Absurdity

"But above all, [youth] is a haste to live that borders on waste."

"There are races born for pride and life."

"The contrary of a civilized nation is a creative nation."

"To feel one's attachment to a certain region, one's love for a certain group of men, to kow that there is always a spot where one's heart will feel at peace - these are many certainties for a single human life."

"Everything that exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

I renewed my love for Albert Camus a couple of nights ago in the train, reading the essay he wrote "Summer in Algiers." I was without a pen, a found myself dog-earing the book (which I never do) to point to the beginnings of what I would have underlined, eventually resorting to underlinin with my fingernails, knowing how easily this kind of marking gets lost or the technique forgotten. But I couldn't just go on reading without putting some kind of mark in the book to show my enthusiasm. It is beautiful philosophy, existentialism, it sometimes seems bleak, and is commonly the philosophy of suicidal people, believing there is no meaning to life. But Camus' argues that this life is just so beautiful, there may be no meaning, but this life is so beautiful because of it.

This is where I stand. Life is just so damn beautiful, enjoy it!

Ode to Spencer

"The world fascinates me."

This has to be my favorite thing ever said in the history of mankind. My brother said this one day as a reasoning why he likes pretty much any christmas present he gets, and why he is so easy to shop for. He's the kind of guy you think of when you see that ever so cool, moderately useless gizmo sitting on the shelf.

He died two weeks after he said this, it's something I can appreciate because if he hadn't died, we wouldn't have spent hours and hours discussing him, and I would have never remembered that he said this. We had a great childhood together, and I can't regret anything about his life because I learned so much from him, it's actually difficult to talk about myself, my favorite things, and my interests without creating a connection to him, because he is such a big part of me.

So, now this will be my motto for life. To take his curiosity, and excitement about everything in the world, everything he taught me and keep it alive in myself.

Design for Life, and the Taxonomy of Experience

To design for an experience one must know it. The experience of using a personal timepiece.

The Design for Life project, run by a guest professor, Ian Coxon, from the University of Western Sydney, Australia, was my first project at KISD, and so far my favorite. The main goal was to choose an experience and study it so fully, to learn it's specific vocabulary, and intricacies, in order to better design for it. I chose to study the Experience of Using a Personal Timepiece. The course was focussed around philosophical concepts from Heidegger, and Gadamer, about how to understand and categorize experiences. From this philosopy Ian created a process which he called the Taxonomy of Experience.

The Process
We were first to experience our chosen experience ourselves, and document that experience as well as possible including as many nit-picky details as possible. I think I learned the most from this step, just inspecting my own behavior was very interesting to me. We were then to use our learned vocabulary for the experience to interview about, and inspect the experiences of others. This ended up for me being about 15 written pages of notes, and plenty of tiny scribbled notes all through my notebooks such as "the lecture no longer interests me, I check my watch." From these documentations we pulled out all the bits of the experience and categorized them under subsets of senses, positive/negative, cognitive, and emotional factors. This was quite a bit of work for me since I ended up with more than 1000 bits.
We then assigned each bit a theme, that was more specific, for example under Sense of Touch I used categories such as cold, heavy, and sweaty. Each bit was then interpretted, in order to document whatever information might be hidden behind the simple words of the text.
We then began narrowing down the information to the essential elements. Cutting my list down to 1/10 of what it was, cutting out overly repetitive elements, and things that did not seem to be essential to the experience.
The most difficult step came next, finding the extraordinary parts of the experience. We chose from the essential elements, the bits that had some surprising aspect to them. We were encouraged to leave behind information on form, and function, and to focus on only the super-ordinary aspects such as feelings, and philosophical ideas. We then gave each of these super-ordinary aspects a title, and sorted them accordingly. This led very quickly to the end product, about 4 words with which you could summarize the experience.
I was extremely excited and pleased to reach the end stage, after having droned through so many bits of information to finally have reached the nucleus of the experience. But I wasn't really surprised by any of the words I had found, because at that point I was so deep inside the experience that they all seemed so applicable to me.

5 Summarizing words
Emotional Attachment
People grow a huge personal attachment to their watch. First, because as a concept, it is a trusted source of information that is important to them. Second, as an object. The watch can represent something about it's past, such as it's former owner, or being a gift celebrating a big achievement. The watch can also become a symbol of you. Because it is a piece that you wear almost every day, it can come to represent your style, showing yourself through a piece of jewelry.

Coordination
Time has become a kind of grid work for the world, a fourth dimension. Just like streets, latitude, longitude and even country borders, are systems humans have created, and implemented to coordinate ourselves with the first 3 dimensions of the world. Watches and clocks are simply establishing a common framework to organize this fourth dimension. We use time to coordinate the flow of our day with those of the people in our society, in creating appointments, such as opening hours, friendly meetings, even train schedules. It's a way for us to coordinate our moments, and in doing so, consolidate our time so that we can get more done with what we have available.

Craving
The need for an answer to the question of "what time it is" can sometimes be very casual, and unimportant, but more often it is urgent, and pressing. It can control you, and cause stress and anxiety just by having the question in your head. This is the reason for having a wrist watch in the first place, a quick and simple satiation to our craving to know the time. It is always there, and can be depended on as a source of the necessary information.

Exactness
Because our own personal interpretation of lengths of time is so weak, the system of measuring and dividing common time has been set into place. The amazing thing about time is that according to our experience it is so inexact. 1 minute can seem to last a lifetime, and an hour can seem to fly by in just a couple minutes. I find it amazing that sometimes a 10 minute exactness is plenty, and at times it is necessary to be exact down to the fraction of a second. But the system of time is designed to function like this, dividable down to the second, every division of time is applicable to measuring different kinds of activities.

Homeostasis
One main aspect of using a personal timepiece is homeostasis. No matter what the form, be it carrying a personal watch, using a cell phone, or even outside sources for the time the user becomes acquainted to, and comfortable with this resource. This can be a physical comfort, in which the watch becomes like a part of the body. Or mental comfort, where you grow a dependance on the watch as a source for the time. After you have grown a homeostatic connecting with your watch an expectation grows, you expect for the watch to be there on your wrist, or not, depending on which side you are on. And when your expectations are wrong, it is always a bit of a surprise, sometimes good, and sometimes disappointing.


Making a Design
Finally we turned our results into a design. Because of time restraints we weren't supposed to make something practical, but more to capture the essence of the experience into a product, or design.

I based the concept for my final product, on the word craving. Quickly put, a watch is a way to strap our the satiation to our craving for time to our wrists. My product is then just a strap, with which one can strap their own personal craving to their wrist. The "cravings" shown in the example are more conceptual than practical, I found however that had I then studied what people currently "crave" a strap-on version of this could have been designed as a more practical application.

Things to add to the ends of words to make them automatically sound cool

-omatic
-omat
-tron

for example:
nerdtron
poopomatic
looseromat

Haha, I'm the postal drone

Core77 blog made a quick reference to one of their message board threads about what you did as a pre-designer. I was very amused to realize that he was talking about me when he said some of us had our former lives as postal drones... Very amusing. I kind of feel famous! Ha ha

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/yo_c77_board_alert_life_before_design_7589.asp

Baby Stroller

Wouldn't it be convenient to have a baby stroller that could lock up like a bicycle, The body could close up to make a kind of locker, or it could just fold and lock for storing on the streets.

CD Covers

A german friend of mine wanted me to share some American Rock music with him, so I picked him out some of my favorites but when I was done I had 4 hours of music, and only some of it was actually rock. So I cut it down to 2 cd's one of the full of almost purely american rock. And the other with a bunch of other songs that no-one knows about, but I love.

The best part was making the CD covers. For the Amerikanischer Rock CD, I played on the language difference, in German a rock is a skirt, so I did a picture of me wearing a true American rock for the cover. And on the inside wrote the song list, including not just the song title, and the band, but why I picked the song. When I went to print it out I ran into trouble - My printer was out of ink. But the result turned out pretty dang cool. Happy mistake (note: the file color was mostly brown).

I almost gave up in making a sleeve for the other one cause of the ink predicament, but I decided I can't have one with a really cool sleeve and the other with nothing, so I did it by hand. I took the liberty of using my in-the-process-of-being-developed-font, in a gold pencil. Which gives a nice subtle shiny effect, and then for the back, copied off from my person list writing/designing technique, by filling the whole page, and switching handwriting "fonts" constantly. I'm pretty pleased with the result, only problem is, I don't want to give it away now!


Front

Inside

Back

Front

Inside

Back

Getting through to them

"Although a message is recieved by an individual, the "room" is very crowded. Messages are designed and launched from a social and cultural stage full of actors. Even if one little message manages to best the competition and reach the ears or eyes of one individual, the person must understand, believe, weigh, and interpret the words and images in the context of her own personal, complex psychology."

Julia B. Corbet in "Communicating Nature"

Biomimicry

While visitng Goblin Valley, about a year and a half ago, I was enthralled by the rock forms, and the geological history of the site. The rocks were formed over thousands of years of rain fall, and wind which eroded the red sandstone. While hiking through one part, I could just imagine pools of water forming in the indentations, and little rivers running across the formations. And then I just wished it would rain, because it all looked like an elaborate, and incredibly enticing waterpark. Sliding through caves, over the bumpy landscape. If I ever design a waterpark this will be the concept for it. The red rocks of southern utah.

My Kind of Bookstore

I love bookstores, I feel at home seeing all of the books on the shelf, all kinds of information stored in the shelves. But at the same time I feel a bit uncomfortable because all the books are pristine, the books that aren't are the display books which have been leafed through, and looked at. But they are the books that don't get bought, and the pristine books beckon me to open their pages, but I feel guilty in making a sellable book into a non-sellable book just by looking through it. Many bookstores, probably first was Barnes and Noble have reading couches, and encourage you to stay and look at the books, but very few people do it, I think because of this sellable to non-sellable factor.

Another thing I love about books is used books, especially those with markings. I love that these books have a history in themselves, the person who read the book has put themselves into the book, and they have also been influenced by the ideas contained in the pages. Probably because I have such a great attachment to the books I read, and I assume that everyone else does too.

So what if bookstores were a mix, between library and bookstore. If you could open a book, and sit and read the whole book through, crack the spine, mark the pages and not feel guilty, but then buy a clean pristine copy of the book if you liked as well. There would be two parts then to my bookstore, not physically separate, but in concept, every book in the store would be accompanied by a readers edition. One you could sit with in the store and absorb. There would be cozy corners to sit in, coffee and tea to drink right there while you read. You could and would actually be encouraged to interact with the book, change it physically. Some might say if people can read the book in the store they won't buy it, but I think if you get the opportunity to change and be changed by a book you are more likely to buy it, because it has become a part of you.

I would love to have such a store, not just to create this new kind of environment, but to have the books that get read. Because the owner of the store would also be the owner of these most precious editions which hold the history of all their readers.

Weather, and Time

It was an amazing day in Cologne, quite untypical for this time of year, and you can see the people absorbing it in, because they know that it could be the last beautiful day for months. So when my roommate, Manuela, a geography major, invited me to go to the rhine to study, although I had nothing specific to study, I agreed to go along. At some point we stopped chatting and got working while we were sitting there in the shade near the river, and at some point broke the silence and said, "I just can't get my head around this," explaining " I know what the words say, but it's so incomprehensible." She began explaining the concept that some of the stars in our sky are thousands of light years away, so the fact that we can see them today means that they existed thousand of years ago. It is a huge concept, to imagine that something is so far away, and the travel of light which we assume as instantaneous, is slow enough that it can take thousands of years to arrive in our sight.

I think it's rather cool though, and I told her this, our sun, which on the universal scale can be taken as a representation for us, and the life on this earth. Because we live from the sun, and it feeds us. And we are (probably) the only living creatures growing from this sun. Our planet my very well end, life may end, and the planet may disintegrate. But in thousands or millions of years, there may be life living on a planet that is thousands or millions of lightyears away, they will see out star, our sun, and they may not know that it represents us, but it is still one way that we exist, essentially through these waves of light that it is sending off into the universe.

It's so huge, and hard to understand, and even explain. But that's the beauty of our life, that it is so tiny, but part of something so huge that we can't even understand it. So I told her this and I said "You know, don't feel bad that you can't understand your homework, because not being able to comprehend it is the beauty of the world. So your frustration, is actually why the world is so amazing.

Typefaces

I love typography, it was one the most evocative aspects of the design when I started my interest in it. Even before I was interested in design I have different fonts of handwriting and I was always (and still am) twisting and changing the shapes of the letters that I wrote. I was writing lists with different "fonts" for headers, and body copy.

But one of the interesting concept of typography, when you are designing with type you have another person's work within your design, the font design that they created has now become a part of your work, and will live on. I used to tell a then-boyfriend of mine that I want to design the next helvetica, and he (a non-designer) then forward called me the font nerd. He couldn't understand why I would want to design a font, although it is used all over the world, no-one knows who designed it, and you seem to be a non-entity once the font gets release to designers. But that is the key, your font lives on as your own, it's not important if people know who created it, because you are in the font, and every time your font is used, you are there on the page.

Childhood

I had a very magical childhood with my brother, I cannot count all of the playhouses we had, because we built so many, one in the attic of our garage, one dug out of the empty spot of land next to our house, and one built in a tree in an empty field about 15 minutes away from our house, that once we finished building, we never actually visited again. It's actually a funny story, I found out later that a friend of mine did play in that treehouse, and they never knew who built it, and were always worried that we would come back and kick them out.

I sometimes feel that now that I am grown up my apartment has become my playhouse, but it's not the same, it's just home, and the excitement of visiting in free time is lost. I would love to have an adult playhouse somewhere, where I could read, and enjoy myself, just get out of the house. In the book Walden I think that Henry David Thoreau got to this, and his playhouse, a cabin he built near Walden Pond, gave him the opportunity to inspect life, and escape from the buy more, and work more feelings of everyday life. He wrote the book during the experience and the insights and ideas he has in this playhouse is unbelievable, what could this do for me, or us as a people?

Loose Parts

The more loose parts a child has to play with, the more creative, and capable they are of problem solving. This is called the loose parts theory. It implies that the design of toys should allow for loose parts. This could be applied in two ways, first by making sets more complicated and extensive but because of recent, and very applicable movement of environmental design, one of the best things we can do is reduce. This is where the second application comes in, not making more things, but making things that are more compatible with what we already have. This idea was applied in my "Bildy" design, a fort building system which provides the tools for kids to build forts from found objects. In what other kind of toys could this be applied, perhaps on a smaller scale?

It amazed me when inspecting my own childhood, that I don't remember a lot of specific toys being used for their functions, we used everyday things to build bigger world, to create the toys we wanted. We didn't even need toys really, but just the freedom to play with everything in the house.

Who is this man?

I love the mystery that I associate with this image. I found it on the dirty, dust covered stairs up the attic of my last apartment building where lines are hung for drying clothes. I love his smile, and his face, his beard, his outfit. I think this picture must be important to someone, and wonder who, and what story lies behind this picture, what kind of personality is locked into the emulsion of the photograph?

Beautiful Map

I found this map at the Cologne Flea Market, I love way the different colors are made out of few inks by cross-hatching, and the hand-lettered names. It's printed on a beautiful thin tissue-like paper, it's an absolutely beautiful piece of paper.

Designer Nachos

This is one of those moments when you think "Hey I'm a designer, I've got a solution for this!" I was making nachos, and trying to make sure I got cheese on every chip.

The power of previous owners

"This bracelet exchange was not motivated by desire for fine jewelry; it was an expression of allegiance; a way of giving shape and substance to the intersection of three kindred women. My bracelet grounds me in an invisible social firmament, where Irene and Irma are stars in the constellations of descent and affinity. I fel their reassuring presence when the weight of the bracelet is on my wrist and I understand what it means to wear your wealth."

an essay by Irene Castle McLaughlin in "Evocative Objects Things We Think With"

Obsessed

"I enjoyed my work but something was missing. I didn't feel the same level of intellectual excitement that I had in college. I had lost contact with my obsession. I began to recognize the importance of having obsessions."
Mitchel Resnick in his essay Stars for th book "Evocative Objects Things We Think With"

I think obsessions are extremely important, that's why I'm building this blog, and website, to help myself become curious, creative, and obsessed with design again. But the problem with obsessions is that they are so easy to lose when we "grow up" and start working in the real world. Part of the reason we become obsessed is because we want to learn a lot about a specific topic, and frankly, once we get into a field we know enough not to need to be curious anymore.

Foreigners

"If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners."
Julia Kristeva "Strangers to Ourselves"

If we can at times do things that surprise us, and have feelings that seem uncharacteristic for us, then we can better understand the actions and feelings of those who are different than us. This could be the key concept to erradicating hate, but the problem is, uncharacteristic actions or feelings aren't something you can force on a person. But it may be interesting to design a campaign around this concept, to help people who have had "foreign" feelings understand it in this way.

Bildy

created for the design21 Child's Play competition. It did not win, but a very similar concept won an Award of Merit, which makes me confident in it's strength





Bildy is a series of fort building supplies which are meant to be an enhancement of the basic found objects which usually end up being composed into children’s forts, such as blankets and sheets, chairs, tables, tree trunks, books, and rocks.

The pieces are not meant to replace these traditional supplies, but to enhance the opportunities available, and therefore extending the possibilities of the child's imagination.

ndividual pieces include first, tension lines with hook ends for hooking to other objects in the kit, or velcro strips at the ends for wrapping around legs of chairs, or other found objects. Tent poles, one type bending into an arch, and another kind, a shorter straight pole, both of which can held taught with tension lines. Non-slip weight holders which keep found weights from slipping on top of the sheets, or smooth floors. Strong, lightweight clips used to hold sheets together at the ends to create larger surfaces for walls and ceilings.

This toy is appropriate for children ages 9 and up. These are the stages when the child’s motor, and problem-solving skills are complex enough to be able to handle such a building task. Also a time when the child's imaginative play is becoming very complex, which makes the forts the perfect toy to integrate, and create to match the situations imagined.

The pieces are very small when broken down, to decrease the necessary storage that a typical pre-built playhouse requires.

Overall, Bildy fort building supplies allow for children to decide how far they want to go. There is no prescribed combination, and the children can customize, leave out, add more, find their own building supplies, and build something as big, or small, in any shape and size they can imagine!

Switzerland

Classes I didn't learn anything from

I have just noticed that the classes where I learned the least functioned still because I met someone new. Two great examples: HTML, I guess I learned a bit, but I met one of my best friends: Skyler, and one of my most wierd/interesting contacts: Ernesto. In advanced drawing I didn't learn much either (it wasnt actually my forte, but whatever) and I met Omar, best friend, and influencer. So hey, maybe those worthless classes are worth something afterall.

fingerplay

here's the church


here's the steeple


open the doors, see all the people


close the doors, hear them pray


open the doors


they all run away

Hand-Made Font

Original typefaces were designed to match the way letters looked when they were written by hand. We currently have billions of handwriting fonts that mimic the same hand-written effect, but legibility on such fonts is low, and formal type seems to do something different for the designed page. So, I am beginning an attempt to use my own handwriting style as a basis for building a formal font. Taking note of the directions of the strokes, stroke weight, and directions of the angles, will hopefully allow me to make a unique font that has a more personal feel but still hold up as a formal typeface. We'll see how it turns out in the end, but here are my first attempts.

Forget it

"Blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders"
-Nietzsche

Sense of Place

Sense of Place 2, originally uploaded by Miss Lou Smith.

"The meaning of a place (not just the physical characteristics of it) is what holds power over people."
Communicating Nature by Julia Corbett

Phrase Mongering

Originally written in February 2007, in collaboration with Patrick Spingler. A review of the Passagen 2007, a community event in Cologne that highlights furniture design in conjunction with IMM Cologne.















written by Lou Smith an Patrick Spingler

”Design… Interior design... Outdoor design… Innovation… Functionality… Exciting insights and inspiration… Products that meet the demands of modern lifestyle, quality and shaping… Combining the old with the new… Get in touch with completely new and inspiring ideas from the crème de la crème of international designers…” Sounds good, but what does it all mean? Spanning over 150 spots all across the city is, what its founder calls, “a ’Mecca’ for the design hungry and meeting point for the international design world” - Passagen 2007. After reading the brochure it seems as if you couldn’t walk for 500 meters in Cologne without running into one of Europe’s top designers these days. But is what’s behind the Passagen event really the high quality design proclaimed by many of the participants, or is it just a PR lady with a dictionary making mouthwatering promises from behind a curtain, like the wizard of OZ?

Obviously some of them had a hard time with their grammar school vocabulary lessons, because the guide is full of big words, which sound nice but are used incorrectly. For example, two designers presented a chandelier that they say fits into the field of so-called "Haute Couture" lighting. The chandelier was made of plastic, and a boring design, leaving us wondering what those lamps have in common with the unique handmade fashion pieces that bear the same name? Asking the designers, it became obvious that they didn't know either. But, hey, who cares? Haute Couture still sounds fancy, doesn't it?

The blurbs were also full of pre-formed opinions on the designs themselves. How can the author know that I will find a design inspiring before I even look at it?

Once again, the trend this year is reusing old designs from the mid 20th century. One showroom included stacking beds from the 60’s that were reproduced with new colors and finishes. The design is still great; the only problem is the sign on the showroom window reading “Modern Design.” Since when is 40 years ago modern? As far as design history books go the “modern” design movement happened more than 100 years ago. And they certainly can’t intend “modern” to mean current design.

Another example, a high-end kitchen producer brought back a design this year, which was, in its time, meant to be a functional kitchen for four. It takes only two square meters of the extensive showroom and, as the hostess was presenting the item, it became clear that it hardly functions and would barely be enough kitchen for one person nowadays. It must have been a bad year for kitchen design if they are recycling this kind of crap. Reproducing old designs is not necessarily bad, but they should at least be appropriate for the current market.

Many furniture designers are presenting the innovative idea of “modular” furniture systems, which allow the owner to use his own creativity to make combinations of furniture in an all-new way. The most avant-garde couch owners are experimenting with an L-shaped "get together zone" for their living rooms. Sorry everyone, you’ve been duped, have you ever noticed that modular furniture hardly ever gets moved into new configurations once it’s in the owners hands? It has been around for a long time, and it’s no longer new and interesting, just absolutely normal.

At the Design Post, a location which hosts 17 Passagen participants, there was not a single new product introduced for the event. 13 did not change their permanent exhibition at all for the Passagen. One store even admitted that the main reason for joining Passagen was peer pressure from the neighboring stores. If the showrooms are open all year round with no changes, then what’s so special about Passagen? Every year more and more permanent showrooms and stores want to join the Passagen and it seems to be only a question of time until IKEA joins as well. Just imagine Passagen visitors trekking to the outskirts of town to visit the extensive IKEA “showroom” in Rodenkirchen. It would be an odd sight, but surely Passagen curator Mrs. Voggenreiter would appreciate the profits from their participation.

This is exactly the problem with Passagen today. It has been taken over by permanent stores, most of which have barely changed a thing for the event itself. Asking one store about changes for Passagen, they replied that their showroom laid new green carpet, special for the event. Obviously, a great part of the exhibitors are just using the brochure to help visitors find their way to their retail locations. Maybe handing out Yellow Pages would do the job just as well. At least this way many visitors could be preserved from the harassment of those mind-numbing phrases and boring showrooms.

The furniture festival has become such a mess that many participating locations aren’t even relevant to furniture design anymore. A hotel participated in the event displaying only one piece of design in the lobby with no background information available or even anyone standing near it. It was obviously a gimmick to get visitors to stay with them during the event. The most irrelevant entry on the list was an authorized Apple computer dealer: The last time we checked, computers aren’t furniture at all.

For one week Cologne is full of orange Passagen banners, but so many are lacking something unique and new to back them up. It is nice to have a furniture design event in the city, but Passagen should take care that the content of the event does not become too full of crap. The event is nothing but its content, and if the content is recycled, non-functional, or irrelevant, the event will quickly become all of those things itself.

Repercussions

I imagine the world to be a big swimming pool, rippling surface of the water is representative of all the ideas, and movements and individual character makes. Each moving character has ripples going out from it, changing the surface of the water, and moving other things with it. In general life the ripples would look like a normal swimming pool bouncing around, some small, some slightly bigger, but not a lot really going on. Big thinkers and changers are moving the water with extreme force and causing large waves, some characters are completely still just being moved by the waves and ripples that hit them. Some people are making a splash, which seems huge in the moment, but minutes later after the initial shock, everything is back to the normal subtle rippling of the water. Big groups of people can work together to create a wave, and people coming one after the other can create a current. But many people are just sitting there, taking it all in, letting the waves wash over them and moving with the current, not doing anything to make themselves known other than having the ripples of others bouncing off of them.

Ideas for Conquering Throwaway Culture

Two main ideas:

Create more value:
-Higher prices create more percieved value, but somehow I don't think this will be the answer, because high-priced objects are not as available to middle and lower class people.
-Smaller runs of products would encourage the owner to value the object as unique, and irreplacable by any substitute, and in this case prices could be reduced to slightly higher than Target prices instead of incredibly high it would require to create a true percieved value from price.
-Objects that are more timeless, or even more difficult to achieve, new but timeless.

Values could be reformed, we currently value convenience at almost the highest level, which is probably, or almost definitely a result of the busy lifestyles we live. And why do we live this lifestyle? to be able to buy more convenient products.
- I once noticed that there are a great amount of old people around the city of Zürich during the day time, they have no job, yet they are not bored, because living their life takes all day, they do little errands, bringing their bottles to recycle, visiting their friends, washing their laundry, and maintaining their homes the old fasion way. The price is lower for doing things the "old fashioned way" and it fills the time that they spare by not having a job. And I suppose the way they use the time is more fulfilling as well, I'd much rather be baking a cake from scratch, and having a spic and span home then working day in day out.

Throwaway Culture

It has recently become clear that that throw-away culture the US (and also germany, but to a lesser degree) currently embraces is damaging the environment, and possibly damaging our opinions on products, and consumption. How to combat this throw-away culture? Factors such as (this list should probably be better, or more scientifically defined, but here's an idea of what I'm thinking) quality, durability, price, popularity, reparability, ease of maintanence, longevity, individuality, trendiness, and nostalgia determine what value we place on a specific object, and the value in turn determines how long we will hold on to specific objects, and how we mentally categorize them on the terms of throw-away product to precious heirloom.

Then one way to conquer throw-away culture would be to put more value back into everyday products.

What's going on in their heads?

I think that to make a poignant and relevant design in any field of context you have to have a good basis of what's going on in the heads of your target audience. I have been trying to figure out lately then, what is going on in people's head regarding the environment, a good step in the right direction was reading the book "Communicating Nature" by Julia Corbett of the University of Utah. It discussed how nature is communicated, and what current messages are communicating about nature. But while doing the research I realized that people have many other priorities which are affecting people's sustainable actions. I have noticed this myself as well, just from noticing that I don't recycle my bottles because I don't have a way to get them to the grocery store where I can turn them in. There must be lots of different factors that are putting each individual person's life, abilities and priorities above being environmental.

So my new problem is figuring out what are actually the priorities people have now, on a large sense. What do people think about everyday. What is important to them. By becoming informed about these factors, I may then be able to find a way to more productively conqer them.

I am currently on the search for books with information about this, but at the suggestion of my friend, and former humanities professor, I think I could gain a good insight by surveying newspapers, magazines and television as well. People's internet usage would also be a good hint. I want to see what media are the most popular (which shows, magazines, or newspapers are most widely sold), what are the headlines, or topics of the respective media, and what kind of advertising is in this media that might affect people's thinking/priorities. Or perhaps this has already beeen done, and I can just find a study somewhere :)

Heirlooms

Has mass-production, and mass cheaping ruined heirlooms?

Will you be able to pass that IKEA table onto your future generations? Probably not, because it's function is not to be valuable, but to look good, and last as long as the trend does. In a culture were objects even as big as furniture and cars are treated as replacable, and throw-away, how can objects even last long enough to make it to the heirloom status. My parents have lamps, and chairs, and chests of drawers that have been passed down through generations, and the objects made it this far because their style is classic, and they have been durable enough to withstand years of use. How will an ikea chest of drawers cope generation, if it can barely withstand one move of house?

Flimsy

What effect does it have on the way we value objects to put our hearts into flimsy or short-lived products that necessarily break or go obsolete?

I know the I have had my heart broken a couple of times by indurable objects. Loving my 12" powerbook, and then killing it with apple juices makes me much less inclined to love its successor, cause I feel like it's just going to break anyway. Treasuring a pair of glasses that I found at the flea market, only to drop one in the sink while washing it, and break it, makes me shy away from it's twin, I avoid using it cause I feel like it's going to break if I do. In addition, every time I see it my heart breaks a little cause I know I am just going to accidentally break it anyway, while pulling something else out of the cupboard, or if one of my roommates decides to use it. My iPod, which I loved and paid a lot of money for 2 years ago, that is now about 5 generations behind, and not nearly as beautiful as the new ones, also the fact that it crashed, and I can't afford to repair it. Makes me much more careful about buying a new one, it'll just go obsolete in the end anyway. I suppose the effect that flimsy objects have had on me is that it's becoming harder for me to put my heart into objects made of glass or technology, I love them, but I know that I can't have them forever. It's almost like be married to someone with cancer, it's great, but you know it's going to end, and you'll have to keep on living without them.

Too many objects

Consumerism necessarily makes objects a larger part of our ersonal identities, but also changes the relationships that we have with these objects. Before the focus was on a few individual objects - but now we put more emphasis on the collection or mass of objects. Each individual object is judged by how it fits in the mass and the mass is where we place our identity, not in the single objects.

Dad's Crutch Chair

Dad's Crutch Chair
Originally uploaded by Miss Lou Smith

Who says that creativity doesn't run in the family? Well, nobody acutally but I thought this was adorable.

I occasionally felt a slight disconnect from my dad, he just seems a little wierd. If you ask him how he is, his explanation could go into a long technical explanation of how tubes need to fit correctly when building the fuselage of a home-built airplane (yes these are more common than you think), and how to achieve this tight fit.

You ask him how to do your calculus homework, and he doesn't really tell you how to get to the answer, but more why the answer should be what it is, which is inevitably a much longer story than just the process itself.

But in the past couple years, since I decided to study product design I have been basking in the genes that I have inherited from him, because he thinks about things complexly, and creatively.

When he broke his foot a couple years ago hiking, and then had another foot problem with his heal that kept him in a cast for more than a year straight, he had all sorts of cute inventions to get along with his foot, and crutches. When buying a fountain drink at the gas station he would ask for a bag, put the cup upright in the bag an tie a knot at the top, giving his cup "handles" so he could hold it and the crutches simultaneously without a spill.

At an airshow a couple years ago he concocted this chair from his crutches since he forgot to bring a chair along (and I get the feeling he used this more than once while being dragged around town with my mom, and tired of standing on his cast.)

So dad, I salute you and your creativity, and thanks for the genes!

Stinky Pillows

In the middle ages, pillows were filled with spices, and herbs to cut down the smells that were coming from the feces-covered streets.

Feces covered streets are a thing of the past, but perhaps spice-filled pillows shouldn't be...

Selling Days

I remember one of the highlights of my elementary school education was selling days. These usually happened once or twice a year. And all the kids would make or bring little things to sell, not with real money, but with the classroom currency.

What if my design school did this? I think it would be really fun to have a bunch of design students make their concoctions, and open one night to sell to the general public. The products would no doubt be more interesting. It would be a kind of exhibition, mixed with consumption. Fun for us to show off more of our personal work, and fun for the public to see what we're doing and actually get to take some of it home with us!

Blindfolded Voters

I just got a great visual for americans voting habits. Blindfolded Voting. I think many people vote on first impressions, of they vote for only a few reasons, but aren't well informed enough to (a)critically back up what they claim as their own beliefs, and (b)know which candidate represents those beliefs best.

Catching the Train

I bet you that one of the hardest parts of being a tram-driver is deciding whether to wait and open the door for that person who is running with all their might to catch the train. You have the power to make or break that person's day. But I bet this is quite a rewarding part as well. I was running for the train about a week ago, already running late, and practically missing the train that was actually 40 minutes later than the one I should have been on. I ran pathetically, but with all my might in my heels that flip off my feet. But once I realized that the driver was waiting for me I was so happy, I wanted to knock on his door and thank him personally (but I decided not to cause there's a sign on the driver's door that says you shouldn't disturb). But I bet the look of joy and surprise on my face was enough of a reward for the driver.

Today again I was waiting for the train, and one (that wasn't mine) pulled into the train station, a few seconds later I saw a girl running down the stairs, hoping to catch the train, even though all the doors were already closed. But the driver opened the frontmost door, and the look on her face was priceless. I gotta catch this event on film.