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...