Seeing The World in Black and White

Personal August 04, 2008

No, I don't mean like old TV shows and movies. I mean conceptually. Things are black and white, absolute. I always try to figure things out and I spend my time going about the world, seeing things in their fundamental components and trying to find patterns.

I have a difficult time accepting things I cannot understand. As such, I often will argue with people to find a solid ground when something doesn't make sense. I'm always trying to categorize or compartmentalize or classify the things I learn. Ideas and things are fundamentally black or white, off or on, this way or that. Even a large space of gray color is made up of tiny black and white pixels. So sure, the big picture may not be simple, but its components are and I strive to find them.

Perhaps that's what I enjoy about teaching and lecturing - taking big picture ideas and concepts that appear convoluted and trying to find the black and white components that we all can relate to. A lot of people I meet often categorize design as this amorphous, highly conceptual, "in the clouds" thing when, in reality, it's just made up of many simple different components and principles. I mean really, at its root, design is psychology whose roots lie in the human body's biology. And even biology has roots in creation and the universe.

Given what we know about the big bang theory, the universe and everything in our world, it seems highly probable the way we got here. What happened before the big bang, I can't say. That's one of many things that freak me out too much to try to delve into. Religion, for example, is a gray area although several aspects appear black and white. Needless to say, I'm not religious, and this is one of the reasons why.

So many aspects of life are mathematical and it astounds me how much can be traced back to it. If I didn't find the subject terribly arduous and abstract, I might have delved more deeply into studying it.

In my opinion, anyone who claims something is a gray area and calls case closed is just being a bit lazy or narrow-minded. Just like computer science, larger problems can always be broken down into smaller pieces that logically make sense.

And as much as I like thinking of myself as a designer and not an engineer, we both essentially work the same way, just with different principles. Engineering and programming stems from math. Design stems from psychology. But we're both putting the pieces together to find solutions.

That's really what it's about: solving problems.

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