If you plan cities for cars and traffic you get cars and traffics. If you plan for people and places you will have people and places.
- Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
- Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
- Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
- Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.
“The medium is the message.” A form of communications technology, the medium or figure, necessarily operates through its context, or ground.
The closer man gets to the unknown, the more inventive he becomes, the quicker he adopts new ways.
Buckminster Fuller
Everything has a value, provided it appears at the right place at the right time. It’s a matter of recognizing that value, that quality, and then to transform it into something that can be used. If you come across something valuable and tuck it away in your metaphorical suitcase there’s sure to come a moment when you can make use of it.
Jurgen Bey
When Charles Eames designs a chair, he doesn’t only design a chair, he designs a way of sitting, or better still, he designs the way of sitting. He doesn’t design for a certain function, instead he designs a function.
Ettore Sottsass, “A Small conversation about things we’ve always wondered about but never understood”