David Foster Wallace as visionary

Reading in the New Yorker about David Foster Wallace today was kind of surreal. The story reminds me of myself on many levels, but I was surprised to feel that I would have had a lot more empathy with him a year or two ago. I was also chasing my impossible dreams of capturing or expressing something I knew and felt: the epiphany of infinity that swallowed me while I was contemplating the nature of abstraction in that cold, lonely cabin in the Arkansas foothills. I formulated it on paper once or twice, but I've never really shown it to anyone except Dad. I accept that nobody will understand or care until I can find a use for it.

None the less, the discussion of boredom - emptiness - that he was trying to capture resonates deeply. The few clips from his writing struck a chord inside me and reminded me of the joy of capturing little insights and feelings through words. But I think there is something in the story even deeper about the drive to envision something and then transform it into a representation in reality. Much like the design process, the author goes through a learning process where he writes, reflects on that, and lets the limitations of what is possible reflect onto the envisioned goal.

The stronger the will of the writer or the designer, the more he or she will stick to that original vision regardless that what is created is but a shallow shade of the abstraction. And doubtless DFW was a strong one, but perhaps he could not live with the inherent limitations of reality; perhaps he could not accept that some visions cannot be fully captured, represented, and communicated.

I am a weaker sort of creator - I will throw myself into a vision for a little while, but after that first pass is done I realize that I'm burning myself up to go back to it, to try it again. Once I've got it to a first level of approximation, I move on to the next project and the next vision. Grad school has taught me to hold on a little longer, to let my goal evolve and change in response to what I can create, and to then try again to bring the goal into being.

But looking at the design process through this lens, another of ID's great focuses comes into focus: the commonly-held original vision. When a group of four or five designers collectively hammer out an instantiation of an idea, none of them can hold back, none of them can say of the entire project "this isn't what I wanted" unless he's going to give up on the group. The project inexorably moves forward, with each team member merely adding to an existing object, none fully responsible for the original idea, and none able to fully negate the value within.