Finding the Timeless in the Deep

The Deep reminds us that the froth on the surface hides the great tidal forces that make and remake the world. Harnessing these forces is both a creative act and a commitment to their continued relevancy in a world that often prefers the froth. Our clients, like us, believe that truly cutting-edge design as well as market-changing innovation can’t come from a present of sameness or a shared set of expert-led assumptions of the future, but rather from the wells of human experience, creativity, and action that have always resonated in the timbre of our lives.

So goes the description on the website for this thing we call The Deep, this practice that defines the work we do and the way we think about client work, about design in general, and about the impact both can have, in particular. 

Half-a-century ago Joseph Campbell formalized and popularized a story whose basic elements are found across all cultures and times. This monomyth—the hero’s journey—is among a very few non-biological indicia of what it means when we talk about a common humanity. On top of the story of someone leaving home, facing extraordinary challenges, and returning changed, each culture has added their own details and spins, defined and redefined how to interpret the voyage, and created something new, yet familiar.

The hero’s journey is part of The Deep. It’s an essential part of who we are, regardless of where we are. The Deep is made up of history, culture, mythologies, beliefs, stories, dreams, and fears. It is profoundly relevant for understanding the contemporary, but is apart and separate from it, in that it remains what it is, unmoved by trends or hype or the machinations of media. It allows us to understand the present by providing the context that allows for wisdom. It also allows us to design for humans, using a language that is both primeval and still extraordinarily resonate.

This primeval resonance is hard to describe or recognize because it is so completely part of who we are, it just feels…right. It feels right because it is us. By attending to The Deep when designing a product or an interior or even a business, one has an opportunity to evoke a sensibility that is at once profoundly affecting and barely discernable. This allows design to affect a sort of transformation in how we perceive and respond to the world. Not only do we find the design beautiful, but we find it true. We move from aesthetics to metaphysics, from the world we can see and appreciate, to the world that sits beneath it and gives it meaning and flavor.

Doing this sort of design isn’t easy. Not because it’s hard to do, but that it requires such a radical change in how we think about good design. It requires going beyond the immediate, thinking not only of the here and now and the future, but also of the near and deep past. It requires an exploration of context and placement that demands an historical, anthropological, structural, and cultural analysis paired with an intuitive process that is able to translate this into a contemporary marketplace. But it is what we do, here.

And it’s something we’d love to see more of.

—Peter