Ronald Van Tienhoven Interview

16th January 2008

A conversation between Mike Thompson & Ronald Van Tienhoven.

Mike Thompson:
“We’ll start with the cemetery in Spijk, it was interesting having read on the TU/E ezine,
‘idzine’” that you strongly believe in the process of incremental prototyping as an integral
part of design research. Bearing this in mind, I would be interested to know, how would
you then approach a project such as the cemetery in Spijk, which, dealing with death is a
taboo subject, and I can imagine that trying to deal with the idea of a prototype with this
is quite a difficult issue?”
Ronald Van Tienhoven:
“It’s well nigh impossible. Well firstly, you have to deal with local traditions, it’s a very
small village and not that many people are buried there. It’s quite a difference if you have
to design a cemetery in a big city where there are many different beliefs many religions,
and many cultural backgrounds. And that’s what you see in Amsterdam, which is a very
multi-cultural city. If you go to the biggest cemetery there are many, many different beliefs
on only a couple of square kilometres, but there its really a very cohesive, very small
community which everybody more or less is Christian, protestant, and for that reason it’s
a very kind of austere kind of notion or belief people have about how they are supposed to
be buried. Well there was one difference because there should also have been niches for
cremation for urns and part of the population there is very much against it because the end
of the day’s people should come out of their graves and are led to the kingdom of god. If
you’re burned, if you’re cremated, it’s a bit difficult isn’t it? So they were very much against
that, but at the same time, there was also a community of people that are not that Christian
or who actually support cremation and they were for it, and so the city, the municipality
actually decided to have both options in the cemetery.
Well, about incremental prototyping, you have hardware and you have software and
software basically is the kind of social interface that is needed as well, and it needs to
be researched with the people that live there. And so incremental prototyping is having
discussions, and listening to people’s stories and its necessary to be an empathetic
designer. On the one hand you really need to follow your own gut feeling when it comes
to design, on the other hand you’re designing for a group of people and finding the right
amalgam of interests from both sides is something that is absolutely necessary. So in this
respect incremental prototyping is the design process based on the social interface you
develop prior to making the definitive design.”
“Well I suppose equally as important then as incremental prototyping would of course
be the feedback once the project is fully realised. So, I take it you must have obviously
had some feedback from the project, how is it now received particularly with the religious
groups which maybe have had some slight issues?”
“Well they will always stick to their own ideas. They’re very, I don’t want to say they’re
radical, but they are very firm in that they say that cremation is something that should not
happen. But when it comes to the cemetery itself, its also landscape design. And because
it is a very small village, people are only, well there are only about 2 to 3 people that are
actually buried there, so it grows very, very slowly, unless an airplane crashes with lets say
half of the population inside, buts that’s not going to happen. So its something that grows
very, very slowly and for that reason we decided to design a garden. And we departed from
botanical ideas or botanical concepts, firstly and fore mostly. So, its, when something like
that when a cemetery like that grows so slowly we said we’re going to design a garden and
the people will be able to determine themselves where they are going to be buried. So its
not something like a parking lot where the places 1,2, 3, 4 and so forth are filled with cars,
or filled with bodies, people actually, there will be a slow filling up of the cemetery. So our
primary goal was to really design a beautiful garden based on botanical concepts, but not
based on lets say the kinds of greens and shrubberies you usually see in North Western
European cemeteries. So that was our big adventure basically, was to find new kinds of
symbols that are not part of the lets say, not part really of the general idea people have
about what should be in the cemetery but based on a kind of adventure we embarked on.
Finding new types of trees that could become new symbols for interment or new symbols
for cemeteries.”
“That’s interesting, because that makes me obviously think about, in that respect, what
process do you go for choosing what those symbols should be, obviously bearing in mind
that then those, they have the capability to evolve in a way where those symbols take on a
meaning which is very much based around that locality?”
“ Yes. Yes. It has a lot to do with the soil. What does the soil take? We actually chose Marsh
Cypress’ which is not really, not exactly a Dutch tree but which has properties that are very
special in the sense that they have the same kind of thickness, and the same kind of density
as the Italian Poplars that are so often used on cemeteries. They have a very, very heavy
root system, and they’re very expressive in that respect. So being rooted in the ground,
being part of the soil and having the same kind, or even more intense density compared
to other kinds of trees that are more easily chosen on Dutch cemeteries we thought would
be quite interesting. So we also had the botanical discussions about what the meaning, or
what the symbol, or what the potential symbol could become, if you would choose such a
plant on such a place.
It wasn’t only me of course; I did it with two other people, with Mike Tyler, who has quite,
a very good knowledge of botany and Laurien Wijers as well. She, by the way, is Tibetan
Buddhist, and so her background is quite different from ours, and so there was this mix of
backgrounds, which made it quite interesting to design a cemetery together. Actually, we
were supposed to do one part each one of us, but we thought it was ridiculous because its
not a very big cemetery so we said where are we going to work together?”
“That must be interesting particularly, I can imagine, with that background.”
“Yeah. And its also 3 different generations. Mike is much younger than I, and Laurien is
already in her 60’s so it was quite interesting from a generation point of view.”
“Yeah that sounds it definitely. Ok. I guess that…”
“But there’s something else I would like to say about incremental prototyping.”
“Yeah sure...”
“I mean, the design process very often is based on the end result as an illustration of an
idea, rather than having all kinds of these different prototypes with a social or hardware
that really gives feedback and that really bring you to the next strange. And even if it’s a
Wizard of Oz. Do you know what a Wizard of Oz prototype is?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t exist yet. The product doesn’t exist yet. You do as if it exists. And people if they
are susceptible to your ideas they will accept it for that moment. And they will react as if
it is existing. There are many ways and many methods actually you can use it in. You can
actually simulate a situation in which the product is already existing or which the idea is
already materialised, and people, if you do it very well, people might react to it in a way
that will provide you with the kind of feedback to go to the next stage of the process. So
its really part of a very rich and very layered way of dealing with concept development
and that’s the reason why I think incremental prototyping, which of course is even more
important if you’re a design engineer, is something that really should on a whole be applied
in whatever way possible.”
“Yeah sure. Well, that’s interesting, you’ve kind of almost brought me onto one of my next
questions because I remember in a previous lecture that you did here before Christmas
at the Design Academy, you were talking very briefly at the start, about the interaction
between designers and engineers in particular and how they all inter-relate, and I was just
interested to know, from your own experience do you think the 2 should, or will merge,
and what you think the advantages and disadvantages of that might actually be?”
“Well first of all, talking about individual people, I think you need to have a certain attitude
or certain temperament in order to accept or put into practice a design-engineering
attitude. And so you really need to be interested in a kind of, lets say, in the slowness or
in the thoroughness of scientific research because it’s a different tempo than developing
assumptions and working these assumptions out as soon as possible. It really belongs to
people’s temperaments, to certain peoples temperaments that, the cycle between starting
or developing an idea and putting it into practice, which for some people it really should be
very short, it really belongs to them, there are people you know, who have a kind of high
burning rate. On the other hand there are people who really like a kind slowness, and the
kind of slow pace of scientific research and of academic engineering, and I think it really
much, very much depends on your goals, your ambitions, and the context in which design.
So, I know people who actually, will not accept the kind of slow pace of scientific research
for one specific project, but who actually will use it and implement it as soon as it is
needed. And I think that, what I consider to be the future of design is the kind of fluent way
with which designers will use, or will be embedded in an academic environment in order
to reach their goals, but at the same time will have the kind of flexibility to avoid it. So
choosing it or not choosing it. Immerse yourself in it or not, should become something that
is part of the whole toolbox of a designer. And, I’m saying this especially because there’s
still too many divisions. The University I’m working in right now, right here in Eindhoven,
is actually trying to bring together engineering science and design as much as possible so
this triangular actually will get to the point that it will have impact on the way products will
be developed and design attitudes will find a different place in society at large. But, I think
it’s a big adventure, it’s really interesting.”
“You’ve kind of already answered a question which I was thinking of asking, about how
you thought things would develop in the future. I guess in some ways that also makes
me interested in, how when you were a student yourself, how you actually thought things
would develop, and how you feel design and this thinking has changed throughout the
span of your career so far?”
“I was very confused as a student. I was a very confused person. Firstly, you know, I’m
self-taught predominantly; I was never on an art school or never in a design school. When
I was about 19 or 20 I really had no, I could not imagine that I would be choosing from
Photography, Film, Fine Art, Drawing, Painting- well I hated painting so I didn’t need to
choose that- or sculpture. And, well, as it is right now, and also in those days of course
you had to choose department and I just had no idea what to choose because I was using
many things at the same time. So I decided to go to a postgraduate course, where usually
people are accepted who have done, who have a background in an art school, but, you
know, they accepted me without having these antecedents, without me having a diploma
or anything like that, and it turned to be confusing for me because I was not really trained
in accepting criticism, you’re being, you know, you’re being trained at an art school to work
with criticism and to harvest from criticism, and to reap basically, what you need to take
the next step, and I was just too young. So, if you ask me, did I envision anything when I
was a student myself, I was far too confused for that, in order to think anything at all at that
time. It really took me a couple of years, and several years on a different continent in South
Central and North America to get some clarity to what I wanted to do.
But, I must say, before I became a student, before I went to this postgraduate school, I
worked in an organisation for new music, avant-garde music, and we also organised film
weeks and so on, and so forth, it was a very good school for me actually to be in, because
you know, John Cage came there. And Martin Feldman and Karl Heinz Stockhausen, and
all these people. And that was really, really, an important environment for me, because,
of course it was about music, it was not about fine art, but at the same time, it was very
much about attitude, an attitude of how to make things or how to develop things. And,
at that time I also read books, I’m going to mention one during the lecture, about Robert
Venturi, about Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. And the biggest thing for was
me, at that time, that I was taught in a post-graduate school where there was a kind of
either or attitude, it was very modernist. These were great artists, you know people such as
Karl Fischer, Heer van Elk, who are very, very fantastic people, but there was very much a
modernist 20th Century attitude. You have to choose, you have to choose very, very exactly,
and you have to keep to this choice as much as you can. Because somehow, if you stick to
this notion, or this idea, or this attitude, or this style, or this strategy, people will recognise
you. The more consequent you are, the easier it is for people to recognise you. To recognise
what you do. And in those days, well with the exception of Heer van Elk, who went
everywhere, who was all over the place, very good work by the way. I really had trouble
with that, and many students had. We thought, well, there should be a “both and” attitude,
there should be the possibility, depending on your temperament again, to play with the
possibilities, to play with the context, and to use or apply whatever strategy you think is
important or meaningful.
Its interesting that in the architectural discourse, and architects are however are usually
better writers than visual artists, in the architectural discourse I really came across with
some theories, ideas, and assumptions, I thought were really important for me to learn. So
these were basically the basis for me to accept this “both and” attitude and to see that its
contexts, styles, strategies, can be used in many different ways, depending on the situation,
depending on your state of mind, depending on the importance situation you find yourself
in. So for me it was a very slow, kind of slow development. It didn’t really occur in my
student days but rather after that that I was able to get some bearing basically.”
“Thank you. That’s quite comforting to hear actually!”
“Yeah. I can imagine!”
“Great. Thank you.”