On the Edge: Design as Art

Designers are often smart in referencing nature. Biomimicry is especially important in this age of environmental awareness. Designers also can, and should be, influenced by art. Sometimes it's hard to make the jump. One doesn't usually walk up to a work of art and think, "Ah, this is a perfect inspiration for my new cell phone design!"

It's more subconscious than that. I actually think most designers (especially at RISD) are influenced by the fine art world, or at least by their own fine art background, more often than they believe. It is in this limbo, somewhere between art and design, where some people put their life's work. Is it a worthy cause? I personally think it would be a waste of time and resources if I did this kind of design, but what this genre does best is to help inspire other designers in their own work - much in the same way nature can inspire.

Designers have to solve real-life problems. Artists are solving problems of a different kind. Art is meant to be viewed, or experienced, and from there inspire individuals by sensory or narrative content. Designed objects may do all of these things as well, but they also have to function in everyday life and be useable by a large number of people. It's interesting to think about process and order when looking at the borderline between art and design. At the outset of a project, a designer's thoughts might reside quite close to the art world. This is where ideas are broadest, and most "blue-sky." This kind of unhindered thinking is what artists capture and run with, whereas designers move from these broad, perhaps impractical ideas, to paring down, appropriating to real-world experiences and limits, and ultimately creating something which goes into the hands of ordinary people. To re-iterate: Designed things are owned; artworks are experienced.

No one is going to buy pills that make your shit sparkle. Well, I shouldn't say no one - I bet there are many people who would want to use this. But the point is that this product is not intrinsically useful and it's not something that's meant to be experienced over and over again. It is certainly making a statement, but the novelty wears off quickly after that statement has been made.

What is useful about something as poetic as this is the creation and sharing of an idea. In sharing this conceptual vantage-point, and linking it closely to industrial design, Tobias Wong has afforded designers the opportunity to take his ideas and use them as inspiration for whatever project they themselves might be working on. And with many of his projects, he's done a lot of the work for them. So much, even, that many of his ideas (like the sparkly pills, and more appropriately his solar-powered moon jar concept) are all set for mass production. You can actually find the moon jar at Target.

So these more conceptual projects clearly have weight in the world of industrial design, if they are being mass manufactured and sold through consumer stores. And perhaps this is where the precious ideas die most quickly. More ephemeral, impractical concepts, have more behind them, in my mind. They have the potential to blossom and become more meaningful than some art project you might find on a store shelf. Take many of the works in "Design and the Elastic Mind" for examples.

One concept called "Sniffing Others", invites users to augment their senses of smell and touch by implanting objects inside themselves. There is a clear element of design to this work, but it is hardly viable at this point in time as a production-ready model. It is simply a concept - one that questions social norms and inspires designers to think outside of convention. Compare this model to the moon jar - they exist at different points along the design spectrum. The former lives right at the heart of "blue sky" thinking, whereas the latter has already become a real product.



Is there a right and wrong place to be if you're walking the art/design tightrope? Of course not. Some concepts work purely to inspire, and some do that plus a little more (or less, depending on how you see it).

Designing Meaning through Marketing

Vibrators have clearly changed in meaning since their creation. But this change came more through society and culture, and not so much as a result of a change in form or physical design. These products have always functioned in the same basic way, but what changed were peoples' attitudes towards them, and settings in which they were used. Consequently, minor physical changes have arisen, relating to packaging, coloring, marketing, and the like.

The vibrator began as a medical device, but has grown into a mass market product geared and advertised towards women. Women are still targeted by gender-specific advertising, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. In fact, many of the vernacular products we don't give a second thought have "genders" attached to them.

Take the obvious examples of beauty products. Loreal shampoo in pink bottles means something very different than a bottle of Axe in black. There’s not usually anything on these products that says, “this is for a woman” or “this is for a man” but all the cultural cues are there. Brand names, shape, and color all speak for themselves. Even more obvious, of course, are things like hair replacement (which usually shows pictures of males or females right on the box), or shoe inserts, which clearly say for which gender they are made. It’s actually interesting that all of these products are so polarized in their marketing, because in reality a woman’s foot insert will probably work just fine for a man, and a woman certainly won’t have some perverse bodily reaction to using Axe.

Televisions have a similar story. When Sony introduced a new television line called “Bravia,” they marketed it as “the first television for men and women.” Sony seemed to really push this concept, releasing multiple ads emphasizing that this was one television that would somehow be "easier" for women to use.

The truth is, of course, that there wasn't anything about previous televisions that women couldn't handle. The Bravia televisions ' change in appeal was mostly cosmetic, but it was the marketing that truly changed peoples' perception of the product. If Sony hadn't given us the tagline or fed us the ads, no one would have looked at the Bravia and declared "these were designed for women!"

Marketing has a powerful effect on our subconscious (which is why we see it everywhere), but it's not the only thing that can direct the meaning of a product. Users themselves have the power to shape a product's meaning through re-appropriation. To take an extreme example, people have used their cell phones and iPods as flashlights in dire situations. I read a news article a while back describing how a man lost in the wilderness was saved because he used his iPod as a beacon to help rescue teams track him down from the air. Another interesting re-appropriation of the iPod comes from the military, which is using the device for translation.

Some of the lighter-hearted appropriations have seen people cooking on their laptops, because they can heat up so much. In fact, there's an entire do-it-yourself culture in which people modify a product so it becomes something completely new, and then post how they did it online for others to follow.