The Compass
A plus sign with a little extra.
A pair of axes is the most ordinary figure in math, a plain crosshairs anyone draws without thinking. What makes it a mark is the third line, the one with no business being there: a single arrow on the diagonal, pointing up and to the right. Upward and forward, the direction I aim to go.
Read the axes as a quad chart and the arrow is aimed at the top-right quadrant, which is where I am trying to work. It hardly matters what I put on the axes:
The diagonal does what neither axis can. An arrow along x is one discipline, an arrow along y is another. The diagonal refuses to be either; that refusal is the point. It is the line that crosses, the one that treats a boundary as somewhere to work rather than somewhere to stop. It is also the only direction on a flat page that can suggest depth, a way of pointing at what is not literally there.
A compass with a needle that never moves. It does not point north. It points me back to what matters most to me.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.