I’m ploughing my way through Volume 1 of Design Unbound at the moment. A bit of a complex-adaptive-systems buzzword bingo game of a book if I’m being honest. With so many ‘insert miracle here’ moments, by page 150, I found myself laughing out loud.

On the up side, though, the authors mention the word ‘contradiction’ quite a lot. They’re not brave enough to come out and say that contradictions should be ‘elminated’, and they don’t quite go so far as to say ‘challenged’ either. But they do talk about the need for designers to embrace ambiguity, which is quite nice in its own right, and at least a step in the right direction. Part of my problem with the book, I think, is the lack of examples of what’s been talked about. So it all comes across as very ethereal and, ultimately, little more than an advert to go and do an architecture degree. There were, however, a couple of quite elegant examples. My favourite concerns the beautiful Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. As it turns out, a classic architecture conundrum. On the one hand, the Vietnam War was probably not the US’s finest hour so in a lot of ways, people want to forget about it. On the other hand, close to 60,000 American military personnel lost their lives and visibly commemorating those tragic deaths was something that was considered vitally important to all those that fought or had loved ones lost in the conflict. A memorial was wanted and not wanted.

In TRIZ terms, the contradiction looks like this:

And if we map it onto the Business Matrix – where we have the biggest selection of ‘intangible’ parameters to choose from, the best fit says that what we’re trying to improve – honouring the dead – is all about Meaning, and, the other side of the conflict – not wanting to glorify the unpopular war – is best mapped as a Negative Intangible, or, possibly, next best, Trust. Here’s what happens when we map those pairings onto the Matrix:

And here’s what the architects of the Memorial came up with…

…a stunning example of a (Principle 32) ‘increasing transparency’ solution. Looked at head on and the Memorial is a highly polished black marble, with the names of the lost engraved; looked at obliquely, and the Memorial ‘disappears’ by mirroring its environment. Monument and no monument.