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Picnic Table Design, Part 1
Posted by Jeff Kupperman Sat, 30 Sep 2006 19:48:40 GMT
We bought our patio furniture for $15 a couple years ago, and it's done us well, but lately every yard gathering has included someone or something falling to the ground as a bench leg or chair seat has given way. Our picnic table has a pronounced tilt in it, too, and when I mentioned to my neighbor Gary Murphy that we were looking around for a way to replace it without spending hundreds of dollars, he offered to help me build a new one.
Gary runs a tree service as a vocation, and designs and builds furniture as an avocation. He also has plenty of access to wood and power tools -- a perk of being a professional tree-cutter. So I immediately took him up on his offer, though I had no idea where to even begin. It's turning out to be a terrific experience in design, and in contrast to the educational programs and software that I'm used to designing, it's extremely tangible and (literally) "hands-on." I dare say I may be able to draw out some general lessons about design, if you can bear with me and read on.
"Let's go look at some wood," Gary said to me, and a few days later, we drove up to where Gary's tree service rents land just north of Ann Arbor. At one end of the land, a small work shed and office share space with several farm buildings in various stages of collapse, along with numerous rusting shells of cars, trucks, boats, and trailers. In the center of this small compound, there is a modest pile of milled boards, some as much as ten feet long and two feet wide, covered with a small array of tarps and metal sheets to protect them from the rain and sun. Some of the lumber, I later learned, had been there for 25 years.
As we lifted one grey, aged board after another and put them aside, I had no idea what to look for. Gary, however, confidently assessed each piece, and soon we had a dozen or so pieces set aside. With a second pass through, we honed in on three pieces of red oak: a heavy plank cut from the middle of a sizable trunk, with a deep crack at one end and a sharp flare at the other, and two narrower pieces, each with one straight-cut edge and another edge that meandered restlessly. That settled (however tentatively), we turned our attention to what the planks would rest on. Gary had a large, knarly piece of sycamore stump with about 20 spindles branching upward in a vase-like shape, and being almost the right height already we fairly quickly decided that would support one end. For the other end, Gary suggested something metalic and modern, "for contrast."
We called it a day and headed home. "We've done the hardest part of a project," Gary said. "We've started."
Now, whatever truth or exaggeration there was to that statement, it is safe to say that this is not the way most people start out building a picnic table. More likely, they would measure the space, decide on size and materials, then find or make some drawings. In other words, they would make plans. But Gary started with "let's go look at some wood." The French call this "bricolage," a word without an exact English translation, but meaning something like "designing through tinkering." (Given Gary's taste for French wine and French antique shotguns, the French term suits him well.)
This is not to say that we are "letting the wood determine the design" -- far from it, we are working with quite a few constraints. The table must fit comfortably on the patio, for one thing (we did in fact measure the patio, though not until after our first trip out to look for wood). It has to be the right height to sit at, and be big enough to fit eight or ten sets of plates and glasses, plus some room for serving dishes and the like. It shouldn't poke people in the stomach or cause wine glasses to fall over. It has to be sturdy and hold up well to the elements. In the end, I don't need a sculpture or a flower planter or a tree house. I need a table.
Is it too much of a stretch to see this as a metaphor for educational design? The usual way to design instruction is to decide what the end result should be, map out a particular structure, list out the necessary materials, and then figure out step by step how to do it. But what if we started with the materials (maybe "the materials" are the students, maybe they are the content, maybe they are instructional tools), and gradually built instruction as we went? In other words, a bricolage approach to educational design....
The anthropologist Lucy Suchman argues that all plans contain an element of fiction -- a smoothing over of the endless small decisions that are made as a situation unfolds. Too much emphasis on the plan, she says, ignores how important those small decisions are. We might learn something about planning, she argues, from traditional Micronesian navigators, who sail with a goal but adjust their course in response to the circumstances of the moment.
Another anthropologist, Renato Rosaldo, writes about hunting in the Ilongot culture of the Philippines: the value of going on a hunt, even more than obtaining food, is the possibility that the hunters might bring back a good story. A hunt is important because something extraordinary, something surprising, might happen. Gary, who does in fact hunt, has taken this idea intuitively to furniture design. I have no idea if hunters are natural bricoleurs, but if we had started with a set of plans, we might have ended up with a serviceable picnic table, but hardly an interesting story.
Last week Gary and I went back out to work on the table. We looked again through the wood we had set aside, confirming our decision to use the three boards we had liked the last time for the table top. Then we started laying out the boards. Immediately we were confronted with an almost endless range of possibilities and decisions. Should we keep the interesting flare at one end of the big piece, or cut it down so it doesn't stick out and poke people? Do we keep the meandering edges on both sides, or cut them straight? Should we line up two big knots so that they are parallel, or stagger them? Should the middle piece be longer than the sides, or shorter, or should we "bump it out" a little so the table takes on a kind of arrow shape? Should the narrow edges be cut squarely, or at an angle? If an angle, how big should that angle be? In the end, many decisions came down to a choice between creating more order versus emphasizing the dramatic idiosyncrasies of the wood. Importantly, the quirks that remain should look consciously chosen, so that they don't look like mistakes or laziness: for example the big crack in the center piece would need to be sanded out and emphasized, and the offsets we decided upon for the side pieces need to be big enough that they don't appear to be accidental. "It has to look like you meant it," Gary said.
After an hour of laying out dozens of minute variations, making lots of pencil marks, imagining the table with people around it and plates and glasses on top, and looking at the pieces from every possible angle, with much "hmm"ing and beard stroking we came to a decision. Ultimately, the table top will have an overall shape somewhere between an oval and an egg, with "natural" edges on the long sides and slightly angled cuts on the narrow sides. We rough-cut the boards with a chain saw and circular saw, then brought them home to sand.
(To be continued...)
Close-up of a partially sanded side piece.
The crack in the center piece.
A side piece, cut but not sanded.
The three pieces, cut and laid out on the patio.
The stripes on the wood are a result of the saw that cut the boards -- and they are proof that the boards are decades old, since modern saws don't leave those kinds of marks.
Spread the word.
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