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Spectacular VernacularWhen graphic designers hear the word “vernacular,” we often think of quaint hand-painted signs or old-fashioned candy wrappers. But vernacular design is more than a collection of quotable styles and false nostalgia—it is a systematic method for creation that can guide us toward more sustainable practices. Systems thinking is a leading development in contemporary design and those systems re-quiring the least resources will best serve design on its path toward sustainability. Vernacular design offers a valuable model as its aim is accomplishing the most with the least.

Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn is an in-depth examination of the concepts of vernacular building. First printed in 1994, How Buildings Learn provides a careful dissection of historic, cultural architecture in America. Brand has had a lifelong impact on pro-gressive thinking and the sustainability movement through the Whole Earth Catalog (which he helped found in 1968), the first Hacker’s Conference (1984), and most recently the Long-Now foun-dation (1996). He has at times been a soldier, hippie, observer, critic, organizer, philosopher, and nerd of the highest degree. Because of his varied interests, Brand approaches the vernacular with a schol-arly rather than aesthetic view.

In Brand’s view, the vernacular process (which he also refers to as “adaptive building”) is a systematic framework for evolving con-cepts. A culture steadily culminates these frameworks over time. Traditions then arise allowing vernacular designers to reuse forms and methods for common tasks. Contemporary designers typi-cally look for a new or wholely unique solution to a given problem, which is counter-productive to creating traditions. The concepts of constraint, durability, and thrift provide the foundation for the vernacular’s evolutionary model. The same principles applied to modern-day design practice offer new and concrete ways for design to move forward.

Here, “resources” refers to anything

that can be spent: materials, time, &

money.

Principles of Vernacular Design (and their application today)by Kristian Bjørnard

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the principleSConstraintIndigenous builders use local culture and materials to guide their processes instead of years of formal schooling. The constraint of locality may limit formal elements, materials, and size to vernacular builders, but making choices inside the presented constraints allows for innovation to take place outside of initial expectations. Before the industrial revolution, around 200 materials were used in the building trades worldwide. Most of those materials were the same nearly everywhere: wood, straw, brick, stone and earth. Even with such a limited array of materials, widely different uses and forms evolved in different locations. Specifying boundaries does not have to limit options.

As a practicing designer, accepting constraints can make choices easier. When you don’t have 10,000 options, you can act quickly and confidently. The web offers limited languages for web develop-ment—PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Flash, CSS, html—yet each year the boundaries of what can be accomplished with the same technology continue to expand. Specific CMS frameworks—like wordpress, indexhibit or drupal—end up being capable of powering vastly dif-ferent types and designs of websites from the same basic code and modules. These ideas are just as applicable to print design. In fact, we already accept many constraints in our contemporary design practice: paper sizes (how many letter-size jobs have you done re-cently?) and ink quantities and colors (CMYK) being two examples.

Constraints play a large part in sustainability. However, sustain-ability itself should be the most important constraint on the design decisions we make. We can simply limit ourselves to only the mate-rials that meet our definitions of sustainable. But instead of simply making the “sacrifice” to use less ink or only using fully recycled paper, we should be inspired to develop new systems of printing and designing in which waste is no longer even an issue. William Mcdonough and Michael Braungart offer a method of book print-ing in Cradle to Cradle that allows both the pages and the ink of a book to be 100% re-made into another book. A google search shows plenty of other possible choices (from solventless printing to waste-derived fiber sources for paper) we could be making, too. One

Another book about evolutionary

design, The Design of Everyday Things,

talks about constraints in the design

process as a way to help a project

succeed: “The surest way to make

something easy to use, with few errors,

is to make it impossible to do

otherwise—to constrain the choices.”

Constraints over sacrifices will be

useful for sustainable thinking moving

forward—we don't want people to feel

like they are making sacrifices.

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advantage we have today over our vernacular brethren is that our information gathering is no longer tied to locality.

ThriftIndigenous buildings—whether Viking longhouses, Amish barns, or American bungalows—aim to get the most building for the least material, money, and time. Practicality is the focus. A building starts with something small and necessary and is only added to as money, time, and need allow.

We have lost sight of this in contemporary design. We often seek the cheapest solutions monetarily, but we don’t always seek the all-around least wasteful solutions. This is partially because the economy of scale in traditional offset printing actually encourages waste—it’s cheaper to print more than you need than risk running out of a piece (of course, we often fail to properly estimate the quantity we need). Emerging print-on-demand services like Lulu and Blurb allow you to make short runs of books or magazines at an increasingly affordable cost.

We can also be thrifty with ideas and problem-solving, not just ma-terials. Knowing when to spend resources on new, untested ideas, and when to use something old, reliable, and cheap is part of the sustainable designer’s job.

DurabilityThe long lifespan of buildings is part of what allows them to grow, adapt, and evolve. With that comes consideration of material and maintenance. A Cape Cod house would never have specialized ad-ditions put on if the main core of the building was constantly need-ing repair because of perishable parts.

Most of the materials used in vernacular building practices are by their very nature durable: stone and large timbers. Ephemeral ma-terials (such as straw, thatch, or wooden shingles) are used in ways and in places that allow them to show their wear and provide for easy repair and replacement. Some mainly aesthetic choices now made in current homes were once made for issues of durability and longevity—cheap brick is kept weather resistant by stuccoing and hazard from fire is reduced by installing metal roofing.

Modernism was actually about some of

these principles as well:

“The new architecture is economic;

that is to say, it employs its elemental

means as effectively and thriftily as

possible and squanders neither these

means nor the material.”

— from van Doesburg’s Towards a Plastic

Architecture, 1924

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Durability in graphic design is as much about the longevity of our systems as the materials in our objects. Design processes should be long lasting and reusable. Chosen materials should last as long as the intended lifespan of an item. Barns and rowhouses should be made of durable goods, while a candy bar wrapper should not. Why use permanent plastics and foils in the manufacture of an item in-tended for immediate disposal?

Think about the quantity of “disposable” objects we consume ev-eryday: cheap paperback books, coffee cups, pounds upon pounds of junk mail (not to mention most low cost clothing, appliances, and electronics). Many of these things pass through the hands of a designer before they make it to the hands of the user. Our job for the future will be to question the materials from which the objects are made—in terms of meeting the durability requirements for the object itself—and whether the piece can be dematerialized further, even questioning its very existence.

a compariSon—the principleS at workThe Cape Cod house (whale house) of New England (Brand’s vernacular principles) compared to the Walker re-branding, Walker Expanded (ver-nacular principles at work in a contemporary setting).

The Cape Cod house is characterized by a low, broad frame and a steep, pitched roof with end gables, and a large central chimney that all fireplaces in the house share. Also referred to as a whale house, the Cape Cod’s form is tied to location and tradtion—its shape, materials, etc., were influenced by the whalers in New Eng-land, the building ideals they brought with them from England, and the stormy weather and landscape of coastal New England itself. Local materials and rudimentary technology were used in the construction (the constraint of what was durable and readily available). Cape Cods almost always started life as simple, large-enough boxes with sloped roofs to keep out wind, rain, and snow (constraint of form). They were clad in easily replaceable clapboard and shingles (again, attention paid to the durability of materials in use). These initial structures were quick and cheap to build and maintain (thrifty in money and time). Over time inhabitants added on to their houses. As this happened, predictable “modules” for ex-pansion began to recur. Future expansion of homes then happened

Charts and pictures showing these

examples can be found in on pages 6–9.

The photo of this Cape Cod style out-

building was taken in rural Maine. It

shows all the elements described here

in near perfection.

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Walker Expanded in use on the outside

of the Walker Art Museum.

Open source software provides an

initial framework or structure. When

users needs are not being met, the

users themselves write the updates,

patches, and modules that modify the

original code enabling new features

and functions. The community then

sounds off as to whether the solution

is succesful by how many others

adopt the upgrade/fix. This perfectly

exemplifies Brand’s philosophies.

From American Signs:

“Traditions provide chronological and

cultural continuity… tradition and

the vernacular go hand in hand—most

vernacular objects are traditional.

Because such objects are ordinary

and common, their designers address

the needs and expectations of the

community rather than their own.”

This leads to another, more simple

definition of vernacular design: Common

Design by Common People.

in predictable ways based on the success of common cultural prac-tices. The buildings “evolved” over time based on the needs of the occupants, available resources, and constraints of local materials and cultural acceptance. (examples on pgs. 6–7)

The newest version of the Walker Art Museum identity, Walker Ex-panded, is a comparable example from contemporary design. Walk-er Expanded consists of patterns and word strings that are assem-bled at the designer’s discretion. The systematic, adaptive nature of the identity is very similar to the vernacular model presented by the Cape Cod house. There are constraints to the size, typeface, se-lected words, and the color palette, but if design choices fit into the template described by these stipulations, anything goes. Every time a piece is needed a new configuration or pattern can be tested. Cre-ated patterns that are deemed successful are kept and used again in subsequent designs—like the standard whale house additions that achieved cultural acceptance. The standard, repetitive nature of the Walker’s design elements means that even a thin strip of pattern is recognizable—this can then be quickly and easily wrapped around any possible product (see the Walker Expanded tape on pg. 9). Most importantly, the designers can change a color or add a new pattern or keyword to the mix at any time. This allows for future flexibility. The brand is no longer tied to style or a time; it can evolve with cul-tural tastes and the needs of the Walker. (examples on pgs. 8–9)

concluSionStewart Brand defines vernacular as the indigenous building of a place. Vernacular more broadly means common designs by com-mon people. What makes cultural common-ness so special is its ability to evolve steadily over time. Common features survive the passage of time when they are generally understood as “good.” Over years, the vernacular incorporates more and more “good” features while eradicating “bad” ones.

While we (as professional designers) cannot always behave as con-servatively as vernacular designers, that doesn’t mean we cannot adopt their “common” ideals of constraint, durability, and thrift. The beauty of design is that we can always pile new ideas on top of old ones, and we do not have to reinvent the wheel each time we tackle a problem. Ideas imported from elsewhere, if better at

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“Once a satisfactory product has been

achieved, further change may be

counterproductive, especially if the

product is successful. You have to know

when to stop.”

—from The Design of Everyday Things

solving problems than our current ideas, are easy to incorporate (this is how present-day open-source communities function). Our role must be to take the cautious, evolving methodology of vernac-ular design and apply it alongside our contemporary technologist tendencies and conceptual processes. ■

Notes on the Synthesis of form, by Christopher Alexander

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, by Stewart Brand (specifically Chapter 9: Vernacular: How Buildings Learn From Each Other)

Whole Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand

Systemantics: How Systems Really Work & How They Fail, by John Gall (this book is also titled The Systems Bible: The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large & Small depending on the edition)

Design & Faux Science (from Rant - Emigre #64), by Jessica Helfland & William Drenttel

American Signs: Form & Meaning on Route 66, by Lisa Mahar

Cradle to Cradle, by McDonough & Braungart

The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman

The Manifesto of January 3, 2000, by Bruce Sterling

The Last Viridian Note, by Bruce Sterling

Shaping Things, by Bruce Sterling

Towards a Plastic Architecture, by Theo van Doesburg

Learning from Las Vegas, by Venturi, Scott Brown, & Izenour

text:Calluna designed by Jos Buivenga in 2009notes/captions:

Anivers designed by Jos Buivenga in 2008

Abridged Bibliography / Further Reading

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cape cod houSeS: brand'S Vernacular at work

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cape cod houSeS: brand'S Vernacular at work

an Evolution from this

to this

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Walker Expanded uses a simple, strict set of design rules to

create countless variations of their brand for everything from

tape, shopping bags, wall graphics, and whatever else the

museum might need (all on pg. 9).

walker expanded

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walker expanded in action

Walker Expanded in a variety of applications: (clockwise from top left)

Wall graphics in parking garage directing visitors towards the museum

entrance, museum admission tags, Walker shopping bags, and Walker shop

tape being applied to some notebooks for sale in the store.

Learn more about Walker Expanded here: http://design.walkerart.

org/detail.wac?id=2090&title=Featured%20Project