Small · 1 August 2002
It’s not me: I finished judging entries last week (though just the idea of me pointing to the timely completion of anything sets off such a roar of distant laughter I probably shouldn’t even ... oh never mind).
Going through the 5k competition entries I had fun, but was struck by how many were assembled with a seeming desire to cram as much stuff as possible into a small space. I suppose this is familiar nature-abhors-a-vacuum thinking – find a space and fill it – such as informs so much design. Just the process of finding out if it’s possible to boot a Unix kernel or play a round of Tomb Raider in under 5 kilobytes would, I imagine, make for an appealing challenge. As a viewer, however, time and again I was required to stop and marvel at crafty concessions to limited space, as though the summary statement was, ‘look how I can simulate a warehouse in a closet’; one which makes a curious demand on the audience: to overcome wondering why it was done at all.
Scarce, I thought, were designers who embraced the smallness; who looked it in the eye and, instead of squinting, tried to imagine what good could come if such a space was all that was ever made available to them. Those who see that every container, no matter the size, can give only a portion of itself to the carriage of something else, and that (for want of a better word) appropriate presentation tends not to do well in crowded conditions.
The Book of Five Rings and My Life in 5k are two splendid entries from last year’s competition, unmatched this year.
Er, it’s not just what is there, or what is said, it’s also that which goes unspoken, and that which forms itself around the visible.
Trying to think of an analogy better to sum this up, I considered public speech: an orator who tries to fill one minute with an hour of ideas is going to get none of them across; a speaker who has a minute worth of content with which to fill an hour has the chance to render it myriad beautiful and ugly ways, to test the depths of proportion and frame, to render, perhaps, a narrative. Or to be as lifeless and boring as this paragraph. Something like that.
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