CROCKER

My tumblr is taking a bit of a swing towards design in the last few days. Perhaps my mind is on the aspects of design that can intersect those things beyond the physical ones we interact with everyday. See my previous link about using New Years’ to redesign your life.

A little over a year ago, I made a chair. It was the first thing I ever welded. It was the first thing I ever designed as an adult that needed to fulfill daily interaction with other people. I thought I was amazing until two things happened:

1.) The chair broke.

2.) I learned that designing a chair is a massive cliché in design circles.

First off, the chair got fixed, and in fixing it, got improved. More importantly, it had to exist in the world, get broken, and get fixed, to fully appreciate the design and it’s flaws. (For instance- I built it to be comfortable to lay back in, but everyone that came in to my office sat on the very edge of the chair, causing a massive amount of front-end stress.)

Secondly, this article offers a pretty good explanation of why I might have been drawn to a chair as the piece that I was welding. I wanted to make something useful, and I knew that I wanted to make something nice to look at. Since I didn’t have a plan for where my chair was going to go, this part makes sense:

According to Kapel, a chair is a showpiece, one that is odten positioned in a living room such that it can be appreciated from many difference angles…

The article goes on to talk about Southern California designers and their chairs. It’s an interesting thing to think about.

While aesthetics are important (and I appreciate the idea that a chair usually sits in the middle of a room, that’s very accurate), I care more about this new idea of making furniture because it’s useful. I like that something like a chair, or a table, or a car, is an immediate recognizable object and it has an immediate, recognizable use. I want the things I design (including myself) to be immediately useful. And through their usage, bring about innovation.