...that you can tell I was educationally obligated to produce.
When Things Are Thought Of
I begin this essay by citing a cliché, an overtly obvious assertion: that things are all around us. We take this for granted everyday and it is easy to get used to the idea in a culture where whole industries are devoted to making things. We grow up wanting toys, bicycles, clothes, etc. We acquire these things by going to “thing stores,” places where rows and rows of aisles are magically stocked full of things with an unseen hand, ready for you to pick out your favorite, bring it home and give it a real context by making it part of your life. This is also not a new idea but we often fail to think of it critically; all our whole lives we deal with “Thing Theory,” with these objects being in our world and, as Heidegger would assert, making them into the “things” that surround us by giving them greater meaning and significance in our lives and thoughts. Similarly we rarely consider those who put those objects into our lives; the designers whose careful thought and planning create much of the very material world we see these days.
The designer is a sort of mysterious, ambiguous figure in modern culture. Many of us imagine them as sort of mad scientists of objects; drafting designs and prototypes in sterile, white studios; carefully scrutinizing each from behind colorful, thick-framed glasses, determining which of their children are fit for life in the outside world. This is truly a strange and disconnected way to see people who are in the profession of populating our reality with its “stuff.” That being said, more than ever designers are changing that reality, not just by designing the casing for an ipod or the look of an electric car but by taking ideas and turning them into design trends. The concept of “green living” or “going green” just sounded like terms to describe nausea before marketing and design took hold of them and helped to bring a new, young slant to the age old idea of conservation and eco-awareness. Truly, designers are probably the most qualified people to bring new concepts to the masses as they are familiar with many theories and ideas of how we relate to our surroundings by, once again, directly effecting the things we deal with in everyday life. Therefore, if done correctly, thoughtful and well conceived design really can change the course of popular culture and the way we see life as we know it.
To make for a simple example, things can be put into two categories: utilitarian and sentimental. Things can fall into either or both categories although many tend to be unable to capture both. Few people, for instance, seem to be very emotionally attached to toilets or garbage cans though I doubt you could find anyone willing to live without either of these objects in their home. Utilitarian things are just that, things that are essential to our lives or make our standard of living more convenient and comfortable. Sentimental things are conversely those things which we think of often, cherished things that hold within them, no matter how small or large, a lifetime of memories and a panorama of a specific place or time. These sentimental things live a life with the owner; by their side, comfortable, familiar. Puzzlingly, when the writer Kopytoff writes of the life of a thing in his essay “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization in Progress” he tells of a thing’s life, from the moment of existence to destruction but includes neither how the object is produced nor what sentimental value it holds to a person, if at all. He also uses the obscure example of an indigenous tribe’s hut in Africa which reveals his true colors as an anthropologist but does little to contextualize the meaning of the object to the Western academic reader. He thereby misses a very important and possibly revolutionary idea: that a critical eye at the inception of a thing’s life can not only make for better and longer lasting things but can completely change the way a user relates to the object in their everyday life.
This concept, while sounding inspiringly utopian yet accessible does have one problem: it negates the concept of planned obsolescence; the very thing that has kept the capitalist system chugging along for almost 70 years in America. Cars, colors, clothes, toys; all these things are designed currently to be disposable ideas; things that fall in and out of fashion on a whim and that, most importantly, require the consumer to buy more to seem up to date or, more simply just dazzle the consumer with sleek design and fantasies of living the good life.
Calling to mind the assertion of Bill Brown in his article “Thing Theory,” the thing can also be an interruption, a dirty window, a broken drill or car, an acorn falling out of a tree and hitting you on the head as you walk past. New things have the real possibility of being just that but in a more conceptual way, an interruption to the wasteful lifestyle of throwing out old, buying new, and filling a landfill with your own personal history. Designers are beginning to look outside of corporate board rooms for directions on how they should be designing products for the public. To loosely use the concept of the “open source model,” as discussed by both Jamer Hunt in his work “A Manifesto For Post Industrial Design” and of Barry Katz in his article “The Promise of Recession,” people around the world have increasingly begun to collect and modify old, broken or outdated objects into new and different things that require them to produce none of their own “post-consumer waste,” if you will, by using someone else’s and, in essence, giving that thing a new life and biography. Designers and companies are following suit with concepts like recycled blue jeans that are blown into houses through tubes as insulation and cell phones that are specifically designed to be taken apart after being discarded. It is hoped that if this idea really takes hold it can change the course of our future as a whole; producing less waste, using less energy and creating a more comfortable world; one that for most writing about it includes even more designers to help us find creative solutions to the problems and needs in our lives.
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