Designer's Approach to Objects

2/20/08

It’s really hard to write about product design’s approach to objects, because it’s so all encompassing that it’s nearly impossible to break it down into just a few fundamental concepts. The other difficulty with breaking this down to the fundamentals is that I can’t remember that long ago when I didn’t think this way. I’ve been seeing designed objects for most of my life, but consciously since I was in 5th grade. Before that, I don’t even remember interacting with objects on an object level, although I suppose I’ve always be interested in the design of objects have always thought in the way designers think.

I’ve also done extensive amounts of reading about design and how designers think, so finding research material and scholarly articles was not much of a challenge. After all, I listen to podcasts about design, read blogs about design and have a mini-design library sitting next to my bed. It was just a matter of picking and choosing the most applicable examples to boil down to get to the heart of design and the way designers think about objects.

Working on this project with Annemarie and Robyn was especially interesting because although I have a pretty good understanding of how architecture interacts with objects, I have absolutely no understanding of computer science and it’s interactions with objects. As far as I’m concerned, computer science makes the whole field of objects unreal. It was very interesting for me to see Robyn draw the parallels between my physical and visual perception of objects to her virtual and element-based object construction. The way that Robyn broke objects down into their characteristics was reminiscent of the way that I perceive objects, but for some reason obscured much of my understanding of the object.

I really realized how little I think about thinking about objects. It is entirely second nature to me to think about how objects are made and what kinds of choices were made to get to that design of an object. It also rarely occurs to me that other people don’t think that way all the time—maybe because my closest object communicators also think about objects in exactly the same way.

The other thing that I found striking was the requirement of being able to see or visualize or experience the object in some way. For designers, invisible objects mean nothing. We must be able to interact with them and appreciate the experience of the object before it becomes real to us. I think that it’s different in other disciplines (I suppose I’ll find out in the next week), but I think that sometimes objects can be evaluated solely based on their cultural influence or impact, which is something that an object need not be present for to impact.

The most difficult part about this project is also what I love most about design—design is everything. The quote that we opened with from Pezzetta really sums up this sentiment. Everything is designed, and as a result, design is everything. At the same time, design is really nothing. Design alone can’t solve the worlds problems, and design is not human and can’t give you a hug. But, design combines every discipline with creativity and technology, and considers as many angles as is popular or possible in the context of the solution. Design ends up being a never-ending process.

What I’m most interested in finding out from our presentation is if our class will grasp what we’re saying about the way we look at objects. This concept is so basic and fundamental to us we can’t separate it from our existence or our object experience. We spent some time wishing that we had been randomly assigned someone who didn’t have a determined field so we could run these concepts by them.

This experience left me realizing that there is still so much about the context of design itself that I know little about. I’m taking an independent study in writing this semester focusing on writing about design, and during the research for this project I discovered about 10 more sources that I had not yet considered evaluating. This only added to my being overwhelmed. There is a limitless amount of information covering this topic, and it doesn’t seem possible to ever fully synthesis this information.

One thing that I looked at in the research that has significantly influenced my thinking for the last few days is the book Thoughtless Acts by Fulton and IDEO. Focusing mostly on how we modify our environments (with or without products) to make them more livable, the book is a study in self-made design—the design that we thoughtlessly participate in everyday. I’ve spent even more time than usual evaluating this incidental design and thinking about how I modify my own personal objects to make them more functional for my purposes. For example, I clip my keys on to my bag’s back clip, so they’re accessible right in front of me for when I get off my bike and need to lock it. This is certainly not the intention of the back clip, but it means that I will always know where my keys are, AND have access to my pepper spray easily in any situation.

This project was interesting for me in the context of evaluating products and design from someone else’s perspective, something that I haven’t tried to do for a long time. I think this will help to inform my writing and communication about objects to remind me that there is little understanding about the way that designers even think about objects to begin with—then I can set my readers on an equal playing field with me in talking about objects.