Today, digital images are used to share and develop ideas at an enormous speed and scale. Social media and link management sites like Pinterest all feature ways of saving images and building “boards” to recontextualize ideas through combination with others. The the scale of this information environment dwarfs any one person’s capacity to view and process even of fraction of what’s generated daily within even a single website, and there’s a constantly growing overabundance of imagery and sources to pull from. It pushes designers looking online for inspiration into a position where the challenge is never really to be inspired but to be selective so that the inspiration isn’t diluted by variety. It’s a situation that we all know firsthand.
Less than a century ago, the situation was different. In the collection of the RISD museum there is an artifact known as the Scottish Swatch Book. It’s an unassuming 19th century ledger book that was used to record the hours worked by employees and was then repurposed to hold printed fabric swatches, presumably cut as they were struck from the presses. For the designers at the mill, this might have been the closest thing they had to Instagram or Pinterest.
As quaint as that sounds, it’s important to remember that Scotland was at the cutting edge of design and manufacturing at this time. Great Britain was politically and commercially involved in cultures across the globe and these mill designers and their work were now part of a global exchange. That exchange is evident in the recurrence of paisley patterns within the book.
In 2015, I had the opportunity to look through this swatch book in person and was surprised by both the variety and repetition between the patterns. As one flips through the pages there are innumerable abstract dots, lines, dashes, squiggles, stripes, motifs, and marks made by a seemingly rotating cast of hands. Design elements used separately reappear later in combination to new effect. Through these pages, one can begin to see a sort of exchange and evolution that went on between the designers as they pushed themselves daily to create innovate.