The Order of Order

One of the functions of design is to bring order to the world. But how to decide what the categories are that constitute order?

Designers employ any number of soldiers to gain control of an unwieldy world: the alphabet, numbers, typefaces, type weights, descending and ascending deeley-bobs, bullets, stars, indents and on and on and on—any form that might jostle stuff into submission; make it yield to some logic of order.

Designers can also draw together unlikely pairs, make surprising juxtapositions in order to completely reorder the material world. Designers can bend the common into something fresh just by arranging it differently. The known can be tweaked into the unknown. Designers can will the world into an unexpected playful, or sobering, reality.

Take Michael Worthington's CD collection. Music is not accessed by title or artist, genre or label, but by the color of the jewel box spine and its place in the spectrum.

The arrangement is not profound. It's just kind of funny because it answers to a very specific sense of order—Michael's. But then a spectral sequence is a time-honored ordering principle. So perhaps this bending of a conventional order now speaks to the experience of selecting music. Or it might acknowledge the vexing yet fascinating role of style in pop culture. Seeing the collection in its entirely just might be a cry to designers to stop with the black, grey and white spines already.

The point is there are endless ways to make sense of the world. The choices are as wide and fluid as music.