About : night stands furniture gallery
Title : night stands furniture gallery
night stands furniture gallery
we work as consultants, which means we work witha lot of different companies in a lot of different fields but really our common interest is in understandingpeople, and what their needs are. so if youstart to think, really what these do as consultants is focus onpeople, then it's easy to think about what's needed design-wise in the kitchen, orthe hospital, or in the car. we have clients come to us and say, here's ouraverage customer, for instance she's female, she's 34 years old, she has 2.3 kids. and we listenpolitely and say, well that's great but we don't care about that person. what we reallyneed to do to design, is look at the extremes, the weakest, or the personwith arthritis, or the athlete,
or the strongest or the fastest person. because ifwe understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself. these are actually things i haven't seen in1,000 years. we tried to use less material, like here's one that'shollow inside. a good friend of mine, sam farber, he wasvacationing with his wife, betsy. i got a phone call one night, he was so excited hesaid he couldn't sleep. and what he was excited about was he'd beencooking dinner with betsy and she was making an apple tart. and she was complaining about thepeeler, that it was hurting her hands. she had arthritis, and she just couldn't hang on to it.and it hit sam at that moment
that here's a product that nobody's reallythought about. and our thought was, well if we can make it work forpeople with arthritis, it could be good for everybody. we knew that it had to be a bigger handle. kidshave big crayons because they're easier to hold onto. it's the same thing for somebody thatmight not have full mobility of the their hand, they need something a little bit larger, that's a littleeasier to grip with a little less force. so we did a lot of studies around the shape of thehandle, the size of it, to come up with a size that would be perfect for everybody. but eventually we found a rubberized bicycle grip,and we basically did this. so, it really goes through many, many, moreiterations than you would think
to do a handle that's relatively simple in the end. i think one thing with a hand pruner is that you havethis constant friction happening when you're closing it. but i feel like here's the spot that really hurts, this isthe biggest pressure point for me. so it's like here in this area, on all four fingers,you have friction. so when we start out doing a project, looking atthese different tools to understand how we can design a betterexperience for someone,ergonomically so what we did here was to map it out, when we didthe exercise with the glove, understanding where the pressure points are, then we go into thisprocess of developing models of some of the ideas.
one thing we realized with this model, if youcompare with other hedge shears, a lot of them just have a straight handle, you don't have anycontrol over the weight. so if you're cutting far down, you have to squeeze harder to hold thetool in place, otherwise it's going to slide out of your hands. so by sculpting this handle area,it locks your hand around this form, so you have to squeeze less, so you have a reallysecure grip. we're really at the final stages of our design here,where we put them into a place where we can control them much more closely to get them readyfor manufacture, and that is known as cad or computer aided design. it's very important that weconstantly are verifying our cad
with physical models. once you get into that, we use a set of technologiesthat are called rapid prototyping, so we can really finely control the ergonomics ofthese parts. so there are the two halves that come out of themachine, and you can glue them together to make an entire handle, and attach them to prototypessuch as this so we can go out and feel the comfort and work with it, and make sure our cadmodel really represents our design intention. the way we think of design is, let's put great designinto everyday things, and understand how to make these gadgetsperform better. and that's what we're always looking for wheneverwe design are ways we can improve
the way people do things, or improve their daily life, without them even knowing it or thinking about it. japanese gardeners, the bonsai must be cut ina way, that a small bird can fly through it. it's nice, isn't it? but all the other trees, you also have to cut them. it's much more so, in japan. they have to cut them,they have to... we would say... to design them. but why are wedoing all this? we are doing a lot, to design our world now, weeven design the nature. i remember the first time i saw an apple product.i remember it so clearly because
it was the first time i realized, when i saw thisproduct, i got a very clear sense of the people who designedit and made it. a big definition of who you are as a designeris the way that you look at the world. and i guess it's one of the curses of what you do,you're constantly looking at something and thinking, why is it like that? why is it like that and notlike this? and so in that sense, you're constantly designing. when we're designing a product, we have to look todifferent attributes of the product, and some of those attributes will be the materialsit's made from, and the form that's connected to those materials. so for examplewith the first imac that we made,
the primary component of that was the cathode raytube, which was spherical. we would have an entirely different approach to designing somethinglike that, than the current imac, which is a very thin flat-panel display. other issues would be, just physically how do youconnect to the product, so for example with something like the iphone, everything defers tothe display. a lot of what we seem to be doing in a product likethat is getting design out of the way. and i think when forms develop with that sort ofreason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable, it feels almostun-designed. it feels almost like, well of course it's that way, why wouldn't it be anyother way.
this is the bezel for the imac. when we remove thealuminum for the display in the center, we actually take that material and then we canmake two keyboard frames from it. these are literally just a couple of the stages of howyou make the macbook air. rough cutting... this is for the keyboard well. andthere is just a remarkable efficiency and beauty to how much a single part can do, and one of thingswe push and push ourselves on is trying to figure out, can we do the job of those six parts withjust one. this part actually starts off as this extrusion, this isan aluminum extrusion that goes through multiple operations, most of them cnc machinedoperations, to end up... to end up with this part. and you can see, just adramatic transformation
between this raw blank and the final part.but what we end up with, is a part that's got all of the mounting features, all ofthe bosses... this is just one part, but this one part is providing so much functionality. and this one part really does enable this product. so much of the effort behind a product like themacbook air was experimenting with different processes. there's a... it's completelynon-obvious, but the way that you hold... to get from this part, tothis part... there's an incredibly complex series of fixtures tohold this part in the different machine stages. and we end up spending a lot of time designingfixtures.
the design of this, in many ways wasn't the designof a physical thing, it was figuring out process. it's really important in a product to have a sense ofa hierarchy of what's important and what's not important, by removing those thingsthat are all vying for your attention. an indicator has a value when it's indicatingsomething. but if it's not indicating something, it shouldn't bethere. it's one of those funny things, you spend so muchtime to make it less conspicuous and less obvious. and if you think about it so many of the productsthat we're surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of just how clever the solution was.
when the indicator comes on, i wouldn't expectanybody to point to that as a feature, but at some level i think you're aware of a calm andconsidered solution, that therefore speaks about how you're going to useit, not the terrible struggles that we as designers and engineers had in trying tosolve some of the problems. that's quite obsessive, isn't it? we now have a new generation of products wherethe form bears absolutely no relation to the function. i mean, look at something like aniphone and think of all the things it does. in "ye olden days" of what are called analogproducts, in other words they're not digital, they're not electronic, something like a chair or aspoon. "form follows function" tended to work.
so if say you imagine being a martian and you justland on planet earth, and you've never seen a spoon or a chair before. you can guess roughlywhat you're supposed to do with them... sit on them or feed yourself with them... by theshape of the object, by the way it looks. now all that has been annihilated by the microchip.so design is moving from this culture of the tangible and the material, to an increasinglyintangible and immaterial culture, and that poses an enormous number of tensionsand conflicts within design. i think there are really three phases of moderndesign. one of those phases, or approaches if you like, islooking at the design in a formal relationship, the formal logic of the object. the act of form-giving,form begets form.
the second way to look at it is in terms of thesymbolism, and the content of what you're dealing with. the little rituals that make up...making coffee, or using a fork and knife, or the cultural symbolism of a particular object.those come back to inhabit and help give form, help give guidance to the designer about how thatform should be, or how it should look. the third phase is looking at design in a contextualsense, in a much bigger-picture scenario. it's looking at the technological context for thatobject, it's looking at the human-object relationship. for the first phase you might have something fairlynew, like karim rashid's kone vacuum for dirt devil, that the company sells as so beautifulthat you can put it on display, in other words you can leave it on your counter andit doesn't look like it's a piece of crap.
conversely you can look at james dyson and hisvacuum cleaners. he approaches the design of the vacuum in a very functionalist manner, but ifyou look at the form of it, it's really expressing that, it's expressing thesymbolism of function. there's color introduced into it, and he's not afrivolous person, so it's really there to articulate the various components of the vacuum. or youcould look at, in a more recent manifestation of this kind of contextual approach, would besomething like the roomba. there the relationship to the vacuum is verydifferent. first of all there's no more human interaction relationship, the relationship is to theroom it's cleaning. i think it's even more interesting that the companyactually has kits available in the marketplace
through icreate, and it's essentially the roombavaccum cleaner kit that's made for hacking. people are really wacky, they've created things likebionic hamster, which is attaching the play wheel or dome that the hamster uses asthe driving device for the roomba, so it's the ultimate revenge of the animal on thevacuum cleaner. how i think about it as a designer myself is thatdesign is the search for form, what form should this object take. and designers have asked that question, and useddifferent processes. hey, what about the forks for the bike?can you make a few inquiries? because l'd love to do the forks, i thinkthe forks would be really cool.
well this is my little table of... one of my tables...you know l've got a whole workshop downstairs which is just full of shit. but these are just thingsthat i just find interesting, and things i want to have around and look at.sometimes these are the materials that l'm looking for an excuse to use, as opposed tothe other way around. but things like micarta, this is one of my favoritematerials, and it's actually made of linen, so it's a bit like wood, actually, it feels like a livingmaterial. and it's enormously heavy. and these kind of weird meshes, how cool is that. ihave no idea what they use this for... it's like this stainless steel... braided... stuff. my career didn't start after art school, it startedwhen i made my first object
in my grandfather's garage. i remember my unclehad said as soon as i could tell the time, he'd give me a wristwatch. so i figured out how totell the time, and he gave me this wristwatch, and i promptly pulled it to bits. i went out to mygrandfather's garage and found an old bit of plexiglas and started hacking away at this bit ofplexiglas and drilling holes, and i transplanted this movement from thisonce-working watch into it. that was my first.... ...design, i guess. i grew up in a generation... you know i canremember when they landed on the moon. i can't deny that that was a massive event in mylife. all of my dreams were about the future.
what i want to do is to be able to have things thatdon't exist..... things you can't go out and buy, or things that irritate you. anger, or dissatisfactionat the very least, plays such an important role in motivating you,to do what we do. but ultimately my job as a designer is to look intothe future, it's not to use any frame of reference that existsnow. my job is about what's going to happen, not what has happened. as a designer, my philosophy is fundamentallynon-disposable, and somehow trying to offer products that you wantto keep, and products that you feel most importantly willstand the test of time.
that hopefully won't date as badly as other things. because it's all about wanting to have new things,isn't it? ultimately, we could all still be using the mobile phone we had three years ago. but you know we've all had about fivein the meantime. of course i fundamentally believe that somethingthat's well-designed should not necessarily cost more. arguably it should cost less. but theproblem is that design has become a way for a lot of companies to "add value" becausesomething is designed, and therefore charge more money for it. and it will become more and more pervasive, andthings will be
marketed in terms of design, in the future. the idea of elitism and the idea of design aremerged. and it's out of this kind of culture that the idea of democratization of design comesfrom. i always tell people that i grew up with good design in my home,with all the joe columbo and achille castiglioni pieces,not because we were rich, or my parents were educated in design. not at all, wewere totally middle class and my parents are doctors. it's just because that's what you wouldfind at the corner. there's design that costs more, and design thatcosts less. some of it is good, some of it is bad. "democratization of design" is an empty slogan,it should really not even exist.
target, in particular, fell right into line with, andinfluenced a lot of pop culture thinking about the importance of design and the virtue ofdesign. the basic idea was good design is something you want, good designis something that distinguishes you, it's sort of a mark of progress, if you are a person who recognizes good design itdistinguishes you from all the naive and corny bourgeois of the past, the past beingeverything up to that minute. so you can now buy into that, you can buy intoprogress, good design, good taste. and they had it available to you in a very attainableway. often the way that a product comes into being isn'tbecause a bunch of expert designers
sat down and said, "what are the ten mostimportant problems we can solve?" there's a company that's writing a check. and whatthe company wants is new sku's, they want more stuff, and they want more people tobuy it. and that's the name of the game. we tend to want new things. they can do something that has a different look, afresher look, a newer look, a new-now, next-now kind of look. and the problem with spending a lot of timefocusing on what's very now and very next is that it isn't very forever. and that means it doesn'tlast, because there's someone else coming along trying to design what's now and next after that.and part of their agenda,
whether it's over-articulated or not, is to makewhatever used to be now, iook like then, so that people will buy the new now. cars are the biggest and most abundant set ofsculptures that we have in contact every day in our lives. although they're reproduced by machines, andcomputer milled stamps that make them, actually every one of them was originally carved byhand, by men and women using techniques not a whole lot different than michelangelo. car designers are makingextremely dynamic, sexy objects, in theory. but in reality,they're bending metal, plastic,
glass. this isn't like a woman coming down acatwalk, where she's swishing the dress and showing a little bit here and there, and getting youreyes to goggle. unh-uh. this thing is frozen in time. which means we have to create it in a way so thatyou as the observer look at it, and you put the motion into it, by the way you scanit. because that car has to be a reflection of that emotional energy that you want to see in it. i believe very strongly in the emotional authenticityof the product, it should reflect what it is. so if the car is a performance object it should havethat feel. it is quite bothersome to me when i see humanisticelements of a car being strangely handled. for instance, cars have a face.
well, you can have lots of faces. but when you putthat one face on a car, it's there forever, it's just one expression. and because cars haveevolved to having two elements, big taillights and a license plate, the backs of carshave also evolved a face, also very interesting, and some of those areawfully... challenging. how do we solve problems of lightness, how do wesolve problems of efficiency? i think these are things that are going to be difficult, but we cansolve those. but the real challenges of car design are going to be addressing the future generations'perceptions of what they want cars to be in their iives? do they want them to fade into thebackground, and just be there when they needone? or do they want them to stand up and be arepresentative of them, basically like we grew up
with it, they're kind of like avatars. i show myself tothe outside world through this car. when you own the car and you drive the car, evenyour decisions about are you going to put a bumper sticker on it... there's an idea of anaudience. i feel pretty strongly, and this is true not just for carsbut for almost everything we buy, that our real audience is really ourselves. and that the personthat you're really speaking to when you're speaking about why me in this car,why is this the right car for me... you're making a statement to yourself aboutyourself. in sort of an abstract way, you're thinking aboutwhat they might be thinking of you, and whether or not they like your obama sticker, oryour save the whales, or...
or your christian fish, or whatever it might be.but the crucial thing is the self, it's your own audience, your own story of l'm notthat guy, or i am that guy, or that woman. because the truth is no one cares, on the highway. design is about mass production. design is using industry to produce serializedgoods. and i try everything i can in the mass market tochange the goods, that people who know nothing about design, or the people who say theydon't care about design, or the people who don't believe their world should have contemporarygoods in it. those are the people i think design can have suchan amazing affect on their lives.
when i was a teenager, i had this white -- fromclaritone, i think it was a canadian company, it was a white bubble stereo, with two bubbled whitespeakers. and it was probably very inexpensive, it was a realdemocratic product. it was a turntable, and the whole thing built in. and it was a beautifulthing... looking back, and thinking why it was a beautiful thing, wasbecause it was very self-contained, and the message was very strong and very simple,and at the same time it was very human. there was a quality about it, it was like a womb, itwas like an extension of us, somehow. it was soft, it was engaging. and i used to have thisalarm clock radio, a braun, that dieter rams designed in the late '60s.
and they were these objects in my life that i reallywas in love with, they brought so much to me. and i can remember going through the teenageangst thing, of feeling depressed or something, and lying on my bed, and i would just look at thealarm clock, and felt better immediately. so i always had this really strong relationship withphysical products. there's something that moves through a lot of myforms, and that is to speak about a kind of digital, technological, or techno-organic world.somehow if i do things that are very, very organic, but l'm using new technologies, i feellike l'm doing something in a way that's a physical interpretation of the digital age. we have advanced technologically so far, and yetsomehow it's some sort or paranoia where we're
afraid to really say we live in the third technologicalrevolution. i have an ipod in my pocket, i have a mobile phone, i have a laptop, but thensomehow i end up going home and sitting on wood-spindled wittengale chairs. so in a way youcould argue that we're building all these really kitsch stage sets, that have absolutelynothing to do with the age in which we live. it's strangel. i find it extremely perverse, in a way. imean imagine right now, l'm sitting here on my iaptop, and l've got to go out. what am i going todo, get in my horse and carriage? of course not! why do we feel like we need to keep revisiting thearchetype over and over again? digital cameras, for example, their format andproportion, the fact that they're a horizontal rectangle, are modeled after the original silver filmcamera. so in turn it's the film that defined
the shape of the camera. all of the sudden ourdigital cameras have no film. so why on earth do we have the same shape wehave. now without sounding like a hypocrite, i revisit archetypes, l've designed many chairs. withthat given, you say, okay now l'm going to design a chair. what can i do here? how can i put myfingerprint on it and differentiate it from everyone else and every other designer? and am i playing agame to show i can differentiate? or am i actually really doing something that iscontributive? because the big issue with design is, are the things we are doing really making an affectand making change? 78% of the world is completely impractical. 78%% ofthe world is uncomfortable. you feel it. you feel that hotel rooms are poorly designed, yousit in chairs that are very uncomfortable.
and it's craziness. imagine that if you design amillion chairs to date, or however many chairs have been done in the world, why on earth should wehave an uncomfortable chair? there's no excuse whatsoever. people need to demand that design performs forthem and is special in their lives. these objects that they buy. if you can't make your gpsthing work in your car, there should be a riot becausethey're so poorly designed. instead, the person sits there and thinks, "oh, l'mnot very smart, i can't make this gps thing work." i can't make the things work! this is my field and lcan't make them work!
if you design something that's precious and thatyou really love, you're never going to leave that. my father's briefcase, made out of a beautiful pieceof leather, gets better with use. and l've inherited it and l'll pass it on, right? it's a really interestingthing, sometimes i get that task which is:. design something that gets better with use. there'svery few things, they mostly degrade, but... some things like this briefcase get better with use. now that's a pretty sweet tick-over, don't you think? i like the concept of wearing inrather than wearing out. you'd like to create something where the emotionalrelationship is more satisfying over time. and you may not worry about it, or think about it...people don't have to have a strong
iove relationship with their things, but they shouldgrow a little more fond of them over time. for example on the laptop that i designed, it'sactually a magnesium enclosure but it has paint on the outside. and when it getsdinged, if it's dropped and a bit of paint chips off and you see some of themagnesium showing through, somehow it feels better because of that. the computer we call the grid compass, thecompass computer, arguably the first laptop that was actually ever produced is this one. youcould carry it with you, we designed it to be thin enough to fit in half your briefcase, so youcould put papers in as well. then there was a leg at the back that flipped down,to put it at the right angle, for using
the ergonomic preferred angle of 11 degrees. wewanted to devise a hinge that would allow it to rotate so the display could come up, but also notlet anything into the electronics behind. so in order to avoid something like a pencil fallinginto it, let me just show you what could happen, if you put a pencil on the back it would roll downand drop inside. i designed a scoop, that would then self-eject the pencil when youclosed it. that was a little trick.... of that. when i got the first working prototype, i took themachine home, really thrilled about wanting to use it myself. and it was with great pridethat i opened up the display and thought how clever i was to have designed this latch andthis hinge and all this stuff.
and then, i started to actually try and use it. andwithin a few moments, i found myself forgetting all about my physical design, andrealizing that everything i was really interested in was happening in my relationship between whatwas happening behind the screen. i felt like i was kind of being sucked down inside themachine, and the interaction between me and the device was all to do with the digital softwareand very little to do with the physical design. that made me realize that if i was going to trulydesign the whole experience, i would really have to learn how to design this software stuff.that made me search for a name for it, which we ended up calling interaction design. arguably the biggest single challenge facing everyarea of design right now is sustainability.
it's no longer possible for designers to ignore theimplications of continuing to produce more and more new stuff that sometimes we need,and sometimes we don't need. designers spend most of their time designingproduct and services for the 1 0%%% of the world's population that already own too much, when 90%%%don't have even basic products and services to lead a subsistent life. although a lot of designers believe emotionally andintellectually in sustainability, they and the manufacturers they work for arefinding it very difficult to come to terms with. because sustainability isn't some sort of pretty,glamorous process of using recycled materials to design something that may or may not be in thecolor green.
it's about redesigning every single aspect, fromsourcing materials, to designing, to production, to shipping, and then eventually designing a waythat those products can be disposed of responsibly. that's a mammoth task, so it's no wonderdesigners and manufacturers are finding it so difficult. if one's really honest with oneself, most of what youdesign ends up in a landfill somewhere. and l'm pretty sure most of the products that l'vedesigned in my career, most instances of the millions of things that havebeen produced are probably in landfills today. that isn't something i was conscious of when lstarted working as a designer, it didn't even really occur to me because it didn't really occurto us as a society, i think.
now, to be a designer, you have to take that intoconsideration, because we have to think about these complex systems in which our products exist. if the shelf life of a high-tech object is less than 11months, it should all be 1 00%%% disposable. you know, my laptop should be made of cardboard,or my mobile phone could be a piece of cardboard, or it could be made out of something like sugarcane or some bio-plastic, etc. why on earth does anything have to be built to bepermanent? if i think about my admiration for eames, it was anadmiration for his ability to identify the qualities of new materials which could be usedto create new objects. but nobody worried about whether fiberglass was going to cause disease, orbe difficult to dispose of.
life was a little bit simpler for him, in that regard. hecould just think about using the materials for their best design attributes. but now, we have to face this idea that what we dois not just the way we create some individual design. it's what happens afterwards, when we've finishedour design and people have used it. so this sort of "cradle to cradle" concept. one of my very first projects was to design atoothbrush, a kids' toothbrush. brushes at that time typically were just a stick withbristles at the end, which was pretty boring. so we introduced other materials to it and we madethe handle thick.
and in the end it became a really successfulproduct. but my boss, maybe half a year after welaunched the brush, went on vacation... the idea was to go to the most remote beach. andthe way paul tells the story is the next morning he steps out of the tent and hewants to go the pristine beach, whales frolicking and all perfect, and what does hestumble over:. it's our toothbrush. and it's there, and it's this brush, it's covered inbarnacles, the plastic is faded, the bristles are worn. this brush, within months ofthe product being launched, had been used up, had been discarded, and found its way in thepacific. so even though it's a little, small object, it creates a big piece of landfill that apparently goesjust about everywhere.
let's go ahead and start defining some of thechallenges and some of the questions we might be asking ourselves. is there any toothbrush that we'dactually feel comfortable washing up on the beach? so much of the toothbrush does not need to bedisposed of, right? you put the bristles in your mouth, the rest of it is all cleanable material.why are we tossing this stuff out every time? there could be the greatest handle in the world,because if you only use one handle in your lifetime you could make it out of sterling silver, it could bethis heirloom and then you just replace the heads. i think also the solution of the toothbrush assumesthe only approach to oral care, or one of the main approaches to oral care isthrough the toothbrush. what is we didn't need toothbrushes?what could it be?
when i first started the company, the role of theindustrial designer was primarily about the aesthetics, or the cleverness around function, but itwas always as a minor piece... the company was in charge of the major piece, andwe were hired guns to complete some aspect. the question is actually not "what's the newtoothbrush?" but "what's the future of oral care?" a fortune cookie with floss inside? as we grew it became clear that companies werehappy for us to do more and more of the actual design of the overall product. i don't know, l'm really just enamored with the ideaof doing teeth cleaning at nascar. i kind of think of it as they do analytical thinking andwe do this kind of innovative or design thinking
where we're more focused on user-centered ideas,stuff that will resonate with the people who are going to actually use the product. we come infrom the point of view of, "what do people value, what are their needs?"and it just results in different products. you get these things, and you break them apart andit's like a wishbone. the big design challenge here is there's a lot ofthings we care about and cleaning our teeth is probably not high on that list. i think the wishbone is nice, but it should take thereal shape of a wishbone. design thinking is a way to systematically beinnovative. you know how some people make lists, designers make what i call mind maps, where theykeep going further and further.
something leads to something else, which leads... and as you're branching out you're getting to newground, where your mind has never taken you before. and that's whereinteresting design stuff happens, in my mind. when i came into design, designers would be at their drawingboards, one, and they'd work at the drawing boards. they would maybehave some magazines and things to iook at to inspire them. one of the things that i didwhen i came was drag people out of the studio into the environment, and put designers in theposition of looking at people, and going through the steps that other people weregoing through as a source of inspiration.
it's really about trying to make an empathicconnection with people in their context. is that helvetica? it's not helvetica, no. so that as designers we're picking up on thevibration of what they're about, and being able somehow to identify with that, andhave that spur our creative thinking and creative response. technology, and things you keep, things you love,things that get better with time. cool. i think today, i see my role as a designer to helpdefine what we should be creating for people,
and the output is not necessarily obviously adesign, it's not obviously a product. recently we designed a new banking service forone of the big banks here in america. and there are two and a half million people usingthat savings account today. so we're not just giving form to the thing that hasbeen created. i think that what designers will do in the future is tobecome the reference point for policymakers, for anybody who wants to create a link betweensomething that highfaluting and hard to translate, and reality and people. and i almost envision thembecoming the intellectuals of the future. i always find it really funny, the french, wheneverthey have to talk about the price of gas or the cheese war with ltaly, they go to a philosopher,right? you know, it's kind of hilarious but
philosophers are the culture generators in france.i want designers to be the culture generators all over the world, and some of them really can. andno matter what, they should become really fundamental bricks in any kind of policymakingeffort, and more and more that's happening. but i see designers as designing not any moreobjects, per se, in some cases yes, but also scenarios that are based on objects thatwill help people understand the consequences of their choices. and people like dunne and rabydo that, exactly, they call it design for debate. we use design as a medium to try and exploreideas, find out things, question. we've got cinema, fine arts, literature, craft... every other medium seems to have a part that's
dedicated to reflecting on important issues, yetdesign, the thing that's responsible for so much of the built environment around us doesn't do that.i think that's one of the things that attracts us. so even though our design ideas are never reallyput into mass production, we always try to suggest that they could be mass-produced or theycould be on the scale of hundreds of thousands, because that's part of what we're interested in. we love the idea that with a product, or shopping...we love showrooms. because what is a showroom, you go in there,around lkea and you imagine this is in your home, you project yourself into this other space. but youcould actually buy that and have it at home. it's true, when you walk into a gallery, you don'timagine the sculpture at home and how it's going
to impact on your life. but if you walk into a shop,whether it's electronics, or furniture, or a car showroom, you do imagine yourself experiencingthis thing and enjoying it. so when we do conceptual products, we're hopingthat people will imagine how that will impact on the way they live their lives. we were part of an exhibition and fiona and ldecided to focus on robots. there are four of them altogether. one of them, for example, might become theinterface for important data you keep online or on remote servers. so it's a strange, woodenshaped object that you pick up and it has two holes at the top, and you stare atits eyes for about five minutes.
and when it's checked it's you, it releases theinformation. so it's not just a quick glance at a retinal scanner, but a meaningful stare into thismachine's eyes. and also you feel better, you feel... "yes, it gets me," and then you access it... "there's no chance it mistook me." another thing we became interested in is asdevices become more clever or more smarter, one of our roles as designers might be to handicapthe technology and make it dependent on us in some way, or needy. so we thought it might beinteresting to design one that has to call the owner over to it whenever it wants tomove. we really wanted to look at the materiality of what arobot might be, so one of the key things
we wanted was when someone saw the robots, wewanted them to go, "well that's not a robot." that's not even within the robot language. but theminute they ask that question, then they're immediately thinking, well what is a robot, what arobot should be, what kind of identity it might have. people, especially students, often say at the end oflectures, "but you just design things that get shown in museums and galleries, shouldn't yoube trying to mass produce?" and because we're more interested in designing to deal with ideas,actually putting things into a museum like moma reaches hundreds of thousands of people, morethan if we made a few arty and expensive prototypes. so i think it depends, i think we'reinterested maybe in mass communication more than mass production.
industrial design has been so closely tied toindustry, and working within the constraints set by industry. very quickly you come to edges ofthe spectrum of choice, the official choice, of what kinds of things that the companies whoproduce these products believe people want. and we know, people want a lot more interestingthings, but so far we haven't managed to... to cross that gap. people are creative, by nature, and always not quitesatisfied with the design of something that they have, that they've bought. they adapt it. is there some way we can better engage withpeople's creativity to make more of it or to enhance what they can do for themselves, orcreate the tools or the platforms
from which people can operate. the tools with which we do design today are ourtools. we make the shapes, people buy and use theshapes. tomorrow, this will be different. the tools to makethings, and to define your world, will be available to everybody. because of the connected world, the idea ofdesigning something for a different community in a different part of the world is now becoming verymuch more prevalent. before there was a sense that africa was so faraway you couldn't do anything about it, but now there seems to be a sense that because ofthe connected world, we can make a big difference.
as designers i think we're so far removed from theactual object. you can design virtually, prototypes can be made remotely, the actualproduct's often manufactured on another continent that's why a lot of the products we're surroundedby, a lot of our manufactured environment, seems too easy, too superficial. if i had a billion dollars to fund a marketingcampaign, i would launch a campaign on behalf of "things you already own, why notenjoy them today?" because we all have so many things, they're justaround, they're in the closet, in the attic, that we don't even think about anymore, becausethere's not enough room left in our brains because we're so busy processing all the excitingnew developments.
at the end of the day, when you're looking around atthe objects in your house, and you're deciding, "what here really has value to me?" they're goingto be things that have some meaning in your life. the hurricane is coming, you have 20 minutes, getyour stuff and go. you're not going to be saying, "well that got an amazing write-up in this designblog." you're going to pick the most meaningful objects to you, because those are the true objects,that truly reflect, the true story of who you are, and what yourpersonal narrative is, and the story that you're telling to yourself and no one else because that'sthe only audience that matters. please rate this subtitle at www.osdb.link/4tn3mhelp other users to choose the best subtitles