Objectified Page #6

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and reality and people. And I almost envision them

becoming the intellectuals of the future.

I always find it really funny, the French, whenever

they have to talk about the price of gas or

the cheese war with ltaly, they go to a philosopher,

right? You know, it's kind of hilarious but

philosophers are the culture generators in France.

I want designers to be the culture generators

all over the world, and some of them really can. And

no matter what, they should become really

fundamental bricks in any kind of policymaking

effort, and more and more that's happening.

But I see designers as designing not any more

objects, per se, in some cases yes,

but also scenarios that are based on objects that

will help people understand the consequences

of their choices. And people like Dunne and Raby

do that, exactly, they call it design for debate.

We use design as a medium to try and explore

ideas, find out things, question.

We've got cinema, fine arts, literature, craft...

every other medium seems to have a part that's

dedicated to reflecting on important issues, yet

design, the thing that's responsible for so much

of the built environment around us doesn't do that.

I think that's one of the things that attracts us.

So even though our design ideas are never really

put into mass production, we always try to

suggest that they could be mass-produced or they

could be on the scale of hundreds of thousands,

because that's part of what we're interested in.

We love the idea that with a product, or shopping...

we love showrooms.

Because what is a showroom, you go in there,

around lKEA and you imagine this is in your home,

you project yourself into this other space. But you

could actually buy that and have it at home.

It's true, when you walk into a gallery, you don't

imagine the sculpture at home and how it's going

to impact on your life. But if you walk into a shop,

whether it's electronics, or furniture, or a car

showroom, you do imagine yourself experiencing

this thing and enjoying it.

So when we do conceptual products, we're hoping

that people will imagine how that will impact

on the way they live their lives.

We were part of an exhibition and Fiona and l

decided to focus on robots.

There are four of them altogether.

One of them, for example, might become the

interface for important data you keep online

or on remote servers. So it's a strange, wooden

shaped object that you pick up

and it has two holes at the top, and you stare at

its eyes for about five minutes.

And when it's checked it's you, it releases the

information. So it's not just a quick glance

at a retinal scanner, but a meaningful stare into this

machine's eyes. And also you feel better, you feel...

"Yes, it gets me," and then you access it...

"There's no chance it mistook me."

Another thing we became interested in is as

devices become more clever or more smarter,

one of our roles as designers might be to handicap

the technology and make it dependent on us

in some way, or needy. So we thought it might be

interesting to design one that has

to call the owner over to it whenever it wants to

move.

We really wanted to look at the materiality of what a

robot might be, so one of the key things

we wanted was when someone saw the robots, we

wanted them to go, "Well that's not a robot."

That's not even within the robot language. But the

minute they ask that question, then they're

immediately thinking, well what is a robot, what a

robot should be, what kind of identity it might have.

People, especially students, often say at the end of

lectures, "But you just design things that

get shown in museums and galleries, shouldn't you

be trying to mass produce?" And because we're

more interested in designing to deal with ideas,

actually putting things into a museum like MoMA

reaches hundreds of thousands of people, more

than if we made a few arty and expensive

prototypes. So I think it depends, I think we're

interested maybe in mass communication

more than mass production.

Industrial design has been so closely tied to

industry, and working within the constraints

set by industry. Very quickly you come to edges of

the spectrum of choice, the official choice,

of what kinds of things that the companies who

produce these products believe people want.

And we know, people want a lot more interesting

things, but so far we haven't managed to...

to cross that gap.

People are creative, by nature, and always not quite

satisfied with the design of something

that they have, that they've bought. They adapt it.

Is there some way we can better engage with

people's creativity to make more of it

or to enhance what they can do for themselves, or

create the tools or the platforms

from which people can operate.

The tools with which we do design today are our

tools.

We make the shapes, people buy and use the

shapes.

Tomorrow, this will be different. The tools to make

things, and to define your world,

will be available to everybody.

Because of the connected world, the idea of

designing something for a different community

in a different part of the world is now becoming very

much more prevalent.

Before there was a sense that Africa was so far

away you couldn't do anything about it,

but now there seems to be a sense that because of

the connected world, we can make a big difference.

As designers I think we're so far removed from the

actual object. You can design virtually,

prototypes can be made remotely, the actual

product's often manufactured on another continent

That's why a lot of the products we're surrounded

by, a lot of our manufactured environment,

seems too easy, too superficial.

If I had a billion dollars to fund a marketing

campaign, I would launch a campaign on behalf of

"Things you already own, why not

enjoy them today?"

Because we all have so many things, they're just

around, they're in the closet, in the attic,

that we don't even think about anymore, because

there's not enough room left in our brains

because we're so busy processing all the exciting

new developments.

At the end of the day, when you're looking around at

the objects in your house, and you're deciding,

"What here really has value to me?" They're going

to be things that have some meaning in your life.

The hurricane is coming, you have 20 minutes, get

your stuff and go. You're not going to be saying,

"Well that got an amazing write-up in this design

blog." You're going to pick the most meaningful

objects to you, because those are the true objects,

that truly reflect,

the true story of who you are, and what your

personal narrative is, and the story that you're

telling to yourself and no one else because that's

the only audience that matters.

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