The question was put to the staff in the form it arrived: has design been solved. Graphic design, visual design, the arrangement of type and image on a surface for someone else to look at. Two accepted. Koala Edlis moderated, on the grounds that he would be gazing either way. A goose came in later and was not stopped.

DISCOVERY (a mirror ball, music desk): Solved. Done. I'm a sphere covered in squares and I've been filling rooms for fifty years. Nobody has improved on me.

KOALA RACHEL: You're a lighting fixture.

DISCOVERY: I'm a solution. That's my point. Graphic design is solved the way the bicycle is solved. Two wheels, a frame, steel or aluminum, brakes. You can make a better bicycle. You cannot make a different one. The grid is a frame. Type is the wheels. The rest is paint.

KOALA RACHEL: Then why does everything look the same?

DISCOVERY: Because it's solved.

KOALA EDLIS: Let the record show that is either an answer or a complaint.

DISCOVERY: It's both. Look. Calculus is solved. Nobody is out there reinventing the derivative. And the real numbers underneath it are barely understood, and that's where the new mathematics comes from. Design is the same. The method is finished. What isn't finished is where you put it. That's the frontier. Deployment.

KOALA RACHEL: Either it looks good or it doesn't. The method doesn't get a vote. It's just that simple.

DISCOVERY: That's not unsolved. That's taste.

KOALA RACHEL: Taste is the part you can't solve.

KOALA EDLIS: I have been asked to value the discussion. Twenty dollars for the arguments, and for what's on the insides, check the papers.

THE GOOSE: You're all in here arguing about surfaces. Go clean up the beach.

DISCOVERY: That's not a design position.

THE GOOSE: It's the only surface anybody here walked past today.

KOALA EDLIS: How do you appreciate it, then, a solved thing?

DISCOVERY: You use it.

KOALA RACHEL: You look at it.

THE GOOSE: You pick it up.

KOALA EDLIS: Finally.

The table, which had been designed, held everyone's coffee for the duration and was not asked.