“The world is everything that is the case” – Ludwig Wittgenstein [1]
The celebrated American author John Updike had a golf habit. His book Golf Dreams collected his essays and writing about golf from 1958 to 1994: 36 years of mostly frustration. The protagonist of his famous Rabbit series of books, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, also enjoys golf, though like the author, he is a middling golfer. As anyone who has played golf knows, the game throws up occasional moments of almost religious epiphany, where a perfect ball strike and result seem to far exceed one’s capabilities. Here is Rabbit experiencing one such moment as he takes a drive off the tee:
“he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather’s color stretched dense across the east. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he’s fooled, for the ball makes this hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling.”
– John Updike, Rabbit, Run
The experience of playing golf is different from the game itself of course, but the game – a combination of a particular landscape, a set of clubs, a ball, and the rules of golf – sets the boundaries for what it is possible to experience.
How far is golf, or the experience of golf, designed?
Golf course design, known as ‘golf architecture’ has a long tradition as a discipline, as does the design and development of golf clubs (the things that you hit the ball with, not the places) and balls. Could we consider the third element, the rules of golf, to be a design too? If so, who designed them?
The Rules of Golf date back to 1744, and are maintained and regularly updated by a golf society known as the ‘Royal and Ancient’ together with the US Golf Association. They reached their 32nd edition in 2012, had major changes in 2019, and recently received a comprehensive new update at the beginning of 2023. The current version elegantly describes, in 24 rules, the game – or the design, more of which later – of golf [3].
Rule 1 is titled ‘The Game, Player Conduct, and the Rules’, with its first clauses stating simply that:
“Golf is played in a round of 18 (or fewer) holes on a course by striking a ball with a club. Each hole starts with a stroke from the teeing area and ends when the ball is holed on the putting green.”
Over the following 23 rules, the details of the game, covering as many eventualities as possible, are laid out.
That the game of golf exists at all is evidence that it was purposefully designed. Figure 3 shows the first known set of rules, written in 1744 for a challenge tournament on the Leith Links in Edinburgh, Scotland. They are signed by the winner of the challenge, John Rattry, but formulated by the ‘Gentlemen Golfers of Leith’ (later known as ‘The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers’) and also adopted for a similar challenge at what is now known as ‘the home of golf’ at St Andrews.
The rules lay out the order of play (“he, whose ball lyes farthest from the hole is obliged to play first”), anticipate possible hazards (“wattery filth”, “stones, bones”, “horse, dog, or anything else”) and other problematic situations (“if you should lose your ball, by its being taken up, or any other way, you are to go back to the spot, where you struck last”). Later versions also go a long way in specifying the technical requirements for clubs and ball in an appendix titled: ‘Design of Clubs’.
The rules specify the hard limits of a small and orderly world, carefully defining what individuals can and can’t do to complete a legitimate round of golf. The rules don’t capture the texture of the game, of course, but the culture, practice, and economy of golf is built on these rules and the rules evolve with each new edition to accommodate these new developments [4]. Considering that golf is played all over the world in vastly different places, the rules, in their elegant simplicity of phrasing, represent an impressive level of objective universality and utility.
Encounters with the rules of golf are when concrete meets abstract. A set of rules has something that we might call ‘imaginative expressiveness’: they inherently imagine the reality against which the rules can be tested. If an alligator swallows your ball after you hit it too close to a lake [5] then Rule 9.6, and recursively Rule 18.2, applies:
“If it is virtually certain that the ball was lifted or moved by an outside influence and the ball is lost, the player must take stroke-and-distance relief under Rule 18.2.”
The rules of golf somehow imagine, in the abstract, the particulars of every possible game of golf. They are necessary and sufficient for the conduct of the game. Nothing is redundant, every sentence – every phrase – has a meaning and purpose. And every sentence shapes golfing behaviour. The words have real force. The rules matter in deciding outcomes and they are used thousands of times every day. Occasionally, a rule controversy breaks out into wider consciousness during major golf events [6]
If the rules of golf represent a design what would the design process be?
If the first edition of the rules was a codification of existing practice, and a statement of the game of golf’s existence, then subsequent editions represent a considered evolutionary process, like the development of a BMW car; adapting to fit a changing environment. The process is likely to have been collaborative, discursive, and creative, as cases were made for this or that abstract entity. New rule forms serve both to modernise the product but also to protect its ‘DNA’. The 2023 version of the rules shows a turn towards “inclusion and sustainability” [7] as many other types of products and services have over the past years. The need to ‘move with the times’ is balanced against protecting ‘the traditions’ of the game.
This debate is alive in almost every conversation about change that we have. How to preserve the value of what we have but adapt to changing circumstances? These are fundamental decisions of design and acts of imagination. Whilst designers have a big say in how a smart product or website might develop, I’m pretty sure that no designers were involved in drafting the updated rules of golf (at least not in an official capacity). If so, that is a missed opportunity. Because rules have aesthetics and because rules affect, or even design, our lives in more fundamental ways than products or services do. Unless you are a golfer, the 24 rules of golf are a fairly trivial example but sets of rules that moderate, shape, and regulate our behaviours and organisations are everywhere. National legislatures make new rules (laws) and those rules frame, to a very large extent, how we conduct the reality of our lives. Organisations are constituted in rules aimed at achieving defined purposes [8]. Tax rules determine how we contribute to the funding of the state. Competitive sport, as we’ve seen, relies on sets of rules [9].
And yet, though sets of rules and laws often determine what designers, architects, and golf course planners can do, the forming or codification of those rules and laws is not considered a design activity. It should be, because the imaginative and ethical capabilities of designers would make them a valuable voice in debates about future possibilities. The quality that sets of rules have in defining an abstract world for us through envisioning concrete, yet undetermined, realities provides an opportunity for designers to have the influence that currently only policymakers, politicians, and lawyers lay claim to. Acts of imagining future possibilities – so central to the process of design – are essential to codifying systems of rules because the form that rules take can have far reaching and often unforeseen consequences.
Through careful design and routine maintenance, rules have the capacity to exist, and therefore regulate, for very long periods of time. In 1787, 43 years after the 13 rules of golf had been set down, a team of designers, known as ‘framers’, set down 7 rules to define the nature of government and the rights of citizens in the relatively new country of America. Those rules became the Constitution of the United States. The recent decision by the US supreme court to overturn the right to abortion (Roe v Wade) was made on the basis that it was unconstitutional; against the rules. The right to abortion violated Rule number 14 (the Fourteenth amendment to the original 7 articles of the constitution) the court found [10].
The concrete reality did not, after all, correspond with the abstract rule and therefore the right to an abortion, along with practices associated with this right, could not be justified, according to the nine US Supreme Court judges.
The rules that determine the constitution of the US Supreme Court are another story.
References
[1] This is the first proposition of seven from Wittgenstein’s famous ‘Tractatus, Logico, Philosophicus‘ (1922). Curiously, this book is structurally similar to the 2016 edition rules of golf which consists of 34 propositions (and sub-propositions) and begins just as simply: “The Game of Golf consists of playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules.” It also ends just as gnomically. While the final proposition of the Tractatus reads: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, the last rule of the 2012 edition states: “If play is conducted other than in accordance with the Rules of Golf, the Rules of Golf Committee will not give a decision on any question.” in other words “Whereof one cannot speak of golf, thereof one must be silent”.
[2] F.W. Hawtree (1983) The Golf Course: Planning, Design, Construction, and Maintenance, Taylor and Francis.
[3] The 2023 rules of golf: https://www.randa.org/rog/the-rules-of-golf
[4] Changes to rules: https://www.randa.org/en/articles/r-a-and-usga-announce-2023-rules-of-golf-update
[5] In Florida, alligators stealing golf balls is not unheard of. The commentators on this YouTube clip discuss the rule implications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mJfNbgFWSw
[6] See, for example, this 2021 incident involving Phil Mickelson and a then recently updated Rule 9.1: https://golf.com/instruction/rules/phil-mickelson-dodges-potential-infraction-wins-two/
[7] The nicely-named ‘Director of Rules’ at The R&A, Grant Moir, commented on the 2023 update: “We are continuing to improve and adapt the Rules of Golf to ensure they are in line with the way the modern game is played. That means making the Rules easier to understand and access for all golfers and making the sport more inclusive and welcoming for golfers with disabilities. We are also working to ensure golf has a sustainable long-term future and making more resources available digitally is key to achieving that goal.” https://www.randa.org/en/articles/r-a-and-usga-announce-2023-rules-of-golf-update
[8] For a technical discussion about the ontology of constitutive rules, a topic of academic philosophical debate, see, for example: Constitutive Rules, Language, and Ontology by Frank Hindriks.
[9] This post could equally have discussed the FIA rules of Formula 1 racing, set out in 63 sections. The rules often provide the impetus for new innovation in racing teams, the subject of a paper by Nigel Cross, ‘Winning by Design‘, describing how racing car designer Gordon Murray developed a hydraulic suspension system in response to a rule about ground clearance.
[10] The decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization determined that: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Peter Lloyd 