Pinned, not fixed

In praise of the drawing pin, and the surprisingly useful art of not being finished yet.

Find an old cork noticeboard, the kind that has hung in a school corridor or a kitchen for twenty years, and tilt it towards the window.

It's likely covered in holes. Thousands of them. Some sit in neat and tidy clusters, where the same corner of the same poster was pinned and re-pinned for years. Others are on their own, left by a note that went up once and was never seen again.

I think a well-used cork board is one of the most lovely objects there is. Not for what's on it, but for what it shows. Every one of those holes is something that was put up, looked at, and then moved or taken down. It's a monument to changing your mind.

We don't build many of those.

We celebrate the finished thing: the launch, the opening night, the book on the shelf, the ribbon and the scissors or the exit. The drawing pin belongs to the bit before all that. The messy, provisional, slightly frustrating stretch where an idea is real enough to point at and nobody has quite agreed what it is.

I'd like to make a case for it.

A pin with a handle

When Edwin Moore patented his push-pin in America in 1900, he described it, with admirable obviousness, as a pin with a handle. I love that. Old objects were named for exactly what they did. Today you need a search engine and a strong coffee to work out what half the things in a shop are for.

Over here, flat-headed pins were already found in architects' drawing boxes by the late 18th century, which is how we Brits ended up with the name. A drawing pin was a pin for drawings. In Lychen, in Germany, a clockmaker called Johann Kirsten gets the credit for the flat-headed version around 1903, and the town is proud enough to have giant drawing pins dotted around its streets. I haven't been. It's on the list.

Notice what the thing was made for, though. Drawings. And drawings are almost always unfinished: a sketch, a plan, a layout, a first go. From the very start, the drawing pin was a tool for work in progress.

Cheapness

Here's what I think the pin really gets right, and it's less about engineering than about economics.

Moving a pinned card costs about a second. No meeting, no new version, no email titled "v7 FINAL (6) - edits - final - to review".

You lift it, you move it, done.

Moving a paragraph in a forty-page document that three people have already signed off costs rather more. Most of the bill is paid in ego by the way.

And people respond to prices, even prices nobody writes down. When changing an idea is cheap, they change it, often and early, while it's still made of paper. When it's expensive, they might find themselves defending it for no other reason than a lot has already been sunk into it – there's a fallacy for that. Not because they're stubborn, but because they're sensible: nobody wants to reopen a thing that took a fortnight to close.

So the humble drawing pin does something rather interesting. It lowers the price of changing your mind. And an idea whose shape is cheap to change in week one tends to be in much better shape by week ten.

Rough things get argued with

There's a second trick, and it's about manners.

A polished thing asks to be admired, adored, approved and shared with pride. A rough thing asks to be argued with, refined and made into something. Hand someone a glossy deck in a lovely font and they'll look for the slide to approve it. Pin a sketch to the wall and they reach for a pen with an open mind.

Plenty of trades worked this out long ago.

In architecture schools, the review is called a pin-up. Drawings go on the wall unfinished, on purpose, so tutors and classmates can pull them apart while pulling them apart is still cheap.

Tailors pin fabric before they stitch it. It's tried on, adjusted and re-pinned, sometimes many times. Nobody at the first fitting expects to see a finished suit, and that's precisely why the suit ends up fitting so well. Well, that's what I've been told by the way. One day I will splash out on a tailored suit.

In the early 1930s, a story man at Disney called Webb Smith started drawing scenes on separate sheets and pinning them to boards. It turned out to be far easier to see a story than to read one, and the storyboard went on to spread through the whole film industry.

And in magazine offices, editors pin every page of an issue to the wall as a thumbnail, the flatplan, so they can see the pace of the whole thing at a glance. Move one feature and the rhythm of the issue changes. Much better to find that out on the wall than at the printer.

Different trades, same discovery. The best time to disagree about an idea is while it's still made of paper.

Firm enough, loose enough

The pin's real genius though is a balance. It holds firmly enough to stay put, and loosely enough to come out. Pinned, not fixed.

Most of our tools pick a side. The pin sits happily in the middle, and that middle is where a great deal of good work gets done: the stretch where an idea needs to be specific enough for other people to see, and still free to become something better.

It's also, in my experience, where a lot of potential goes missing. Usually not because the idea was bad, but because three perfectly nice people were each picturing a slightly different version of it and nobody had pinned it to a wall long enough to notice. The pin is very good at helping people notice.

A head-nod to Blu Tack

I'll concede the obvious. The drawing pin is losing ground.

Blu Tack was invented by accident in Leicester in 1969, when Bostik was trying to make a new sealant. It started out white, was turned blue after research suggested children might mistake it for chewing gum, and was sold as the friendly alternative to the drawing pin: no holes. Add magnets and sticky notes, and the modern wall is a much gentler place with less redecorating needed.

I'm a fan of all of them. But I still like the holes in a wall. If you've gone hole-free, a photo of the wall each time it changes does a similar job.

Every board comes down

The last thing about pin boards is my favourite: they come down.

My eldest's university room is almost wall-to-wall pin board. Within a week it held timetables, photos, letters from home and an remarkable number of discount codes for drinks in various watering establishments. In a year it'll be bare again, waiting for someone else. Nobody moves in expecting the last student's life still pinned up. The lack of permanence is the point.

The best working walls share that.

A flatplan has a print date. A storyboard has a shoot. A suit has its final fitting. The wall works because it ends, and the date that ends it sits outside the wall, where the planning can't stretch to fill the time.

A cork board, a door, the side of the fridge - they'll all do. Put one idea up this week, rough on purpose. Move it rather than rewrite it. Show it to someone and see what they point at. And decide, before you start, when it comes down.

Where to go next

Studio members get edition No. 007 of The Department of Interesting Things, below. 5000+ words exploring this concept of pinning ideas long enough to get clarity and alignment, which then creates the conditions for momentum to occur.

Plus the investment and "first idea" cards along with the practice loop and seven field tests.

Explore previous edition of The Department of Interesting Things here.