Design is about finding boundaries.
In many ways, a life worth living is very much the same. We explore, we poke, we prod, we delve, we dive, we go out on a limb, we roll the dice, we take a chance, and in order to find ourselves we go out in search of the edges of our world. This is how we determine our own limitations.i
As with anything worth doing, when we go in search of boundaries, we can sometimes find that we’ve missed the mark and overstepped our target. This is, of course, perfectly inevitable. It’s quite impossible that boundaries might be approached with the timidity and tenderness needed to ensure they’re never overstepped. There are simply too many areas of exploration and too little time in this life for such tepidness. Besides, you’ll never strike the right chord without risking that you might hit the wrong one a few times on the way there.ii
All of which brings us to blogging: that intersection of design and a life worth living.
Blogging is a medium through which one both expresses and explores, both trolls and challenges, both the reader and himself. The blogger may find that, re-reading a piece he wrote just a few months later, that he was so totally off-base that he barely recognizes himself in his own writing. I’ve certainly found this once or twice myself. And if I hadn’t, I would close up shop tomorrow and find myself a new cult. Blogging isn’t worth a fucking thing if it doesn’t reach a little farther, and a little farther still.
That’s the beauty of it really. Blogging is a platform for growth; at once public and permanent.iii It’s a space that one fills with one’s ever-evolving self. It’s a space designed quite specifically for that ever-evolution.
A blog, then, is a space filled with one’s portent of possible portmanteaus, sack of silly syllogisms, assemblage of astute anecdotes, panoply of philtered phrases, wealth of wicked whelps, tent of tangential tirades, and basket of bumbling brainfarts. Blogging is that enlightened glimpse into another person’s world, and occasionally, a glimpse into another dimension entirely.
This is what design is all about. This is what life is all about.
This is blogging: that finder of boundaries.
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- This is par for the course when working from causes; unusual, if not downright exceptional, though this may be. It’s important shit, this blogging.↩
- This is both inherent in what it means to take risks and explanatory as to why so few people grok design, living life, or much of anything at all.↩
- Though it’s perhaps more like “semi-permanent” because you can always stop paying those pesky hosting fees. But y’know what they say: freedom isn’t free!↩