Designing from Experience, Not Expertise
Res Extensa #51 :: On vernacular design and function over form
During India's British Raj period, the "bungalow" became popular as a style of housing for foreign officials and ambassadors. The original look and feel was similar to what you see in popular bungalow houses today — extensive front porches, wide overhangs, lots of windows, simple structural design, minimal ornamentation. Today there's a "coziness" about the design that make it attractive and inviting in some high-end neighborhoods today. But in mid-19th century Bengal (where it gets its name), the approach was about function, rather than form. The heat and humidity of the Indian countryside demanded shaded, breathable living space on the large veranda, and the windows allowed for better ventilation. The extreme overhangs kept out the heavy rains. The simple one-level construction meant they could be built cheaply and quickly. The bungalow was a solution to a set of practical problems, rather than a design rooted in its aesthetic appeal.
There's this concept called "vernacular architecture" that refers to a style or design developed from local needs, using local materials, and reflecting local traditions. In contrast to formal architect's academic professionalization, the vernacular architect actually isn't an architect at all, by modern definitions. Building in the vernacular means an origin in practicality. Local people have immediate, on-the-ground needs to be met, and only a certain selection of resources available to them. Tradespeople, builders, the housing-occupiers themselves construct living spaces well-adapted to the local environment and its challenges.
It's amazing to see what kinds of design solutions cultures around the world have ginned up to address the needs of their surroundings.
Over 5000 years ago people in the deserts of Iran were building "windcatchers" — scooped openings raised on towers to capture wind and circulate fresh, cooler air into living spaces. In cold climates, many cultures around the world used rammed earth walls composed of gravel, dirt, and clay tightly packed to create structures with high thermal mass. When they got warm inside, they stayed that way. In both examples, practical need forced people to sort out a solution, through experimentation
I'm fascinated by how many innovations like these spring up from the ground, from the ordinary inhabitants of a place, with no formal training or expertise.
Doing what works
Contrary to what you may think about how they get built, countless buildings have no formally trained "designer". As is true in many fields, the people best suited to solve a problem are often those that live with the problem themselves. These local non-experts are actually archives of knowledge in how to solve their problems. Over the centuries, the knowhow to build well-adapted buildings is passed down, with modifications to techniques made gradually as new methods are discovered, or as they gain experience in what works and what doesn't. In frigid regions with heavy snowfall, people eventually figured out sloped roofs shed snow, and positioning the fireplace centrally maximizes heat availability.
Vernacular architecture is not the product of a single visionary, but the collective, learned wisdom of a community. It represents a collaborative effort where knowledge and skills are shared and passed down through generations.
The term carried pejorative baggage for a long time, until recent years it's made a comeback as the movements of localism and sustainable design have fostered a renewed respect for local materials and cultural mores. It was talked about in modernist circles as though the "primitive locals" don't know the best techniques or the state-of-the-art materials us experts are using these days. But when you pop the hood on what's really happening, it turns out the Inuit, the Navajo, or the Romans were using techniques well-adapted to their environments and the materials readily available to them, hard-won through deliberate trial and error over centuries.
Vernacular design outside of architecture
I've been thinking about how this idea applies to design in fields outside of architecture. Architecture is unique in its geographic, climatic, and cultural contexts, since the "localism" aspect is particularly relevant. But there are probably some parallels that could be drawn to modern software design, product design, furniture, and others.
Design is ultimately about manufacturing solutions — creating technologies that map a need to a result. It's about observing problems had by real people, investigating the context in space and time, the before and after, the consequences of failure, of success, and the constraints within you'd have to work to create a solution to the observed problem. These "vernacular", armchair designers have an advantage, in that they themselves have the problem being designed for. And perhaps that's the key to translating the concept across fields. If you are a creator of solutions for your own problems, you start the game with a depth of knowledge about context, consequences, and the contours of the problem that an outsider will have to put in hard work to understand. It's not impossible, of course. That's the point of things like Jobs to Be Done and ethnographic research: to get on the "demand side" and learn the fine details the problem-haver is working with.
So maybe "vernacular design" could exist as an abstraction from its architecture equivalent, referring to the idea of designing from within the problem context. In the case of something like software, or building physical hardware or equipment, there are often specialty technical skills needed to solve one's problem. A factory foreman can't necessarily open up a laptop and hack up an inventory management app. But an open-minded software builder could "go native" with the potential user and learn from the inside which solutions fit and which don't. One of the fun things about building in the low-code category is that we build tools to help users build their own tools. Fulcrum supports a vernacular design strategy by letting the users do their own designing.
Vernacular design is a reminder that beauty and functionality in design are not the sole purview of trained experts. It underscores the potential of non-professionals to create things with both practicality and aesthetics. By valuing the wisdom inherent in these traditional designs, we not only celebrate the creativity of non-experts but also embrace sustainable and culturally rich practices that have a lot to teach the modern us. In recognizing the value of vernacular design, we acknowledge the extraordinary capabilities of ordinary people in shaping our built environment.