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The Art of the Luminous Detail

I listen to the nest of baby starlings outside my front window. In the midst of their morning song, I have picked out their attempts to recreate the sounds of car alarms, police sirens, foghorns from boats on Lake Union, cars accelerating, the cry of a toddler, doors shutting, and the calls of robins, crows, flickers, and a wide range of other birds that throng the trees and marshes near our home.

The song of the starling seems like a random melange of clicks, whistles, warbles, and otherwise incongruous chatter. But the starling does speak in a pattern—one that is barely perceptible to the human ear, but possible to decode. Philosophy professor and musician David Rothenberg wrote a lovely book called Why Birds Sing that delves into this very subject:

"Starlings eat everything, and they absorb all manner of peculiar sounds, choosing those that fit their own aesthetic... a full starling song, which takes about a minute to sing, is composed of four distinct kinds of phrases... [where] each [phrase] is repeated two or more times before the bird moves on to the next type... First, one or two descending whistles, out of a repertoire of two to twelve different kinds; then a quieter, continuous warbling, in which imitations of various birds living in the starling's territory are often inserted; the third part of the song is a series of rapid clicks, up to fifteen per second, a rattling or ratcheting with no clear breaks between; finally, the song concludes with loud, high-pitched squeals, repeated many times."

Mr. Rothenberg encourages us to listen to a starling after reading this description. "You'll immediately hear things you did not hear before," he says.

I did what he said, and he was right: the structure of the song was immediately perceptible. I could actually pick up the shifts between phases of the song.

But what still stood out for me through all the of the buzzing and clanking of this small poofy bird was his clattletrap accumulation of observed sounds. I often feel like my job as a designer is much like the starling's everyday song.

Lessons in Arrangement from the To-ji Flea Market

The old man crouched on his haunches, lost in thought. As a stream of people flowed past, he reached forward, quietly shifting the placement of varied and sundry antiques on a bright blue blanket: an incense holder, teapots, rice bowls, binoculars, reproductions of classic Zen art on roughly cut wood, books for copying sutras, quartz watches, lacquered boxes, flower vases, and six-inch tall carved figurines meant to represent an African-American blues band.

The To-ji Flea Market happens on the 21st of every month on the grounds of To-ji Temple, about a ten minute walk from the JR Kyoto train station. I wasn't at the market to purchase a memento of our trip. I wanted to observe how these few hundred shopkeepers -- from food stalls to pottery, from old picture scrolls to antique buttons -- displayed and maintained their goods.

Arrangement in Japan is an art unto itself, with its own kind of psychology. Any designer who has dabbled in visual merchandising knows that the specific qualities of an arrangement have a gut-level influence on how we perceive information. A pile of leaves can look peaceful and natural, while a haphazard stack of paper on a messy desk can incite a riot. Both can be shaped by human hands, but a truly great visual stylist is able to infuse even the most mundane objects with a kind of spirit that seems both spontaneous and inevitable.