dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
At the opening of the TDC47 and TDC2 2001 exhibition in New York City last week, designer/educator Carol Winer introduced a wonderful term to the world of type and design: “boundary disorders.” (Or perhaps this phrase has been part of her vocabulary for a long time; it was new to me, and it appeared to be new to everyone who heard it.) She suggested this as a descriptive name for a sort of disjunction and disconnection that afflicts many people and situations in the new century—especially designers.
The idea grew out of a conversation about spelling, of all things. Someone observed that people who grow up on computers with spelling checkers often don’t know how to spell, “and don’t have to.” (The same has been said about the arithmetical skills of people raised on calculators.) Although I said I thought the ability to spell correctly in our arduous and arbitrary language was probably a talent found in the same proportion in any generation, it’s certainly true that there’s a difference between having to rely entirely on your memory (or looking in a reference book) and having software handle much of the task for you as you work.
Personal Space
Carol suggested that the kinds of technology we all use break down many of the boundaries we set up and negotiate in our daily lives. In a sense, technology is all about breaking boundaries—geographic boundaries, productivity boundaries, etc.—but it doesn’t take many dinner-hour sales calls to figure to out that not all boundary crossing is positive.
Many boundaries we once took for granted are routinely crossed these days, with geographic boundaries being the most obvious: In a literal sense, people and ideas cross borders more freely today than ever (despite the best efforts of many governing bodies to prevent it). And technology has leapfrogged physical boundaries in so many ways that we’re quite used to feeling “closer” to someone thousands of miles away than to the people right next door. Yet in many ways our day-to-day expectations are still based on habits acquired through millennia of face-to-face communication.
“Have you ever been at a party,” Carol Winer said, “where someone is looking toward you and talking, but you realize they’re really speaking to a little microphone on their lapel?”
This reflects a confusion of personal boundaries. In any social interaction, we usually expect the lines of communication to have some clear physical relation to the closeness of actual human beings. If you think someone at a party is talking to you and it turns out they’re not, you’d expect to find the person they’re really talking to right behind you or next to you—not someplace else entirely. But these expectations can no longer be taken for granted. As we carry more and more modes of communication and information retrieval on our bodies in daily life, we may need wholly different notions of what a boundary is and where it lies.
Work and Play
How does this relate to designers? you ask.
That’s easy. Haven’t you ever been working on a project at long distance and spent a fortune on FedEx packages back and forth? And don’t you find that these days you’re saving on the FedEx bills but getting last-minute changes from clients by e-mail at any hour of the day or night? (Someone else at the TDC opening was heard to declare, tongue not entirely in cheek, “E-mail is evil!”)
Designers deal with boundary disorders on a daily basis. Now that clients can reach us nearly any time and any place, people tend to expect a quicker turnaround. The boundaries between the “work day” and the rest of the day—or the rest of the week or of life in general, for that matter—have mostly dissolved for anyone working in the creative high-tech field. We all recognize this (otherwise why would we laugh so loud at “Dilbert“?), but we may not think about what new kinds of boundaries are being set up—and violated.
How does the traditional boundary of the “deadline” change in this fluid environment? Does telecommuting, for instance, or working as a freelancer from afar make it easier to miss or push deadlines? Or does it simply reduce the elapsed time to smaller and smaller increments? Maybe some boundaries are better left unbroken.
In an e-mail comment on an earlier draft of this article, my own frequent editor on this column—creativepro.com’s Mitt Jones—raised an issue that seems likely to affect many designers: “I’m thinking of how we work with people from a distance electronically, often without ever having met them, and I wonder how this affects boundaries. When people deal with one another in person, they tacitly negotiate some types of boundaries, don’t they—interpersonal boundaries. I guess we do the same thing electronically, but the boundaries are a different set of boundaries, pertaining to a different communication medium.” Incidentally, Mitt and I have yet to meet. I did note, however, that as I was miserably late submitting the revision of this column, he was much nicer to me during his follow-up phone call than his e-mail. Medium matters. Or perhaps we’re simply still negotiating.
No End in Sight
A person could spend a lot of time thinking of boundaries that technology has changed, and how the shifts in boundaries affect us. Has the Internet blurred the line between the ignorant and knowledgeable, by making it easy for anybody to amass an amazing amount of information about nearly any topic? Does the easy availability of professional-quality design software—the same tools you I use—threaten the boundaries between laypeople and designers, by emboldening folks who would never have dared to pull up to a drafting table with a set of pens and markers? How much will boundaries continue to change, and how fast?
These are amorphous issues, because we’re all new at this game. I have no answers, just questions. Our world changes too fast to rely entirely on tradition for guidance, yet we can’t exist in a state of constant uncertainty and anxiety. Perhaps all we can do is keep paying attention to the boundaries around us—both the ones we run up against and the ones we set up—and keep asking ourselves again and again which ones are useful, which ones are needlessly restrictive.
At the exhibition opening, Carol Winer and I had been talking about initiating a series of small talks and forums sponsored by the TDC, and Carol suggested this notion of boundary disorders as a topic for a possibly lively discussion among designers. I think she may be on to something.
This article was last modified on March 25, 2022
This article was first published on July 6, 2001
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
