Alicia's Long Weekend

Alicia Endures Her Groove

Alicia was finding her groove. She had reluctantly front-loaded this mindbogglingly tedious task. It was the only way she could make herself face it!

What she had to do was to go through what she had thought had been the final draft of her thesis and deal with the notes her adviser had made. Some had been insightful, but it seemed to her that most were intended to get her to more strongly validate his viewpoints.

Well, whatever. It was a Master's Thesis. The sooner it was done, the sooner it would be gathering dust on a shelf, unread. She certainly never wanted to ever read it again and if anyone held flattering her thesis advisor against her, they certainly weren't in academia.

With any luck, he'd send back his final critique and she could be done with it before the weekend was over.

The system was set up to let her read her email just as she woke up. There was no caffeine to help her, but a blast of pure oxygen was a remarkably good substitute.

She remembered Maxine's suggestion that she could just start over or even transfer to a different program. But she had a wide streak of determination in her and it had finally occurred to her that this was an escape problem. Aside from that, she'd invested too much time in the thesis to abandon it. Instead, she took it even more seriously.

Her idea was stated in the title: "From Rome Through Reformation to Maker Culture; the Evolution of the Scandinavian Modernist Aesthetic."

He'd critiqued the idea from the beginning and she'd assembled piles of additional support material and references.

But the fiercest critique had been her own. "How could anyone possibly care?"

The answer was surprisingly simple. The things people made could be dated by how they were made, pegged to an origin by what they were made of and what techniques were used to make them. Tools left marks – and tools defined what you could do with the materials you could get in the time that you had.

All of this was very well understood – at least, over in the anthropology department.

Collectors and restorers were aware of it too. But it was in spots here and chunks there and generally, they were thinking of exemplars that had been preserved simply because they were priceless. Her thesis was speaking to the aesthetic that, she argued, developed from the utilitarian traditions. One did not get to make a masterpiece before churning out a great deal of merely useful things.

This idea hadn't been well explored in the context of design theory – not, at least, in the sense she was speaking. The parts were all there, but it was like an Ikea bookshelf – not quite fully assembled, with parts left over, some put in backwards and if it were ever to stand unaided, there would be tape and glue involved.

Her arguments were ones of form, of proportion and visual balance; she had found an arguable premise that you could track the evolution of a design ethos as it arose from everyday practice and visualize it almost as the confluence of streams.

It was, like most scholarship, an assemblage of the observations of others with as little original work as possible. But that one idea joined together a number of different disciplines, from antiquing to the study of the movements of populations and the dispersal of tools and techniques. It made predictions – that as people moved around and encountered new materials, they'd adapt known approaches to them, only changing approaches to the extent that materials and other utilities changed.

So if you were to take a cabinet-maker from 17th century Norway and drop them into Philadelphia you could look at a piece they had made to local tastes and still say "this was made by a person trained in Norway."