I’ve recently bought myself a wonderful book called Dansk Design, by Thomas Dickson. It covers a lot of the history of Danish design, and not only the immediately recognizable furniture, lighting and other overtly bauhaus-inspired domestic artefacts. It also explores how Viking-era art also informs the Danish aesthetic, building on principles of simplicity, utility and a deep-seated sense of playfulness. The book draws in examples from all over the place, including the Danish landscape, early boat-building, office equipment – even the cover art for late-nineties group Aqua) – to explore Denmark’s place at the forefront of innovative design.
I got suckered in by the references to Lego of course, which made me consider what it is about the design of Lego that appeals. As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of much of the “modular” Lego – it seems more to do with movie tie-ins and a constructed approach to play. The kind of play that appeals to me comes from taking a bucket full of bricks and letting your own imagination take hold. I’m quite proud of my kids who – when presented with a new box of Lego (a common occurrence in our house) – will prefer to just muck about with all the new shapes and colours available to them first before getting into what the boxed instructions have to say. Taken to Toy Corner and given the choice of anything from India Jones to Star Wars sets, my youngest opted for a Creator set in order to build “monster robots”. Yay! Kids know how to play – it’s in their nature. I’m not sure why we feel compelled to give them pre-packaged imaginary worlds to play in.
The parallels with Ruby on Rails are readily apparent. RoR gives you a set of patterns, conventions and classes – building bricks if you like – to create web applications with. Using Rails you are constrained in certain ways, but those constraints free you up to focus your energies in other areas. According to the book Fifty Years of the Lego Brick, six 6 by 2 stud Lego bricks can be combined in 915,103,765 ways. Similarly the various component parts of Rails can be put together and extended in a wide range of creative ways that are – to all practical concerns – limitless. Paradoxically, the imposition of certain overarching constraints only restricts you to the bounds of your imagination.
You can see some of this in the simple but effective designs of web sites built using Rails. Basecamp, Lighthouse, and Shopify all carry forward this aesthetic, as do many of the sites listed in software.com’s ‘Best Ruby on Rails’. There is joy in their simplicity. They each take a problem and respond to it in an imaginative way that isn’t bogged down with artifice or preconceived complexity. It’s not that you couldn’t do something similar in Java, .NET or PHP. It’s more that you wouldn’t because the culture of surrounding each of these languages is very different to that of Ruby on Rails.
I didn’t realise this before, but David Heinemeier Hansson – the originator of Ruby on Rails – is Danish, thereby bringing my musings full circle. What a weird world. I can’t find a reference to Ruby on Rails in “Dansk Design”. Maybe a revised edition will see it included – at least on a par with Aqua.
