Objects from No Impact Man

No Impact Man, one of my favorite bloggers on sustainability, recently shared an object that represents culture, sustainability and elegant design all in one. These types of objects provide experiences that specifically remind us of specific cultural decisions and influences, and bring us present with our actions. Not to mention this is a particularly beautiful set!

The one question I have about this object is how although the design is so appropriate for the function, the use is not particularly intuitive. Would it be possible to make this set more intuitive, or would you lose the simplicity of the design? I guess it would be intuitive to those who are raised in a culture that interact with this object.

Me and Objects Versus Everyone Else

Last week, for her senior project, my friend Cambrie did a series of workshops to open people up to the concept of dialogue. I participated in three of the four, and was particularly interested by an exercise we did in the first of the workshops - bringing in and sharing an object that was significant to us. Of course, me being who I am (clear by being the author of this ridiculous blog), I was so amped. Deciding which object to bring was actually kind of hard because there are so many that mean so much to me as a part of my life. I settled on my most important one: my bike. Some of the other options included my helmet, my cell phone and my planner. The explanation that I have for my bike is that it the single most important object in my life, and the representation of so many things that I strongly value, including freedom, mobility, connection to my community and my environment, and taking a joy in life. When I explained this to the group, I also tacked on that my parents had purchased the bike for me as a graduation present and I was grateful to them for having done that.

What made my object and my explanation and understanding about it different was that nearly everyone else brought an object that was attached to a person or a story in a more significant way. There was a lot of jewelry, a fair number of photographs and a few other non-functional tokens of love, affection and stories together. People described the story related to that object, or the emotion that they felt when receiving the object or when they interact with it now. It was a lot about reminding oneself about past experiences.

I know that I interact with objects differently than other people, but it's not frequently that I am blatantly reminded of that. My interpretation of objects is that they are not equivalent or even (most of the time) tied to memories, experiences or relationships. Yes, I keep a lot of stuff, but most of it I keep for it's intrinsic value as opposed to the memory that it triggers. But, for me objects are only valuable as themselves. This kind of makes me concerned that some day when I start losing my memory (more than I already do for those of you who have unfortunately experienced my rough short-term memory recently) I may need those objects to evoke a memory, emotion or relationship for me, and I may simply not have them.

So, perhaps this puts me in a position where I'm not a great person to be conducting research about why people care about objects, and how they relate to them, since I don't have any grounding in their relationships with objects, rather just my strange and unusual relationship. Maybe it this is what makes me so fascinated with human interaction, though.

The Shape of Food: Tropicana Redesign

Yet another food packaging redesign brought to me (and therefore you) by Rachel. Tropicana recently redesigned their orange juice boxes, to relatively poor outcomes. It did so poorly they're actually pulling it off the self.

Now, I don't drink Tropicana, and this is not a product placement (neither is the cool whip entry), but I have some feelings about the qualities of both boxes as objects.

First of all, as a consumer object, the new box is more sale and less information. The old boxes are clearly labeled by their color and their text in the front and center. The for "pulp free" nearly disappears into the glass of orange juice, and the band along the top does little to inform. The glass of orange juice doesn't actually invoke orange juice (at least not for me), but says something more along the lines of orange Faygo. Gross? And the font is pretty boring, mundane modern text. Anyone could make that Word 2007 with the auto fonts.

But what do I love about this bottle? The cap, clearly. It's shaped like a little half an orange, evoking the previous symbol of Tropicana and the contents of the case itself. The little half-orange is pitted like a real orange (except made of plastic), and gives a continual reminder that , in fact, drinking orange juice is a pleasure.

So the redesign may have failed the test of the consumers (with whom I generally agree), but as far as I'm concerned, they were able to redeem themselves with that one little cap change. I really hope it stays, so I can get one and add it to my collection with the Cool Whip cap. Or I'll have to run out to the store soon and get one before they disappear off the shelves (as collectors items?! Probably not in Missouri...).

Mini Metro Buses

This doesn't really fit into what I normally write about on this blog, but who's to define normal when I don't write here enough to define normality.

Here we have a three mini-Metro Buses that I made this afternoon. They're about 3 inches long (there's nothing in there for scale, sorry). They're made out of sheets of paper, folded together and glued with an archival quality glue stick. The colored ones are Sharpie and/or colored pencil.

Why put these on here? These are objects that I made myself. With my own hands, inspired by the Metro-produced folding train banks (one of which floats above my desk). These objects serve no particular purpose, but as a trinket they are effective for one purpose for me — reminding other people about the bus and it's struggles here in St. Louis. I'm going to use these buses to film some little videos to help publicize an event I'm putting together, and hopefully we'll have a little army of them made for the even itself, so everyone can take home their own favorite bus.

These little trinkets won't last long (especially when I light them on fire!), but they put some DIY fun into a transit system that's pretty inaccessible. Is having a paper bus on your desk going to remind you to ride the bus and vote for transit initiatives? Probably not. But it could become a conversation piece about why we should support and value transit, and that could lead to something good.