done. Here one recalls the wise question of the bewildered child seeking boundaries: "Can I really do just anything?" Modern art and architecture says "Yes," while child psychologists say “No.”
P.S.
Since discovering the puzzle in the New York Times, the paper has dropped this game from its offering. The 'Daily Set puzzle' can be found at setgame.com where it is explained that Set Enterprises Inc. is now part of PlaY MoNSter.
NOTE:
The process of design and its experience remains an enigma, yet there have been repeated efforts to describe or explain the process, to teach it, in much the same manner as art is tried to be taught. The terrible failure of this descriptive, prescriptive process can be see in the BBC 4 programme, The Joy of Painting presented by Bob Ross. The programme highlights the terrible outcomes with this 'How to' approach. The paintings remind one of the very worst of Victorian popular works, with a quaint, sentimental, cliched romanticism fuzzed into 'pretty' landscapes displaying every popular postcard vista imaginable.
The show is useful in highlighting what art is not. Maybe the message lies in the strict interpretation of the title, The Joy of Painting, suggesting a concentration on painting techniques alone; an approach that has little to do with art and its ideals, offering more of a therapeutic indulgence than anything to do with art. It is with this awkward awareness that one searches out analogies that might allow an understanding of the design process without destroying its marvellous mystery and magic, or intruding into the enigma of its 'methods.'
Tom Heath's book, Method in Architecture, Wiley, 1984, is an example of an attempt to demythologise the experience and the act of design. One fears that the application of this logical analysis of the design process will not give much joy in architecture. The pattern of embedded sets, overlapping and intertwined to give one integrated whole, holds more relevance to understanding design, and life itself, than any considered predetermined deconstruction and rational interpretation. We do not need certainty, just the open ambiguity of the pattern to help us understand something of the potential of richness and depth. One might use this concept to gauge failure rather than success.
AND MORE:
Puzzles are interesting in the way that they make experience more explicit. Take, for example, the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle. This challenge gives an array of six letters around a central letter. The task is to make as many words as possible using a minimum of four letters that always include the central letter. There is always at least one word that uses every letter. In this version of the game, the letters can be used more than once.
What is intriguing with this puzzle is how the eye sees and the mind interprets various combinations. One can stare for hours and see nothing, and then return to the letters some time later and see the word immediately. It is as though the mind and body become sensitive to the circumstance and continue to mull options and arrangements even when one is not thinking about the problem.
Could design thinking work in the same manner? The proposition is that we might learn more about the mysteries of the design process through these analogies of experience than through any systematic, logical analysis and interpretation that might seek prescriptive outcomes that are very likely to kill the thing most loved.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves. Oscar Wilde
Eric Gill Art-Nonsense and other essays Cassell Walterson London 1929
Frontispiece
If man is essentially a tool-using animal, the tool is from the beginning that of the artist, no less than that of the labourer.
The starting point of human progress is to be found in the highest type of knowledge - the intuition of pure being . . . man's development is not so much from the lower to the higher as from the confused to the distinct.
Christopher Dawson: Progress and Religion.
The Set puzzle can be seen as a model for the confused becoming more distinct: it also highlights how modern art and architecture is merely playing with mindless, inarticulate confusion, and delighting in its bespoke differences that brazenly 'entertain' the eye with "WOW!"s.
Indries Shah Thinkers of the East The Octagon Press, London, 1971
p.143
Sufian said
The wisdom which is invisible but which sustains is a hundred times better than the appearance of wisdom, for that has itself to be sustained.
*
Since writing this piece, the format has changed, and the Set puzzle has been dropped by the NYT.
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