Virgil Abloh and Designing Your Space
How to set up an environment for flourishing
In 2021, fashion designer, Virgil Abloh, died at the young age of 41 from a rare form of heart cancer. Although sometimes controversial figure in the fashion industry, his perspectives on design and space has always fascinated me. I’ve used his concept about transforming one’s setting many times in my own teaching and know that it can be applied to many other contexts outside of the classroom.
In what looks like an interview done on a Zoom call, Abloh picks up a candle in a tin can to illustrate his point. It is dented and looks like junk, but Abloh says:
“If I put this candle in an all white gallery space, it looks like a piece of art. If I put it in the garage it looks like a piece of trash. Someone would throw it away. It’s dented. I often use this analogy in design. I could design around the candle, telling you about the candle or I can design the room that it sits in.”
This simple concept has made him, at that time, only one of two Black fashion designers in Paris, France. It is important that we work on the person in the space, to help craft the way that that person thinks about the world and their space, but it is also important that, as a consequence, we also craft the space that we live and work in. There needs to be a dialogue between person and space that is synergetic, that feeds off of each other.
One of the most important things I’m having to do over and over again this new year (and at the end of last year), is to clear my office space and throw away or store things that I am not using. It was very difficult for me to do so because I had accumulated so many papers and junk in my office. My parents are hoarders and I’ve come to learned that those who are usually experienced some kind of traumatic event or stressor in their lives. Hoarding is a coping mechanism for survival. Just the act of clearing out rooms and donating or throwing things away is often emotional for me. The reason I don’t do it often is because it uses much of my psychological energy to do so. However, decluttering, cleaning, and organizing is needed if I want to have a working environment conducive to fruitful working.
Finding and creating good spaces is important for flourishing. Just as the right spot in the garden is necessary to a plant to grow, the right place is important for us to do work, read, or reflect. Even when working outside of the house, a coffee shop or café with the right sunlight, atmosphere, and space is important. Sometimes, there may be people there who can ruin the environment by listening to videos without headphones or talking too loudly, thereby taking away from an environment that could help focus and creativity (a shout out to my friend, Kate, who too often has to deal with these distractions). Even a well placed plant or a picture makes all the difference. This is more than what is known as feng shui, but a way to think and live within an environment. More often than not, our places of living are reflections of who we are, and setting the right kind of room helps us channel our work. However, not all disorganization is harmful. Spending too much time organizing can also distract us from doing what we need to do to accomplish tasks and goals.
A decluttering method that works for me follows:
Take a before picture.
Set a timer for one hour.
Pile all my papers and items onto the desk so that I can’t use the desk and start there.
Take out the trash bag and recycling bin and fill them with those papers. I also have a paper shredder for documents with private information.
File important papers.
Take an after picture to see what the area looks like. If there are other things I don’t like in the picture then I can adjust immediately.
It does not have to be perfect and I can always come back to it the next day and invest another hour to the work.
On the other side of a decluttered space is chaos and messiness. However, not all chaos is bad. There is a randomness that can help our creativity. The Hidden Brain Podcast featured a show entitled “In Praise Of Mess: Why Disorder May Be Good For Us.” It is not about glorifying messiness, but talks about the research that shows how imposing tidiness on others does not help work to be done. Tim Harford, writer of Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, admits that he does not impose clean room orders on his children in his own home. Sometimes, we can leverage randomness, chaos, and spontaneity in order to be creative. Harford explains:
“Messy disruptions will be most powerful when combined with creative skill. The disruption puts an artist, scientist, or engineer in unpromising territory—a deep valley rather than a familiar hilltop. But then expertise kicks in and finds ways to move upward again: the climb finishes at a new peak, perhaps lower than the old one, but perhaps unexpectedly higher.”
Hardford uses legendary music producer, Brian Eno, as an example of planned chaos. Eno would show up at recording sessions of musical artists, such as David Bowie, with a deck of playing cards called Oblique Strategies. The musicians would pick a card randomly and follow the script. This would produce work that breaks out of a creative impasse that often reduces artists into becoming their own clichés. If we are intentional, then chaos can be used to help us break free from stagnation. In a way, it sets the backdrop and environment for us to explore work in a fresh way. Rick Rubin would definitely agree with this (see my article on his book).
Because I don’t yet have my own painting studio, I have to occupy any space available to me in our house. For large paintings, I use my wife’s photo studio space when she is not using it, but then I am forced to remove the painting on photography days. Often this becomes a mess since oil paints are difficult to clean and gets everywhere. But the messiness distracts me from concentrating too much on the technique of painting. Instead of getting in my mind, which is never a good space for an artist, I do the work of creating. It becomes a moment of what is called a “flow state,” where there is the right amount of tension and challenge with the art so that the artist can create without frustration. This is the ideal place, both physical and psychological, for a painter.
One’s space need not necessarily be either tidy or messy, but a place of one’s own to do work, be creative, and enjoy one’s time. It should be able to elevate our presence there. But this space is also a reflection of one’s sense of being, so working through various blocks and ways of thinking and being is at the core of what makes a space transformative.