Clarity is not Always the Path to Enlightment
My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
In the preceding list, there is a reason that I left the attribute of ambiguity (Goel 1995) for the end. It is the least intuitive and perhaps the one needing the most explanation. The essence of the reason that this is so, is captured pretty well in the preceding quote by the cartoonist James Thurber, which I came across in Lawson (1997).
In an essay about ambiguity in design, Gaver, Beaver, and Benford, (2003) state:
… their use of ambiguity makes them evocative rather than didactic and mysterious rather than obvious. ...
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