The Museum of Vestigial Desire
Surplus elements in design always disrupt the end experience. But it takes much more effort to design objects without surplus elements. It is difficult to be precise. And because of this difficulty, the disparity between our eyes and the way the frame wants to be seen comes up. The disparity is fundamental and is responsible for the reason design practice is in this state of voiceless delusion. Surplus is a matter of perspective also. Who decides whether a given element needs to be there or…
Sitting is a posture designed for temporary rest and a permanent ability to work. Sitting and working have a firm relationship. The owner of the factory wants the factory to function. The machines in his factory could only be operated while standing. The employee had to stand, operate, sit, rest, stand, operate. This was the cyclic rhythm of the employee. Every time the employee missed a rhythm, there was a fall in production. One cycle was supposed to get completed in x seconds. If the world…
There are broken chairs that are not even functional anymore. Broken chairs cannot be used as sitting surfaces anymore. They can only be symbols for their intended function. But broken chairs can be repaired and once chairs are repaired they can be used for their intended purpose but at the same time the fragility of their brokenness comes across as a fact also. How is the ghost image of the broken chair unshackled eventually from the chair that has been repaired? Can the image of an object…
There is no generic human to be found. Everyone is specific. Everyone is distinct, maybe not in their preferences but definitely in the criteria that emerge from their physical and psychological being. Design as a practice focuses on profiles of individuals that they cater to through mass-produced objects, in this case mass-produced chairs. But individuals cannot be neatly segregated into profiles and categories. The extent of how much they know themselves and who they really are, are two…
Function is not really a parameter of comfort. It is actually the other way around. Comfort and function are even opposite sometimes. Comfort wants to lead us to a space that lays the minimum impediments in our enjoyment of it. Comfort is the count of the number of impediments in our experience that could be removed. Actually comfort is a synthetic parameter. We are comfortable with what we are used to. And we can get used to precisely anything. As far as comfort is in question, and within the…
Chair might be designed frugally and frugality as a design principle might compromise on the principle of comfort. A frugal chair might even be a stool and get away with it. Frugality in design tends to be biased towards the performance of the function. Maybe this comes across as a pressure, it must seem that to be frugal one must be functional. But there are other values of frugality. There could be aspects of comfort built into an object but it might still be frugal. Frugality needn’t be o…
The form that is given to a given entity is not an accident. Deep consideration is given to each parameter of its design. And form is not even a parameter. It is not even derived from a set of parameters. Form is a constraint. The aesthetic a specific form needs to meet is not decided by any process that occurs across a single instance. The template of the ideal form is derived from working on scores of projects across time. The aesthetic of a designer is developed by a lot of factors. Some of…
Ergonomics is the economics of comfort. Because it is the economics and not for instance the dynamics, there is a certain amount of give and take that needs to be taken into account. What can be given away and what can be retained in the context of a given design object? Not all aspects of the use of an object can be made comfortable, everything is inter-linked and some flips trigger some flops. When comfort becomes perfectly calibrated, luxury emerges. Luxury is the abundance of comfort in…
Copies are made not because there is a dearth of ideas but because putting new ideas into motion is a risk. And risk and capital have a relationship that is opposed to each other. Where there is risk, there will be no capital. Capital is available only for a predictable multiplication, for some factor of extrapolation. If something works as an idea, then it can be scaled up. If it has been not proven yet then there is no opportunity or stage available for it. The task of vetting of ideas and…
What does the object allow us to do? What it allows us to do is its affordance. But some objects are generic and have multiple affordances. It is OK to do something with them and at another time it is also possible to do something else with them. This generic quality will have to be known in greater detail. The generic is the object that has not found its unique function yet. Some objects do not ever find their unique function. They remain like idle objects that can be used as chairs of a…