March 2009 • Current Issue
A Good Argument
The 20th-century definition of “good design” was driven
primarily by form. Today the stakes are too high, and the
world too complex, for a superficial response.
By Peter Hall
Posted March 18, 2009
What is good design? Some 54 years after the Museum of Modern Art abandoned its Good
Design exhibition program, the question lingers in the air like the smell of last night’s dinner.
It’s bandied about in the media and lurks behind the scenes of every product-design
competition, from Germany’s Red Dot and Japan’s G-Mark to the IDSA’s International
Design Excellence Awards. The question goes further than designers’ personal need for
recognition and reveals a much deeper cultural anxiety about consumerism. But is it a useful
question?
One problem with “good design” is its connotation of moral authority. Whose “good” are we
talking about? MoMA’s idea of good, like the 1950s British and European equivalents,
implied “good for all” but tended to translate into a Modernist aesthetic rampage against
ornament and historicist styles. Victor Papanek, ever reliable scourge of the design
establishment, dismissed museum exhibits of “well-designed objects” as parades of wellworn genres. “[T]he objects are usually the same,” he wrote in his 1971 book Design for the
Real World, “a few chairs, some automobiles, cutlery, lamps, ashtrays and maybe a
photograph of the ever present DC-3 airplane. Innovation of new objects seems to go more
and more toward the development of tawdry junk for the annual Christmas gift market.”
The link between “good” and “sellable” was deep in the veins of the Good Design program.
Its founder, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., was the son of the owner of Kaufmann’s department store
in Pittsburgh, and was unabashed about the importance of “eye appeal” in the jurors’
selection of objects for the orange-and-brown Good Design tag. The exhibit was held in
January and June at the Merchandise Mart of Chicago’s semiannual home-furnishings shows,
with a carefully timed pre-Christmas finale at MoMA. Goods were arranged with a
department-store taxonomy—furniture, tableware, accessories, and so on. If Good Design is
remembered today for helping bring to the American public’s attention the designs of Arne
Jacobsen, Finn Juhl, Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia, and Venini, among others, it
also directed a fair share of tawdry junk to the Modern, from shrimp cleaners to pancake
flippers. Kaufmann used no grand aesthetic theory: he simply charged his jurors with the task
of finding high-quality, widely available, reasonably priced wares that were new to the U.S.
market since the previous show. This established, as Terence Riley and Edward Eigen put it
in an essay about the program, “an equivalence between the good and the new—a concept
that became a characteristic of the optimism of the postwar years.” It also cemented the
importance of the image as the means by which product design is judged, prefacing Guy
Debord’s sardonic prophesy: “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.”
Current concepts of good design have a hard time shaking off this legacy, this Cold War
mission to stimulate consumption with images of products and rid the world of ornament,
pastiche, and, implicitly, Communism. (After launching the program, Kaufmann put together
Design for Use, USA, an international exhibition of exemplary work, sponsored by the State
Department, to promote the American dream overseas.) But without a comparable value
system, do we descend into a relativist morass, in which good and bad are simply matters of
taste, culturally constructed terms serving different agendas? In the 21st century, surely, we
need to move beyond the impasse of cultural relativism, but without resorting to 1950s
dogma and agendas hidden under the guise of good.
This is easier said than done. It’s tempting, for example, to simply replace “good” with
“useful.” In these uncertain times, with rampant consumerism taking a breather, it might even
make sense to revive the framework of MoMA’s 1942 show Useful Objects Under $10. No
doubt Papanek’s ghost would be delighted by needs-based criteria supplanting “eye appeal.”
We could imagine MoMA festooned with Make magazine–style creations, with perhaps a
historical exhibit or two on “vernacular” design. But the problem with usefulness as a
standard is that it doesn’t allow for useless objects, which are actually quite an important part
of design practice. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s nervous robots, for example, are
polemical objects that cannot be purchased, let alone used. Some important icons of productdesign history are similarly useless: Raymond Loewy’s streamlined pencil sharpener (which
never went into production, or needed to), Philippe Starck’s famously dysfunctional Juicy
Salif lemon squeezer, or Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton bookcase (you could put books on it, but
that wasn’t the point).
One could argue that this useless stuff isn’t design. But the above examples were created by
designers and belong to an ongoing conversation about design. Sottsass’s bookcase was a
provocation to remind us to see form not as an end in itself but as the beginning of an
interaction. Dunne and Raby’s robots sprang from the idea that design can serve as a medium
for discussion about the cultural and ethical implications of technology, an alternative to the
“Hollywood” genre of corporate design, which tends to glorify technology.
Many objects are designed not to be useful but to make an argument. And my contention is
that every object is an argument of some sort, and its strength or weakness as an argument is
a good guide to its value. The theorist Richard Buchanan once identified three rhetorical
characteristics of a product’s design: Its logos, or technological reasoning, is the clarity of its
function—the way in which, say, a spoon is an argument for getting food from the plate to
the mouth, or a clamshell shape suggests that the cell phone needs to be opened to be used. Its
ethos, or character, is how it reflects its maker; a Dieter Rams–designed Braun product
conveys an unobtrusive, efficient quality. Its pathos, or emotion, is how it persuades its
potential users that it is desirable and useful to them—its sexiness, if you like.
But the most valuable effect of considering an object as an argument is that it allows us to
look under the rhetorical hood and consider it not as an inevitable or neutral invention but as
something that embodies a point of view. The iPod may seem like an innocuous musicplaying device, but in fact it is an argument about how we should navigate, purchase,
download, and listen to sound. It’s an argument based on premises negotiated among the
various stakeholders (Apple, the music industry, acoustic engineers). Similarly, the Ford
Model-T was an argument for personal transportation using fossil fuels. Frequently, designers
are not given to thinking about the premises on which their arguments are based, but in a
world where every decision is connected to a sprawling set of decisions and consequences,
they should be.
Viewing designs as arguments frees us from the art world’s tendency to evaluate on aesthetic
criteria alone. It insists on contextual evaluation: design is not just about how a thing looks or
how it works; it is also about the assumptions on which it rests. The new One Laptop per
Child XO computer, the MIT Media Lab’s $100 machine for children in developing
countries, lacks the sleek eye appeal of a Macintosh and has been criticized for pioneering a
non-Windows user interface based on a theory rather than user testing. But a full appraisal
would note that it is an argument for closing the digital divide based on the theory of
“learning by making,” which assumes that children learn by creative experimentation and
making social objects. A polished-aluminum case and a user interface rooted in files, folders,
and wastebasket metaphors would be irrelevant in rural India.
Seeing good design as an argument has one more point in its favor. “Good Design” was a
stamp of approval that bestowed a suggestion of timelessness. As such, it depended on a
rather fixed notion of problems and solutions, an old-fashioned model that still persists in
everyday design language. But in reality, problems are too big and slippery to stamp or fix.
Who would have known in 1950 that we’d be recycling plastic, eliminating chrome plating,
and singing the praises of urban density? I’m sure there are designers at Boeing and General
Motors who have seen the parameters of a project changed beyond recognition by recent
events. The great design thinker Horst Rittel once wrote that “a design problem keeps
changing while it is treated, because the understanding of what ought to be accomplished, and
how it might be accomplished is continually shifting. Learning what the problem is IS the
problem.”
The current issue of Metropolis makes a case for ten criteria for evaluating design arguments
today, in the troubled economic, ecological, and political climate of the early 21st century.
Arguably, these criteria provide an ethical framework for evaluating design so that the longestablished yardsticks—design that is functional, beautiful, enduring, well made—are offset
by values like affordability, accessibility, ergonomic strength, social benefit and necessity,
and emotional resonance. No argument could meet all these criteria, but it might satisfy a
few. More to the point, a loose framework gets us beyond the problem of labeling design as
good or bad, or seeing problems as solvable. There are no solutions to design problems.
There are only responses in the form of arguments.
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3757
March 2009 • Current Issue
Bending the Reeds
Eric Chan’s bamboo armchair is not only a tribute to his
native country, it’s a primer on the physical properties of
one of our most renewable materials.
By Julie Taraska Posted March 18, 2009
When Eric Chan speaks of bamboo, he likens it to his Chinese countrymen: strong, flexible,
always moving. He talks about how, in Chinese art and literature, it represents purity and
honesty. He extols its rarified uses and everyday applications. And then Chan, the founder of
the industrial-design firm ECCO Design, reaches onto the shelf behind him, picks up a threefoot-long bamboo reed and several processed bamboo samples and drops them on the conference-room table of his New York office. “Today people treat bamboo like wood—they
extrude pieces and glue them together,” he says, handing me a block of bamboo strands
affixed to one another in a checkerboard pattern. “You are using a small portion of the
bamboo when you use it that way. There’s a lot of glue and labor, which is not ecologically
sensible.”
He picks up the bamboo reed and bends it in half. “Trees are solid. But bamboo, by nature, is
flexible. It responds to pressure but doesn’t break,” He lets the reed go, and it bounces back.
“This is ergonomic,” he says. “How can I use that natural flexibility?”
Two years ago Chan got the opportunity to find out. To mark the tenth anniversary of the
city’s reunification with China, the Hong Kong Design Centre approached ten designers to
make a product that celebrated the country’s heritage and its place in the global design
community. Chan, who was born in China and raised in Hong Kong, decided to build a
bamboo armchair that exploited the material’s physical properties. Partnering with Herman
Miller, with which he has had a longstanding relationship, Chan created the ECCO 9707, a
chair that uses individually flexing bamboo slats in its seat and back to provide comfort and
ergonomic support. Combining traditional craft with modern technology, it also relies on a
minimum of adhesives and sealants to remain eco-friendly.
Herman Miller provided financial and technical help for the project, which started in May
2007 and ended that December with the delivery of ten limited-edition chairs. But unlike the
company’s usual product explorations, here commercial concerns took a backseat.
“We let the goal to innovate be primary,” says Timothy McLoughlin, Herman Miller’s
design-facilitation manager. Market considerations would only enter the picture if the team
worked on iterations beyond those for the exhibit. In that way, McLoughlin notes, it recalled
other one-offs Herman Miller has supported, most famously Gilbert Rohde’s Modern
furniture collection for the Design for Living House, shown in 1933 at Chicago’s Century of
Progress Fair, and the fiberglass chair that Charles and Ray Eames, along with Eero Saarinen,
produced in 1948 for a Museum of Modern Art furniture competition.
Chan began his design process with a series of research trips to Anji County, in the Zhejiang
region of China, which is internationally recognized for its bamboo production. “It’s a
beautiful area, whole mountains full of bamboo,” Chan says. He also knew of the local
government’s efforts to promote sustainable harvesting of the material, and to encourage
residents to work locally and take an active part in the region’s management.
Over the course of the project, Chan returned to the area a few times. He visited the bamboo
forests, learned about traditional fabrication techniques, and talked to managers and
craftsmen at local factories. He visited the regional bamboo museum, which traces the use of
the material from traditional objects to cutting-edge applications, and met with suppliers. All
of this research colored his design.
Chan, who has more than a dozen chairs to his credit, started with the seat’s shape. Using his
experience and 3-D geometry software, he calculated a generic ergonomic profile, taking into
account the average person’s weight, height, and leg and arm span to create a curve that
would be comfortable for 95 percent of users. But that was a static model. For the next step,
he had to factor in bamboo’s give.
His core questions were how much the reed should move, and how to manage that
movement. He began with a solid bamboo back and seat. “The panels were good but not
flexible enough,” he says. Chan cut the bamboo into slats of different widths and thicknesses,
experimenting until he got the tension, shape, and response that he wanted. His aim was to
make the reed function like a gentle spring. When you pushed back, it would bow and cradle
the body; when you let up, it would bounce back to its original place. “So your heavy
portions, or the more concave and convex areas of the seat and back, they would respond,” he
explains.
But bamboo’s flexibility is also a liability: too much give and the chair would sag like a
stretched-out sweater. So Chan needed something to control the reeds’ range of displacement.
That came in the form of four horizontal polymer strips—one in the chair’s back and three in
its seat—that he wrapped around each slat and affixed to the chair’s ribbonlike frame, which
was inspired by the frames of traditional Ming chairs. Known as Super Seat suspension, the
polymer technology had been developed by Chan and Herman Miller for Geiger’s Foray
office chair. Used on the 9707, though, it allowed enough horizontal and vertical movement
to keep the ergonomic curve while maximizing bamboo’s natural cushioning. Chan
christened the combination of Super Seat and the slats BEST, for bamboo ergonomic seating
technology. This new seating paradigm, a patentable development, has the potential to be
applied to a range of market sectors and products.
Keeping the chair eco-friendly was important to Chan: using a sustainable material like
bamboo but then contaminating it with lamination seemed counterproductive. So he finished
the 9707 with several coats of water-based lacquer, giving some of the chairs a reddish hue,
others a dark brown.
Since the exhibit closed, the chairs have traveled to Milan, London, and New York, with
several auctioned off to benefit the HKDC. “We would have accepted just a beautiful
handcrafted object, a one-off,” McLoughlin says, “but Eric took it further, into a platform
realm, if you will.” Don Goeman, Herman Miller’s executive vice president of research,
design, and development, concurs. “We expected that Eric was going to do more of an
exercise in object design, but he was seriously trying to figure out how he could approach a
new suspension of a chair using a material that was indigenous to the area and the culture he
came from. There wound up being some real innovation as a consequence.”
For Chan, the project stirred a desire to help his countrymen find their own design voice.
“The Chinese know how to make things,” he says. “You give them a design, they make
whatever you want them to make. It is time for them to realize that they don’t need to make
or do what people tell them. They need to look into what other values or cultural dimension
they can contribute to the whole design scene.”
They have the natural resources and the desire, he believes, but technology is their
shortcoming. Chan worked with a factory in Anji, experimenting with bending bamboo
strips, but the facility didn’t have the advanced skills and machinery needed to manufacture
the chairs. (They were ultimately produced in Toronto, using bamboo from China and
Canada.) If Herman Miller does make a commercial version of the 9707, Chan would like to
have it produced in Anji. But he wants to go beyond the chair. He’s exploring ways of
collaborating with the region’s designers on an eco-friendly product that could be integrated
into their local culture and would respect their way of life and natural resources.
“I know design is coming around in a circle,” Chan says, back in his office. “I feel doing
good design is not just for my own ego. It’s an opportunity to connect with a community and
take political entrepreneurship to another level.” He picks up the bamboo reed from his table
and idly presses on it. “And that’s a bigger mission.”
***
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3764
Updating a Workhorse
The Perkins Brailler—which has served as a literary
lifeline to the blind community for almost 60 years—gets a
long overdue redesign.
By Kristi Cameron Posted March 18, 2009
Most people understand that the act of reading Braille is a physical one, in which fingertips
skim a landscape of raised dots. But what about writing Braille? The most basic tool, the slate
and stylus, requires the user to press each dot (up to six per character) by hand into the back
side of the page, working in reverse—as if in a mirror. No wonder the mechanical alternative,
which makes brailling more like typing, has been so widely adopted. The standard machine
used around the world is the Perkins Brailler, released in 1951.
Aesthetically and functionally, the ten-pound steel device is a bit like the Underwood
Champion portable typewriter released the same year. Both are dependably rugged and clack
nostalgically when you hit the keys, but, frankly, it’s hard to imagine anyone lugging around
either one in the featherweight age of the MacBook Air. So when David Morgan came on
board in 2005 as the general manager of products at Perkins School for the Blind, he was
faced with modernizing the Boston-area organization’s enduring best seller.
What people love about the machine is its indestructibility. The number one complaint,
however, is its weight. “Think about a little kid carrying ten pounds around all the time,” says
Judi Cannon, a Braille-services specialist at Perkins Braille & Talking Book Library. The
dilemma is this: because Braille cannot be rendered in bits and bytes but must remain solidly
3-D, the device cannot be dematerialized. Paper still has to roll through it; the dots still need
to come out crisp and clear.
Though there are plenty of Braille-writing alternatives—note-taker PDAs, screen-reading
software, computer embossers—the mechanical device still has a role to play. “It’s really the
pencil and paper for people who are blind,” says Kim Charlson, the director for Perkins
Braille & Talking Book Library. And in places like India, the cost of those other technologies
(around $6,000 for the Braille Sense Plus note taker, versus $375 for Perkins’s classic
braillewriter) puts them out of reach, while the slate and stylus is so laborious that it impedes
the learning process as students begin to compose more complex sentences. “There seems to
be something about the immediacy of the written word through Braille that still attracts folks
to the Perkins Brailler,” Morgan says. “So we wanted to figure out how to stay true to the
original design. There was always a doubt that we could downsize this package and still
capture the same physical characteristics.”
Product Development Technologies was recruited to bring the machine down to scale and upto-date because, according to Morgan, the Illinois-based firm was one of the few “within a
day flight” that had in-house engineers and experience with medical devices, and could
source the international manufacturing. PDT also has a built-in research process that led
directly to many of the changes that were made. “We watched people in the environments in
which they actually use the Brailler—in Boston, Indiana, Mexico City, Malawi, and remotely
in India and South Africa,” says Sona Patadia, who led PDT’s design team. “Watching
quietly allows you to see needs that people sometimes aren’t able to articulate.” Ob-serving
students bend their wrists 90 degrees behind the Brailler to feel what they had just written led
to the addition of a reading tray. And when PDT witnessed younger children using two
fingers to press down each key, the designers made sure that the new ones required less force.
Later sessions, where users tested materials and prototypes, proved invaluable to overcoming
some of the sighted designers’ assumptions about good design. “We might think a rubberized
product that is textured and soft is great,” Patadia says. “They told us that rubberized
products have a lot of dirt that sticks to them that they can feel. We would never have known
that had we not done this research.” And when a round paper-roller knob broke during
testing, PDT learned it wasn’t as easy to grasp as in-tended anyway. “One of the users told us
they would like it better if it worked a different way,” Patadia says. “We quickly mocked it
up, and that’s where the final cog design came from.”
Released last October with American Printing House for the Blind, a supplier of accessible
products, the Next Generation Perkins Brailler features a streamlined turquoise-blue plastic
body with contrasting smooth gray keys and levers. Perkins will release its own raspberry-red
and midnight-blue versions later this year. If the candy colors ring a tad trendy, that’s no
accident: while the design needed to appeal to adults who might want to upgrade, it primarily
had to capture the fancy of children and teens eager for accessories with the style quotient of
iPods. “Kids in the U.S. want to have all the cool stuff that their brothers, sisters, and
classmates have,” Patadia says. “We learned that this wasn’t just a tool in the way that the
classic Brailler was. It needed to have a personality.”
Replacing the steel case with polycarbonate and substituting some of the 600 unique metal
components inside with consolidated Grivory-plastic pieces took the weight down to 7.5
pounds and the price to $650 (though subsidies from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation allow
the Braillers to be sold in developing countries for several hundred dollars less). Having
plastic connecting with metal also makes the machine quieter and, because it requires less oil,
more recyclable.
Overall, Perkins’s new Brailler has been well received. “I just came back from Paris for the
bicentennial celebration of the birth of Louis Braille,” Charlson says. “I took it to the
conference and people were really thrilled with the easy-erase button”—the feature that for
the first time allows users to correct mistakes without scratching them out manually. The
director of professional development at the American Foundation for the Blind, Karen
Wolffe, who has no vision impairment but uses Braille to communicate with her colleagues
and clients, cautions that the erase button doesn’t completely flatten the dots, which could
cause confusion. “Let’s say you typed an r, which is dots one, two, three, and five. What you
really meant to do was a p, which is dots one, two, four, and four. If you don’t fully erase it
and add the correct dot, you now have one, two, three, four, and five, which is a q.”
Wolffe is quick to praise the new paper-roller knob, though: “It’s almost like a wingnut. This
is a huge improvement for kids with multiple disabilities. The little round knob on the old one
took pretty good finger dexterity to turn.” But universal design is always more of an ideal, or
perhaps a happy medium, than an absolute reality. “A round roller I can almost use more with
the palm of my hand,” says Cannon, whose severe arthritis means she favors an electronic
braillewriter. “But, personally, I can’t grasp the new knob for rolling the paper in.”
Shortcomings aside, Cannon acknowledges that PDT and Perkins got one thing exactly right:
they included the blind community in their research. “Many times I have seen them give us a
product and say, ‘This is what you wanted,’” she says. “That’s a big mistake because it can
end up being nothing like what we need.” Something never in dispute? The community was
sorely in need of this 21st-century update to its old, reliable workhorse.
***
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3747
March 2009 • Current Issue
Redefining Design
Once they have left the factory floor and are actually
being put to use, products get deployed in myriad
unintended ways. It’s a lesson the industry should take to
heart.
By Jennifer Kabat
Posted March 18, 2009
How many ways can you use a plastic bag? What about a paper clip, a Post-it note, or a park
bench? This isn’t a quiz; it’s about messing with design, about reinventing objects and
endowing them with new uses. We all do it—you, your kids, your parents, your sister in the
burbs. We’ve all slid a matchbook under a table to stabilize it and turned a sheet of paper into
a dustpan, and in that sense everyone is a designer. Design doesn’t simply happen at the
moment of creation, when an object is given certain attributes to solve a specific set of
problems. It happens in the myriad ways a plastic grocery bag is reused, reconceptualized,
reborn.
That spirit of reinvention now seems particularly apt. The sobering landscape of the new
economy—or, rather, being thrown back to old economic realities (circa 1933), where things,
either credit or shiny new products, can’t be had so easily—gives new impetus to finding
ways to recycle. Those values are also a welcome relief from the climate of the recent design
boom, when furniture fairs rivaled fashion extravaganzas, and designers and architects
became stars. (Zaha Hadid’s celebration of Chanel handbags in Central Park, anyone?)
During the boom, products were outsize, expensive—baroque, even. In the developed world,
however, we hardly need another new sofa, chair, or pretty much anything else. As in the
’30s, simplicity is once again best, and necessity the mother of many people’s design
interventions.
Uta Brandes, a German academic, is the design sociologist for this moment. Her new book,
Design by Use: The Everyday Metamorphosis of Things (coauthored with Sonja Stich and
Miriam Wender, both designers), explores how average people redefine products. The book
is a sort of reader-response theory to design. Just as Roland Barthes posited that readers
(rather than authors) create meaning in a text, here it’s the user’s intentions that matter.
Brandes throws down a gauntlet, writing, “Each object must be investigated from two
opposing perspectives: from the perspective of design and from the perspective of use.” In
other words, people aren’t thinking about the concepts that lead to products; they’re simply
looking for things that fulfill specific needs. Once designers begin to take that independent
agenda into account, she argues, “then we can expect a qualitative and open design approach
as a result.”
Brandes also pleads for simple things, since they are the easiest to transform into ad hoc
solutions. The more complex a design, the more needs it’s supposed to fit, but the harder it is
to rejigger to meet your own. Knives may be made for eating, but Brandes reminds us that
they serve as quite good letter openers. And in that vein, how many times have you used a
chair as a bookcase, a lamp stand, or a bedside table? (The chair in my bedroom is not at all
as Ebert Wels intended it when he designed it in 1928; instead, it’s bedecked in sweaters and
ski pants.)
Improvisations are hardly limited to such small and almost inconsequential interventions.
They range in scale from the Internet (a military application from the Cold War) to the
makeshift solutions common in the developing world.
In the 2006 book Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, a punctured ball and a
stool leg become a toilet plunger, and spare forks are turned into a TV antenna. The latter’s
creator, Vasilii Arkhipov, recounts in the book, “My mother had the forks in her cupboard.
She bought them when everything was collapsing around us. There wasn’t anything but forks
to buy in the shops then. They weren’t even very good forks, in the practical sense. But they
went well with that aerial.”
Such transformations are nothing new. The artist Kurt Schwitters used trash to build his
Constructivist Merzbau house around himself; and in Marcel Duchamp’s hands, voilà, the
urinal became a fountain. During the recession of the early 1970s, skateboarders discovered
that empty swimming pools were highly conducive to riding. In the early ’90s they
reimagined park benches and rails as an urban theme park. Now, with the recession,
California skaters are back to draining and cleaning pools behind foreclosed homes. Punks
transformed the safety pin into an emblem, an anticapitalist symbol, rejecting middle-class
values and new clothes by sticking them (often, many worn together) through jeans, leather
jackets, and even their own cheeks.
This “design misuse,” “post-use,” “post-design,” “nonintentional design,” or whatever you
decide to call it, can create evocative, meaningful objects—more meaningful, in fact, because
of the user’s participation in the process. The British sculptor Richard Wentworth once said,
“I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore.
Five reasons. Firstly, the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of
both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works.”
Ten years ago, just when design was set on its collision course with fame and money, Claire
Catterall curated the exhibition Stealing Beauty at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in
London. The show objected to the dictates of “good design” and the imperatives of taste and
style. The participants took the muck and matter of the everyday world and repurposed it.
Catterall’s catalog essay seems particularly fitting a decade on. “If design caters only to those
who can afford it, who subscribe to a certain ideal and approach to life, what is left for those
who cannot aspire to such lofty heights or simply don’t want to? In this light,” she wrote
about the show, “the work can be seen to have a political and social resonance if only because
it responds so directly to the circumstances of its need, conception, production, and,
ultimately its consumption and use.”
Stealing Beauty featured Tord Boontje’s Rough-and-Ready furniture: a chair, table, shelves,
and lights made from salvaged wood, old blankets, and plastic sheeting. The collection
follows Brandes’s ideas—not only finding a new use in old things but also in being finished
by the user. He gave away the plans so anyone could make the pieces. A fan of Wentworth,
Boontje offered an antiaesthetic that democratized design and production. “Although it
started as a stylistic comment about what design was at the time, underlying is the concern of
using what you have as an anticonsumerist approach,” he explains now. “Often, people
automatically buy things when they need something versus making it themselves, and today
when many more people are aware of the pitfalls of consumerism, the option to make their
own things and become self-reliant again seems fitting. With Rough-and-Ready, if it breaks,
because you made it, you know how to fix it, and you start to understand it in a different
way.” The collection still has legs: the chair is currently being shown at the Museum Shop, in
Amsterdam’s Museum Square, where 30,000 copies of the plans are being given away.
This January at IMM Cologne, Stephen Burks, another designer interested in post-use,
created the Composite Lounge with trash containers and streetlights, as well as Morosodonated furniture. The bar was made from bottle crates, while a Dumpster found new life as a
chill-out room.
“I wanted people to think about the 70,000-some products produced every year,” he says.
“Few consider the impact of the piece—or that in the end it’s going to be garbage. The
furniture is all chic and expensive but, one day, trash.”
At last year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan, he launched Love, a collection for
Cappellini that includes tables made of recycled magazines—Wallpaper, in particular. “I had
all these magazines lying around, and rather than buying new materials, I thought, Let’s do
something with those. It was obvious necessity,” he explains, “nothing more than that.” The
back issues were repurposed by craftspeople in South Africa—laudable, but not quite the
average-Joe-centered designs Brandes had in mind.
Both Burks and Boontje are interested in a product’s life after the designer is finished—the
trash something inevitably becomes and the way personal choices can change it. There is,
however, another, more planned route that allows people to participate in the design process:
mass customization. Hella Jongerius did it with Repeat, a textiles collection she designed for
Maharam. The pattern was so big that anything upholstered with it would look individual, a
low-tech way of creating a manufactured one-off. Ron Arad has used rapid prototyping and
stereolithography to manufacture high-end custom pieces, and both Nike and Puma have
Web sites that allow consumers to pick the colors of their sneakers. But those solutions are all
decorative. What if the options were more than visual? What if they allowed users to
influence function?
The Internet has already made everything from publishing to music, and newspapers to
political campaigns, more personal and participatory. Why not design? World War II put an
end to the Depression and also created the technological revolution that led to the era of
midcentury Modernism, when products became cheaper and more accessible. Now we have a
technological revolution that can involve people in the process. It might be expensive, but by
harnessing the Internet to take advantage of stereolithography, items could be designed to
individual specifications. So far, the designers who have used rapid prototyping to make
actual products (instead of models) have created something more akin to art than design, but
going beyond this is the challenge to the profession—and, perhaps, to consumers.
Inexpensive furniture ultimately adds costs in waste—people buy things and discard them
because the bed frame isn’t quite right or the shelves fall apart, but with the way the world is
moving, people will become increasingly aware of the post-use price. Seen in that light, a
one-off that really fits someone’s needs becomes less expensive—maybe even affordable.
Given the means, I’d invest in a tailor-made version of Ebert Wels’s chair with a coat hook.
My ski pants could use it.
***
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3744
March 2009 • Current Issue
In Praise of the Supernormal
In a recent exhibition, Jasper Morrison coined a term for
a collection of humble, well-made objects. His own work
exhibits the same simplicity of purpose.
By Paul Makovsky
Posted March 18, 2009
When it comes to promoting new products, the idea of a designer wearing a synthetic pink
suit, feigning boredom, or throwing a temper tantrum for the media suddenly seems so last
year—especially for Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa , who have spent their careers
designing well-made products without resorting to stylistic gimmicks or personality quirks.
Their low-key, let-the-object-speak-for-itself approach (with maybe a little promotion here
and there) has worked exceptionally well for them. For the past three years, they’ve had the
design world abuzz with their refreshing exhibition celebrating normality in design and the
beauty of simple, well-made everyday objects.
Morrison came up with the idea for the exhibition a few years ago when talking to a Muji
employee about Fukasawa’s Magis stool. He remarked that both the stool and the cutlery he
had done for Alessi seemed like examples of a new way to design. They looked like
unassuming objects but shared a quality that went beyond the visual, utilizing sturdy
materials, simple forms, exacting details. Morrison called it supernormal. It’s a philosophy
that seems all the more relevant in a stalled economy. Recently I spoke to Morrison, who
works for Alessi, Flos, Muji, and Established & Sons, about the exhibition, his new work for
Vitra, and the state of design today.
How do you define supernormal?
The key point is that it’s designed so that the visual characteristic is not the most important
one, or it may even be suppressed. It’s about unsensational-looking objects that perform in a
sensational way. In fact, it may take time for you to notice how well they work.
Aside from function and durability, what makes an object supernormal?
If you take all the stuff out of a room, all that’s left is an architectural atmosphere. As you
start to bring things into it, the atmosphere that develops in this space is very different,
whether it was an antiques dealer’s store or a dental practice. The atmosphere is made out of
the objects as well as the architecture. Architecture is like the background, and the objects
have their effect.
So the atmospheric effect of any object is a tangible thing. That’s the most interesting thing
about design: knowing what to put into an object to make a good atmosphere. Supernormal
objects all have that ability to make good atmosphere.
One example: about ten years ago, I bought a chopping board, and after about five years, I
started to appreciate it, and then I started to understand how great it was. Sounds a bit over
the top, doesn’t it? That board was cut at a slight angle, which allowed me to remember not
only which side is which—in case you want to cut onions on the top and meat on the
bottom—but when you wash it, you can set it against a wall to dry, and the edge doesn’t sit in
a pool of water. Little things like that, which are almost imperceptible when you first become
acquainted with an object. You’re subconsciously aware of those things, but not on an
everyday level. And that makes good atmosphere for everyday life.
So much design these days is about going for a magazine cover and making a big show. In
reality, if we take these objects home and try to live with them, they just mess up your
atmosphere and, more than likely, don’t work because so much attention has gone into how
they look.
Did you have some specific objects in mind that you wanted to include?
We looked across a range, from furniture and kitchenware even to outdoor stuff. We looked
at many catalogs and companies. I liked those Fiskars scissors with the orange handles and
had to find out where to buy them. It was quite a lot of effort to bring it all together, but
there’s plenty of stuff missing.
In the case of cutlery, you had so much to choose from. Which one did you decide to
include?
I picked my one. (Laughs). There’s another one by Sottsass that is very good. We included a
very basic range of six or so spoons that are all supernormal in a slightly different sense.
What did you want visitors to come away with from the Super Normal exhibition?
It’s a reminder to think about why and what design is for. If you are a designer, think about
why you’re doing it. And if you’re, as we all are, a consumer, then think about what you are
buying, and don’t be duped by looks alone.
The Basel chair for Vitra is another interesting example in the progression of your
work. Can you explain the thinking behind it and what it does?
It’s all about atmosphere. I realized that designing a good-looking chair may be not enough.
If you put forty of them in a restaurant, do they make for a good atmosphere where people
will be relaxed enough about their surroundings to enjoy their lunch? Usually not, because
the effort to make them look good has prevented the designer from considering their effect on
the atmosphere, and the result is an overload of unnecessary, four-legged attention seekers!
Having realized that, I started to think about the kind of chairs that avoid that problem, and
that’s how I came to the project of the Basel chair. It’s actually a sort of apology because
there’s a sushi restaurant in my neighborhood in Paris that has forty Air chairs, which I
designed, on the pavement in pink. That’s a great example of the visual pollution of design.
The Basel chair is trying to correct that. Am I going to try to buy all those pink chairs back? I
should, but as the whole interior of the restaurant is also pink, I don’t think it would work.
The chairs are all right, but the color just isn’t for Paris.
You talk about how design is breaking down into two schools, one driven by marketing
and the other by the designer. How would you characterize the designer’s point of view?
I would characterize it as the truer point of view, where the interests of the user and the
environment are put before the spin of selling things with cutesy stories!
Your Crate series is beautiful and stirred up some controversy in the design world.
Explain the thinking behind these pieces.
When I moved into my apartment in Paris, I used an old wine crate the builders left behind as
a bedside table. I stood it on end, stacking books below, and used the top side as a table. It
worked so well that I became very attached to it, and when Established asked me for a
project, I had the idea to get them to remake it. When it was shown in Milan, people were
outraged, accusing me of a cynical approach to design, which surprised me. It was the same
year that one of my colleagues (who shall remain nameless) had the idea to present a chair
that could wear clothes! After that, I decided to prove how uncynical I was by expanding the
range to satisfy as many functions in the home as I could. I’m not sure it’s finished yet.
Is the media to blame for promoting bad design?
The media is to blame for presenting design as a kind of visual game in which considerations
for the everyday reality of an object are set aside in the interest of selling the magazine and
getting everyone all hotted up about how glamorous it is. It’s understandable that they would
do this, but unfortunately it has a distorting effect on our perception of design. We have
started to think of design as we do fashion, as something temporary that keeps us up-to-date
and in the know. But like the Christmas advertising aimed at preventing people from buying
pets that they later abandon, a sofa is for life (almost). The other point is that despite all the
creative juice that goes into making these showstoppers, the results don’t make for good
atmosphere. They make for something fake and trivial and uncomfortable, the kind of atmosphere where you ask yourself if your trouser legs are cut thin enough! An atmosphere for
people who choose to hide from life behind a veneer of style. That’s enough moaning from
me. I don’t mean that design shouldn’t look good or that there isn’t a lot of good design
around, but you get the point.
***
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3760
March 2009 • Current Issue
Selective Memories
Creating an evocative user experience involves tapping
into our most powerful method of recall and recognition.
By Donald Norman
Posted March 18, 2009
Life is filled with unpleasant experiences. Not only do we survive them, but in hindsight we
tend to minimize the bad and amplify the good. Psychologists call it “rosy remembrance.”
Recently, I gave a lecture on this subject and afterward received an e-mail: “Your discussion
… made me remember my trip to Thailand a few years ago. … I traveled for three weeks and
lost 10 pounds because I didn’t like any food. There were insects ‘on steroids’ everywhere I
turned and the restrooms were no joy. … However, I had the time of my life and I would go
back in a second.” The message came attached with photos of awful, insectlike food, a
mammoth spider, and an unseemly squat toilet.
Scary meals, scarier bugs—why on earth would anyone go back for more? Clearly, the
positive aspects of my correspondent’s trip (her memories) far outweighed the typical Third
World inconveniences. This fundamental behavior, which can be powerfully merciful when it
comes to ordeals like childbirth and marathons, has important implications for how we
interact with designed ob-jects. Why, for instance, are people’s most prized possessions often
trifles, even kitsch—a chipped teacup, a torn and faded photograph, a wire Eiffel Tower? Our
attachment to those objects is entirely shaped by memory. Because past experiences are no
longer recoverable except through recollection, we value objects by the emotions they
provide rather than their intrinsic worth. It’s why the memories surrounding them often
transcend everything else about them.
For most of the 20th century, product design was largely about the physical appearance of objects that solved well-defined problems. Museum curators treated products as exercises in
styling—Art with a capital A. But today, as our technology becomes more complex, as
computers are embedded into so many of our gadgets and gizmos, the dominant way we
interact with products is through experience. If the last century was about rationality and
reason (or attempted to be), let’s hope this one ushers in a deeper appreciation of human
behavior. Ideally, logic and reason would remain important, but cognition (how we
understand things) and emotion (how we value them) should play equally important roles.
In my book Emotional Design, I argue that the interplay between cognition and emotion
occurs on three levels: the visceral, the behavioral, and the reflective. The lowest level, the
visceral, is unconsciously triggered by the environment and driven by involuntary,
biologically determined reactions (a fear of heights, say, or a yen for sweets). Visceral design
is about appearances. Expert skills operate at the behavioral level. These are so well learned,
so automatic (language, for example), that they’re performed with little or no conscious
effort. The reflective level is where our consciousness resides, where we ponder the past and
contemplate the future. Despite the sensual pull of the visceral, and our utter dependence on
the behavioral, the reflective level ultimately dominates our perception. Why? Life is a series
of temporary, fleeting experiences. The rest is, literally, memory.
So if memory rules perception, where does that leave the 21st-century product designer? The
obvious answer—go out and create objects capable of evoking vivid memories—comes
loaded with an inherent problem: memories exist in the mind of the user. The object, however
well conceived, is merely a tool. It may be beautifully resolved, function perfectly, come in
trendy colors, possess an elegant interface, and even make the user feel better about himself,
but the object itself is ultimately a go-between: we love our objects (when we love them) for
the human experiences they provide. Why are some people emotionally attached to their cell
phones even though they tend to replace them every year? The cell phone is a tool for
connection, just as the automobile is a means of transportation. Everything else about these
objects (and think of all that goes into differentiating one car from another, when the basic
function is exactly the same) is defined by the rituals, cues, and memories built into them.
Look at what we do on our cell phones. We fall in and out of love. We flirt with the cute boy
two rows behind us (via text message). We watch YouTube videos. We contest credit-card
charges (with operators in India!). We haggle with clients. We remind aging parents to take
their blood-pressure medication (in loud, head-turning voices). It is the messy, tedious,
glorious stuff of life, facilitated by a cool or clunky contraption lodged in our pockets or
buried in our purses.
The iPod was a revolutionary object: smart, prescient, beautiful, emotionally engaging. It
transformed our listening habits and inspired a raft of copycat devices. But what is an iPod’s
ultimate function? It’s certainly not to upend the recording in-dustry as we know it, or to
render aging radio DJs obsolete (although it is doing both, ruthlessly). The iPod is a tool for
bringing a roomful of music—one of the strongest sensory cues known to man—into the
palm of your hand: touch a button and you’re reliving the quaint and awkward horrors of
your high school prom.
But creating a product with emotional resonance does not require Jonathan Ive and his band
of merry pranksters, or a team of German automotive engineers. It is not about technology or
elaborate styling. Our love of objects is not even about the objects themselves. It is always
about us. We grow to love the objects that connect us to other people, create meaning, and
remind us that we’re alive.
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3761
March 2009 • Current Issue
Mari on Mari
The legendary Italian designer—a man of fiery polemics
and rigorously pure forms—has produced a remarkable
body of work, built surely for the ages.
By Martin C. Pedersen
Posted March 18, 2009
Enzo Mari is a man of many fierce, incendiary proclamations. His favorite, of course, is
“Design is dead.” He enjoys saying it as least once every interview. One of the last of the old
Italian masters, Mari has always been an intellectual provocateur, prone to long rambling
ruminations on art and design that vacillate between genuine brilliance and philosophical hot
air (perhaps it’s the translation). His career began in the late 1950s, a generation behind
Achille Castiglioni and Ettore Sottsass, and it’s remarkable for its output, variety, and
influence. The 76-year-old seems to have designed everything but buildings (unlike Castiglioni and Sottsass, he was not trained as an architect). A recent retrospective, Enzo Mari—
The Art of Design, held at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Com-temporanea, in Turin,
Italy, merely hinted at the breadth of his work. We decided to pair quotes from the elegant
exhibition catalog (from interviews by Francesca Giacomelli) with samples of his seminal
work, coupling the purity of his insights with the rigor of his lines. Today Mari’s no-frills
aesthetic is not only a tonic for uncertain times but a stunning rebuke of his most famous
proclamation. His is an enduring legacy. Design is dead, long live Enzo Mari!
On Process
This search for what is essential is still today my first thought when designing a product.
On Necessity
I am convinced that the low cost constitutes a safe perimeter for the quality of the design, if
for no other reason because it forces the designer to eliminate any foolish ideas he might get:
the solution of the form cannot be anything but necessary.
On Enduring
In order for a product to be continually renewed, it must be continually provided with
different masks. These, as such, can only encrust a product with the overlapping of a
thousand signs taken from the catalogue of universal formalism.
On Exhibition Design
When a group of objects has within it a formal quality that is the reason for their display, this
must not be the justification for displays that tritely repeat the poetics of the object, or for
pseudo-poetical contradiction, where what is displayed is the display itself and not the object
to be displayed.
On Retrospectives
I am aware of the fact that I am like an affectionate mother with many children who might
feel more love for the weakest of them. I preferred to entrust the selection of the works to a
group of about twenty friends who love design, that I invited to express themselves each time
solely on the basis of that which had moved them.
On Form
Form is everything. It is form that leads me to investigate, and understand, ideological and
political drives.
On Formalism
The market for “design” survives on formalism. A few words on formalism. There are two
kinds: that which is acknowledged and declared, and that which derives from total ignorance.
On Solving Your Own Technical Problems
If the purpose is the quality of the form, it can be no other way. Otherwise, it is just
formalism.
On “Design Products”
The “design” product is substantially artisanal even if such products imply the use of costly
industrial equipment. But while, as in the case of the coffee cup, these costs do not influence
the final cost because of the number of cups produced, in the case of the “design” product the
quantity of products that can be sold is unpredictable, minimal or at times zero. It is for this
reason that they need to look in the direction of an elitist market.
On Toy Design
The shapes of toys must be based on archetypal images, and these images must be realized
with the highest possible quality and not in the style of “children’s drawings.”
On Quality
The quality of form emerges regardless of the trite reasons that lie behind technique and the
market, that nowadays are always influenced by the rapid transformation of ties between
production, methods and what is in style.
On Collaboration
Each time I have spoken to master artisans I have done so in an attempt to design a coherence
with their knowledge and at times intervening to improve it. I do the same thing with
workers, but with the artisan, even if he does understand, it’s different. He might own a small
shop in which to work independently, if he does not, his boss might himself be an artisan.
Therefore, the premises that will allow me to transmit my knowledge of form exist. But,
nearly always, because we are talking about an artistic craftsman, his references are strongly
influenced by the “silly things” picked up in art institutes, and this involves the difficult task
of getting rid of them.
On Quality
The quality of form emerges regardless of the trite reasons that lie behind technique and the
market, that nowadays are always influenced by the rapid transformation of ties between
production, methods and what is in style.
On Design Education
During the first month, my professor of painting, followed by one who taught sculpture, and
then the one who taught decoration, all suggested that I chose a different course of study: I
asked too many questions and was never happy with the answers I got. So I ended up taking a
stage design course, and fell in love with perspective and stagecraft. On my own, I wrote a
paper that I called “27 ways to plant nails.”
On Process (part II)
Like every other intellectual activity in history, [a project] can only come about by negation. I
negate all that which seems to be but is not. I could continue to do so endlessly, but a project
must have an outcome.
On Play
When a child is growing up, [play] is the activity needed to discover one’s potential and to
learn about the world. For this reason, objects used to play with are soon abandoned by
children, who go on to other things, once an experience has ended.
On Shaping Atollo
A sheet of PVC is placed in a wooden mold; hot compressed air then pushes it up against the
mold so that it takes on the same shape. But the sheet has to be perforated beforehand. A
rubber sheet is placed between the PVC and the mold (this is the inventive part), allowing the
compressed air to produce the shape.
On Emotion
When the quality of form emerges, it goes straight to your heart. It has no need for
justification.
***
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3765
March 2009 • Current Issue
Products For a New Age
After years of lagging behind architecture, industrial
design begins tackling some of the world’s most vexing
problems.
By Ken Shulman
Posted March 18, 2009
It may not be entirely fair to call industrial design a slacker at social responsibility. But it’s
certainly true that the discipline has struggled to figure out how to do good while still doing
well. Architecture has had an easier time with green design, stroking its social conscience
with solar panels and geothermal pumps while stoking the bottom line with lucrative
commissions. And whether funded by governments, NGOs, or private donors, the world’s
poorest communities still need hospitals and bridges and homes. It’s harder to make the same
case for iPods. It’s not that industrial designers haven’t wanted to take a break from building
a better MP3 player, but until recently neither they nor their employers could see how they
might save the world without going broke.
“Altruism is a good reason to do something once, but not to repeat it,” says Timothy Prestero,
founder of Design that Matters, a nonprofit social-enterprise design company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The organization teams student volunteers, professional consultants,
and aid agencies to tackle some of the world’s thorniest design and distribution problems.
The company’s current collaborations include a low-cost, low-energy microfilm projector to
promote literacy in West Africa and an intuitive intravenous-drip flow controller to allow
nonmedical personnel to assist ailing family members. “There’s a reason design isn’t beating
a path to the doors of nonprofits and aid agencies,” Prestero says. “They don’t tend to have a
lot of money.”
Of late, there has been a modest stirring in the field. Design students at top schools clamor to
work on projects in which they can express creativity and concern. A few seasoned design
firms contribute their employees’ inactive but billable “white time” toward the greater global
good. Consultancies now partner with NGOs and aid agencies to redraft their field-service
and delivery strategies. Even major foundations have been swept up in the flurry, sponsoring
workshops and research that explore the role design can play in fighting poverty, disease, and
social injustice.
“There’s a real hunger to work on these projects,” says Sami Nerenberg, a 2007 Rhode Island
School of Design industrial-design graduate who now teaches the Design for Social Entrepreneurship studio at her alma mater. Her students designed, among other projects, a
backpack to be manufactured by the homeless, and reorganized volunteer services at a local
inner-city school. “Two years ago I was part of a minority at RISD interested in these issues.
Today students are looking at our economy, looking at where consumerism has led us. They
want to shift away from producing excess and do something that makes them feel useful.”
Organizing the homeless in Providence or teaching adults to read in Timbuktu may seem like
unlikely roles for a trade long associated with releasing products into oversaturated markets.
But the early innovators of socially responsible design believe they can make a vital
contribution. “In development work, you tend to get jaded, which limits your thinking,” says
Graham Macmillan, senior director at VisionSpring. The New York–based NGO partnered
with IDEO to produce and design affordable eyeglasses for children and some adults in India.
The project was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. “And business consultants tend to
focus on generating the greatest possible returns, which doesn’t work very well for clients at
the bottom of the economic pyramid. Design is about the ultimate solution, about elegance.
Designers tend to have more open minds and can approach a challenge without being
exclusively driven by profit.”
Foundations active in social-sector research have also begun to tap the latent energy and
know-how of the industry. “Design thinking can offer a series of new approaches and
solutions for social issues,” says Maria Blair, associate vice president and managing director
at the Rockefeller Foundation. The group has funded several socially responsible design
initiatives, including a workbook produced by IDEO that provides a framework for design
firms entering the social sphere. “Working in the social sector is often about complex systems
that need to change, about aligning multiple stakeholders with multiple interests,” Blair says.
“Design is an empathic, user-centered discipline. It has enormous potential in the social
arena.”
As development actors usher design into the race, the profession still faces several entry
hurdles. One is distribution. “Our first eighteen products went nowhere,” Prestero says.
Design that Matters was born in 2001 as a student-led seminar at MIT, and its most recent
project is an incubator that aims to save some of the four million babies who die each year
shortly after birth. The device is heated by a pair of automobile headlights. “I didn’t
understand that the distribution channel was our real client. Keeping babies warm isn’t rocket
science. But you can’t just make some gadget, drop it out of the back of a helicopter and say
good luck. The true design work is in understanding the system in which the incubator will be
produced, distributed, maintained, and used.”
The second and even greater challenge facing design is how to pair with nonprofit agencies.
“It’s the aid piece of the equation that’s the problem,” says Tim Brown, CEO and president of
IDEO, recalling an epiphany he had after a 2007 meeting at the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, in Seattle, about smallholder farmers. “The end users have traditionally been
given things. After the meeting, it occurred to me that there might be a way of getting more
leverage out of the design process if you could hand over the net and not just the fish. Initial
development efforts can still be funded by grants and staffed pro bono. But somehow we
need to generate an engagement that builds the economy and sustains wealth.”
The Seattle meeting—and subsequent Gates Foundation grant—led IDEO to create a humancentered design kit to help aid agencies fathom the needs of the communities they are trying
to serve. With the kit, agencies learn to understand production and consumption systems, not
just how to deliver aid or objects. “We want to treat smallholder farmers as customers, not as
objects of charity,” says Al Doerksen, CEO of International Development Enterprises, an
agency that field-tested the IDEO kit with smallholder farmers in Ethiopia, Zambia, Vietnam,
and Cambodia. “But in order to do so, the goods and services you produce have to make
sense in their paradigm. You need to be extremely creative to sell stuff to poor people, to
make things you can afford to produce and they can afford to buy with extremely meager
resources.”
There is a critical mass of aid and development professionals convinced that design can help
further their mission and, ultimately, help those living on the margins of society. But the
profession also stands to benefit from its new direction. “We ask human-resource managers
to send us their best and brightest for a week,” Prestero says. “People who are burnt out on
snack crackers and golf bags. We send them to India or Bangladesh or Nepal, and they come
back saying it was the greatest experience they ever had. It’s the design alternative to whitewater rafting.”
Brown is convinced that focusing on world problems will generate not only happier designers
but more innovative ones. “To be honest, design has just as much to gain from this as it has to
contribute,” he observes. “There are clever people in these environments, and the lack of
resources often leads them to original and ingenious solutions. For us, not working in these
environments means running the risk of not being in the places where the most interesting
design work is being done.”
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3746
March 2009 • Current Issue
Empty Promise
The mastermind behind Muji’s global brand explains the
stripped-down beauty of Japanese design.
By Mason Currey
Posted March 18, 2009
Late last year, the Japanese housewares brand Muji opened its fourth New York store on
West 19th Street, a few blocks from my office. Now I can visit Muji on my lunch break—
which I do, frequently, even though its stock rarely changes, and I’ve already bought about as
many translucent plastic bins, recycled-paper notebooks, and portable toiletry containers as
one person can justify. Still, I always come up with some excuse to drop by again—an ink
refill for my favorite pen, say, or another inspection of those smart leather key wallets that, at
$26.50, seem just a touch too extravagant for these recessionary times.
In short, I am one of those aspiring minimalists and unabashed Japanophiles who fetishize
Muji (which roughly translates to “no brand”) and its promise of an elegant, uncluttered
life—even though, paradoxically, achieving this life seems to require buying more things. At
least I’m not alone. Based on the design community’s widespread reverence for Muji, an
uninitiate might think it is some sort of cult and not, in fact, a company that began in 1980 as
the house brand of a large supermarket chain and first saw success with affordably priced
packages of irregular foods. (One of its early hits was “Broken Dried Shiitake Mushrooms.”)
Lately, like an addict trying to get to the root of his dependence, I’ve wondered how to
explain Muji’s unique and powerful appeal. It’s not merely that the products emphasize
function. (In fact, as I’ve discovered from buying office supplies designed for A4-size paper,
they’re sometimes an awkward fit for American lifestyles.) Affordability isn’t the answer,
either; by the time Muji products get to the United States, they’re often much pricier than
comparable items from other retailers.
No, the Muji magic works mainly for aesthetic reasons. Admittedly, their products are not
what you might traditionally call beautiful—they’re unadorned, anonymous, simple
sometimes to the point of blandness. But their stripped-down rigor is lovely in a
quintessentially Japanese way. To better understand this core quality—what makes Japanese
design so, well, Japanese—I consulted Kenya Hara, a Tokyo-based communications designer
and the mastermind of Muji’s global brand identity.
Hara does not design Muji products or even oversee its product-design division. But since he
joined the company’s advisory board in 2001 and took over its art direction, he has done
more than anyone else to shape the company’s image and philosophy. He is also an active
promoter of design through books and exhibitions; his latest book, Designing Design (Lars
Müller Publishers, 2007), is packed with photos of the unusual and provocative products that
have resulted from his public explorations of design’s ability to transform our everyday
dealings with the material world. (We’re showing several examples from the book here.)
From Hara, I learned that my first mistake in thinking about Japanese design is falling back,
lazily, on the notion of simplicity. As he wrote to me in an e-mail: “Simplicity is a concept
that emerged in the West around 150 to 200 years ago. It was discovered after the arrival of
modern society made complex patterns and decorations no longer necessary to symbolize
great authority. Something is simple when form and usage are closest to each other.”
By contrast, Japanese visual culture esteems “emptiness,” a subtly but crucially different trait.
As Hara describes in his book, the concept of emptiness has its roots in the late 15th century,
when Murata Shuko—an adviser to Shogun Yoshimasa Ashikaga—developed the tea
ceremony as a conscious attempt to reject the influence of Chinese culture and to highlight
uniquely Japanese values. Shuko turned away from splendor and embraced an aesthetic of
“austere beauty” and “elegant rusticity” called wabi. In physical terms, this translated to
unadorned utensils and small, ceremonial tearooms with a few, uniform elements.
The point is that what seems merely simple to the untrained eye is actually carefully
orchestrated and rigorously controlled. The tea ceremony is stripped of unessential trappings
to allow people to invest it with their own meaning. The same principle applies, Hara says, to
product design: “The result is design that at first appears to be simple and unspecial, but is in
fact the reflection of a sophisticated approach and sophisticated thought processes.” With
Muji, the result should be products that unobtrusively occupy people’s daily lives and provide
reliable doses of small pleasure.
Ironically, people like me, who covet Muji goods and take pride in knowing their semi-secret
design pedigree—the company’s anonymous designers have included Jasper Morrison,
Konstantin Grcic, Naoto Fuk-asawa, Shigeru Ban, and Enzo Mari—are, in a sense, missing
the point. As Hara writes in Designing Design, Muji products are supposed to inspire
“acceptance,” not “appetite.” The appropriate response to the brand is “This will do,” not
“This is what I want.” It’s something that Westerners, and Americans in particular, aren’t
typically very good at.
But I like to think that my covetous attitude toward Muji is somehow appropriate. Understanding Japanese product design and visual culture—at least, from a Westerner’s eyes—
requires embracing contradictions. Muji presents a bundle of them: its “no brand” goods have
become a potent brand of their own; its products aspire to anonymity yet are created by some
of the world’s foremost industrial designers. More broadly, Japan values material goods as a
means of fostering spiritual reflection; it devours foreign culture yet has developed an
aesthetic consciously opposed to outside influence. Even simplicity is complicated. As Kenya
Hara writes at the beginning of Designing Design, “The whole world looks different if you
just put your chin in your hand and think.”
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3750
March 2009 • Current Issue
A Call to Arms
The Iraq war has produced thousands of wounded
veterans, propelling research into the ultimate ergonomic
challenge: the perfect prosthetic.
Military amputees now find themselves on the front lines
of prosthetics research, with each new development
promising more than mere mobility.
By Suzanne LaBarre
Posted March 18, 2009
“I lost one limb in Iraq,” says Garth Stewart, a 26-year-old Army veteran, reclining on the
futon of his dorm room at Columbia University, a glint of metal peeking from his trouser leg.
“And in return I’ve gotten at least twenty.” A blast outside Baghdad in 2003 made pulp of his
left foot, forcing doctors to sever his leg seven inches below the knee. Stewart, like many
military amputees, now finds himself on the front lines of prosthetics research, with each new
development promising more than mere mobility.
He has had a leg for running, a leg for swimming, a leg for grappling. He’s had gray legs,
flesh-colored legs, legs with balls, computer-programmed legs, plastic legs, carbon-fiber legs,
and titanium legs too.
He has had a leg for just about every occasion. (Indeed, Stewart has been photographed
drinking beer out of at least one of them.) Today, the ex-gunner marches around campus,
where he’s a senior studying history, in a simple mechanical contraption that mimics the Jshaped curve of a human foot and feels, as he describes it, completely natural. “I really
capitalized on my investment,” he deadpans.
Three decades ago, Stewart would have had little more than a wooden foot. Either that, or he
would’ve been dead. But refinements in medicine and armor have guarded against the direst
consequences of war, allowing Stewart and nearly 900 other soldiers to emerge from combat
alive if not physically whole. According to a 2004 Senate report, amputees make up 6 percent
of the Iraq war’s wounded, compared with 3 percent in previous wars. This represents just a
sliver of total sales for the nation’s $900 million prosthetics industry, whose primary
customers have diabetes, AARP cards, or both. Even so, the war has trained the klieg lights
on wartime amputees, bolstering R & D funding and, in turn, innovation. About $50 million
from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has gone toward developing
intelligent upper limbs. Soon, amputees will be able to sense and manipulate objects as they
would with a real hand. They will wield mind-controlled Luke Arms (so named for Luke
Skywalker). They will traipse about on electronically powered feet that make the wearer feel
as if he’s floating on air. “If you plot prosthetic innovation against time, you’ll typically see a
spike after every major war,” says Hugh Herr, a biomechanics expert at the MIT Media Lab
and an amputee himself. He is researching the aforementioned bionic foot with $7.2 million
from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It’s a science that needs a war to ad-vance
even the tiniest increments, and for that reason, ever since the birth of the artificial limb, its
aesthetic has largely been shaped by the experience of combat—for better and for worse.
It sounds like a coat being feverishly zipped up and down. Zipzip, zipzip, zipzip. In a corner
of Room 213 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in a gym behind the dismal concrete face
of the nation’s largest military hospital, Sergeant Kevin Brown lumbers over to a weight
machine. Zipzip, zipzip, zipzip. He wears a prosthesis on his right leg, a bulky plastic thing
that looks like something out of Transformers, and when he walks or climbs stairs or even
sits, the limb cries out: Zip! The Power Knee is hailed as the world’s first powered bionic
knee. It propels the user forward, compensating for the extra energy above-the-knee amputees
expend walking (58 percent more than able-bodied people). Released in 2006 by Össur, an
industry giant based in Reykjavik, it joins a host of intelligent artificial legs that take their
design cues from Silicon Valley. Microprocessors, Bluetooth, ultrasensitive sensors:
manufacturing body parts has fast become a digital affair. “I coach Little League football,”
says Brown, an Iraq veteran who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident Stateside but who
nonetheless remains active. “And this helps me off terrain, walking up and down hills.”
Which isn’t to say the limb is foolproof. Brown lowers himself carefully onto the weight
machine’s bench (zipzip). A sensor strapped to his good leg sends a signal to the Power
Knee, directing the prosthesis into sitting mode. “But if you don’t sit down correctly,” Brown
explains, “the leg can trigger itself and throw you up.” What’s more, the Power Knee weighs
about ten pounds—more than twice as much as a standard prosthesis—and its battery lasts
just three hours.
“If I’m going out somewhere, I’m not going to wear this,” he says. “It makes too much
noise—and look at the size of it.” These are ultimately issues of streamlining, and Össur is at
work on a successor that promises to be lighter, quieter, and longer lasting. “It was the first
prosthesis to use powered movement, so what it does it does well,” says Brian Frasure, a
clinician with Össur. “But it’s like anything else. When computers and cell phones came out,
they were big and bulky, so each generation will get better.”
The technology has a violent past. One of the earliest written references to prostheses comes
from Herodotus, the chronicler of the Greek-Persian wars, who noted in the fifth century B.C.
that a prisoner escaped the stocks by slicing off his own foot and replaced the flesh with an
improvised wooden contraption. At the beginning of the Renaissance, during a decidedly
bloody epoch, the celebrated French Army surgeon Ambroise Paré designed the first
articulated knee joint, a precursor to modern artificial limbs.
The American Civil War occasioned further innovation. James E. Hanger, the war’s first
amputee, fashioned a widely distributed “Hanger Limb” from whittled barrel staves. (Hanger
is now the country’s largest provider of prosthetics-patient services.) World War I saw the
formation of the American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association, and World War II the
creation of the Artificial Limb Program. Look to nearly any flashpoint in the history of
prosthetics, and you will find a war.
Of course, the human body has never been easy to replicate, and for
every technological breakthrough, there are plenty of deficiencies. Arms have been
particularly vexing to prostheses designers. This is partly a matter of markets: because leg
amputations are more common in the general population, companies have more incentive to
replace them. Thus a 1912 invention—a pair of hooks controlled by a harness—remains the
industry standard. A funding bump after World War II gave way to the myoelectric hand,
which uses electrodes instead of a harness, but did little to advance amputees’ range of
movement. Lifelike hand coverings (detailed down to a patient’s veins) are ubiquitous now,
but as anyone at Walter Reed will tell you, they can actually diminish agility.
In 2007 the U.K.’s Touch Bionics introduced the “first fully articulating and commercially
available bionic hand,” to quote from the company’s Web site. The $50,000 i-LIMB has
movable plastic fingers that mimic the human hand’s assorted curls and flicks through
electrical impulses in the muscles of the residual limb. It has been heralded as the first major
breakthrough in artificial-hand design since World War II. But in early tests, the i-LIMB
proved too delicate. “When they initially designed these, they weren’t geared toward the
twenty-one-year-old traumatic amputee,” says Craig Jackman, a prosthetist at Walter Reed.
Touch Bionics has since modified the limb, strengthening tendons in the fingers, adding
aluminum support to the thumb, and flattening the fingertips for better gripping. Retired
Sergeant Juan Arredondo, who lost his left hand in 2005 in an IED blast, brags that with the iLIMB, he can play basketball with his son, shoot rifles, and, most unexpectedly, eat grapes
(which tend to burst in the grasp of clumsy hooks). For heavy-duty tasks such as yardwork,
though, he still straps on the metal claws. As technology grows more complicated,
researchers would be wise to sweat the design details—the materials, the shapes, the
hardware. A thought-powered hand won’t do much good if there aren’t any fingers left to
control.
A peculiar, and perhaps unsavory, aspect of this surge in prosthetic invention is that for the
first time in American history it has allowed amputees to return to the battlefield. Already, 22
have redeployed. Stewart, who graduates from Columbia this spring, was nearly one of them.
Months after leaving Walter Reed, his stump still swollen, he started training for a second
tour in Iraq. He’d cart limbs in a satchel on mock missions in the desert, slipping on his
running leg or his grappling leg or his marching leg as circumstances dictated. Stewart never
went back to Iraq—mostly due to Army politics, he says—but the fact remains that with the
help of some carbon fiber, he was sturdy enough to go another round.
The industry has noticed. Otto Bock, the world’s largest prosthetics manufacturer, has a $1
million contract to update its best-selling microprocessor-controlled limb, the C-Leg, to make
it easier for military amputees to return to active duty. According to Gizmag.com, the new CLeg will better address the exacting physical demands of combat, with ten programmable
modes (walking, riding a bicycle, etc.) and faster response times to changes in walking speed
and direction, which might be especially useful in a war-torn country full of improvised
dangers to flee. It’s a curious development for Otto Bock, which was founded in 1919 to
serve veterans of World War I. Nine decades on, the company’s motto, “Quality for Life,”
takes on a dire new meaning. Instead of engineering for civilian life, it’s engineering human
shields. Marshall Young, an industrial designer at Otto Bock, points out that technology
developed for the military will eventually redound to the benefit of civilian amputees. It’s
hard to disagree. War amputees represent less than 1 percent of Americans who have suffered
limb loss, and diabetics increasingly dictate the market’s trajectory. Wars might refine the
industry, but they don’t sustain it.
Back at Columbia, Stewart is in the university gym pulling on one of his legs, first unrolling a
liner onto the stump, then sliding it into the prosthesis, a plastic-and-metal shank with a size
12.5 cross-trainer at the base. And then he’s down on a wrestling mat, practicing jujitsu with
another Army veteran who, though half Stewart’s size, has what would appear to be an edge:
his own four limbs. Stewart beats him every time, with or without the prosthesis. Now
Stewart’s socking a pair of hand mitts, rocking back and forth on his legs, building power
before he drives forward, left hook, right hook, uppercut. Only a keen observer would notice
the slight hitch in his step as he shifts his weight. It could easily be mistaken for swagger.
“It’s never too hard to get up,” goes a favorite motto of his, one he learned from his father.
“Get up or die.” It should be no surprise, then, that Stewart has vaulting ambitions—teaching,
joining a school board, running for state senate. None of them, as you see, involve sitting at a
desk for very long. War nearly killed him, but the technological fruits of war will allow him
to live a consummate life. It’s suggested to him that he might run for president one day. “In
2020,” he says without a moment’s hesitation, “I’ll be old enough.”
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3745
March 2009 • Current Issue
Banal Genius
Sam Hecht’s intriguing Under a Fiver collection highlights
the ingenuity and folly of some of the world’s most
inexpensive objects.
By Paul Makovsky
Posted March 18, 2009
It’s one thing to make a well-made, functional object that looks good. It’s a bigger challenge
to have it manufactured in the millions and cost close to nothing. Since the mid-1990s, the
industrial designer Sam Hecht has traveled the globe searching out local hardware stores,
supermarkets, and pharmacies to amass a curious collection of low-cost, mass-produced
objects costing less than five pounds (about seven dollars). It’s part of his Under a Fiver
collection. “It’s not about luxury or conspicuous consumption, so the room to maneuver is
very small,” he says of his finds, which now number around 200. “You’re dealing with often
extremely primordial, basic activities. On a local level, I started to notice different ways of
doing these everyday activities, like brushing teeth or washing vegetables.” The items
generally serve a specific purpose; few involve a designer; and not all of them work
particularly well. “They make a promise, generally a functional one,” he says, pointing to a
two-in-one potato peeler and grater that at first glance seems like a good idea. “You can peel
potatoes, but the surface of the handle is a grater as well. But you can’t hold it because it’s
incredibly uncomfortable, cutting your hand. There’s a feeling of extending the product’s
quality on the manufacturer’s terms and failing miserably.” Hecht’s curiosity about the things
people aren’t necessarily paying much attention to has helped him and his firm, Industrial
Facility, cofounded with Kim Colin, design products that work for companies such as
Herman Miller, Muji, and Established & Sons. We asked Hecht to talk about a few Under a
Fiver products, both good and bad, a selection of which Rizzoli is publishing this year in a
forthcoming book.
***
Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3758