real world columns: blank

One of the worst feelings in the world is receiving an email about an approaching writing deadline and then just sitting there staring at a blank screen on your word processor. There is nothingness and into that nothingness you must bring form, structure, content and above all else entertainment.

Early researchers in user interface design knew this fear of nothingness and at Xerox they quickly realized the power of the copy and edit paradigm over the create-a-new-totally-blank-thing and start-completely-from-scratch paradigm. Instead of having to bring content into the nothingness, you start with something similar and change it until it is what you want.

Nothingness causes a problem in taking that first step in creative or design processes. It also causes problems in navigation and orientation. Having distinct and tangible things in a space is vital to orientation; something to fix your gaze on, something as a starting point or a reference point when building. Arctic explorers have always feared the whiteouts when they were crossing the snow. Whiteouts occurred when white skies, snow covered landscape and clouds of falling snow conspired to create a totally white environment with no perceivable up, down, left or right. A situation likened by some to ‘being inside a ping-pong ball’.

In the CAD world this orientation is vital when creating 3D structures. One thing worse than a blank 2D screen representing a blank sheet of paper is a blank 2D screen representing an empty 3D world where you don’t even know which way is up and where you are. Some packages solve this by introducing grids and empty but well labeled co-ordinate axes defining the scale and the notion of up-ness that is necessary to begin construction.

However, while the total absence of anything is a thing to be feared, emptiness within structure is a vital, powerful and often underestimated part of the design vocabulary. Just as pauses add drama, doubt, and other emotions to our day to day vocabulary, so too do absences add to the structure of other created things. Within a structure nothingness can form a vital part of the design. Consider the importance of pauses in music; that split second of nothingness after the opening bars of Beethoven’s fifth. Or the school drama teacher whose boys are piling into a cupboard representing a prison cell with a political prisoner in it and then immediately banging about as they administer a beating. ‘No, no, no!’ She says. ‘You must all go in, wait for a second and then start the banging, that will be more dramatic.’

In graphic layout the use of so called ‘white space’ is a key resource, though on the other hand it is wasteful. White space in a newspaper means printing and distributing thousands of copies of bits of nothing at all. On the other hand it gives vital structure and emphasis to key parts of the layout. Architecture too has its own version of white space. Designers such as Rogers and Piano working on the Pompidou Center realized the power in only using half the site and keeping the rest as an emptiness; a clear space which invited others to fill it, ambling crowds, street performers, musicians etc.

The final emptiness I want to mention is the emptiness that seems like emptiness but is not emptiness. Just as the apparent empty space between the galaxies is full of matter so too are other emptinesses actually filled with something. Today’s telephone systems sometimes optimize the use of telephone lines and if there is no speech detected for a half second or so they go dead and use the line-bandwidth for something else until you utter another word. This is very efficient, but for a participant in a telephone conversation it can be disturbing. During those vital pauses in conversation you suddenly hear the line go dead… One is almost forced to hum in the gaps to ensure that the conversation is not disrupted by that feeling that you have been cut off.

Well, writing about nothing has ensured that I now have a full screen of something and I am faced with the subsequent writing problem; how to knock all these text fragments into shape to turn it from a collection of bits-and-bobs into a cohesive article … but that is a subject for another time.