design research and objects

Above photos by Dean McCartney.

Photo below by the designer.

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This stage of the Archaeologic project was exhibited during Sydney Design Week 2011 in collaboration with Henry Wilson.

For other stages of this project I am using an approach adapted from kintsugi, the Japanese art of ceramic repair, embedding the photoluminescent pigment into deep glue seams running right through the bowls. For this project, Henry and I decided to focus on the common problem of chipped crockery – the kind of damage you see in crockery sold at second hand shops, which is where we obtained these samples. The pigment is applied as filler within the chips and sanded back to restore the unbroken shape, but with a nice surprise when you open your cupboards at night.

The exhibition case was built with a timed light switch similar to the ones they used to use in museum displays (at least the ones I remember from my childhood), except that the switch is reversed; pressing the button turns the light off for 30 seconds, instead of on.

In situ on Elizabeth Lane during Sydney Design Week:

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Broken white stoneware repaired with photoluminescent pigment.

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My new project with Henry Wilson is now on show during Sydney Design Week 2011. Details below.

Archaeologic

Seeing potential in the look and feel of broken things, Guy Keulemans and Henry Wilson present an act of protest against the new. The transformative power of repair is harnessed in a collection of objects which celebrate a synthesis of Japanese kintsugi, archaeology, and light.

The street exhibition is on view in the laneway behind 617 Elizabeth Street Refern during Sydney Design Week between 11am and 5pm daily.

Studio 1, 617 Elizabeth Lane (behind 617 Elizabeth Street)

Facebook event page.

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From March 18 to April 19th my installation NNancy is on show at the PYD Building in Sydney. A spatial intervention built from a simple fixed modular component, the structure generatively becomes complex as it caterpillers its way up the central staircase. I, with a rotating group of assistants, are building the structure live on Tuesdays the 29th March, 5th of April, and 12th of April, with a pulldown on the 28th April. The pulldown is, in a way, as interesting to me as the build up because I film the process and use it to make animations, like the one below, but in real rather than virtual space.

The work is a sequel to my recent exhibition in Poland, WWilma, a similar structure, but whose form was built by visitors and controlled by demographic factors. It grew to massive proportions in the cultural centre which housed it, akin to an out of control architectural growth, temporarily, but drastically changing the interior space. NNancy, built for the first time in the PYD building, is smaller and less monstrous, but possesses more defined geometric parameters; an invitation to thoughts about the relationships between art and nature, control and chaos.

NNancy from yugyug on Vimeo.

NNancy: a spatial intervention by Guy Keulemans
The PYD Building
197 Young Street, Waterloo, NSW 2017, Australia
18th March to 28th April
Hours: Monday to Friday – 9am to 5:30pm
Saturday – 9am to 5pm
Sunday – 9am to 4pm

Information at the PYD website:
http://www.pyd.com.au/exhibitions-4785/generative-installation-nnancy-pyd-during-april.aspx

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Pawel Kraus from Poland’s Archizoom has written about my project Kids Energy House, here.

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The exhibition Tag! Base! Hide and Seek! has opened successfully at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun, and  WWILMA has begun. This was project was difficult for me because I was unable to travel to Torun and set it up myself, but instead sent an instruction manual to the curators. That makes a fair amount of sense, considering its built by the art centre visitors, and, as the video stream shows, they did an excellent job and its running like a dream. Already it is quite large, with a large chaotic arrangement in the foreground and some nice smaller, disconnected satellite arrangements in the background. As the structure expands, will these join up and intensify?

Click the link below for the live video stream. Works in most browsers, Chrome and Safari certainly, it will also open in VLC. Keep in mind the time difference – at night the centre closes and turns off the lights, and all you see is black :/

WWILMA at COCA, live video stream

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Earlier this year I was asked to contribute to the soon to be released Platform 21 book. My contribution was a series of sketches proposing an structure built by the visitors of an exhibition which represents their demographic qualities by translation into physical structure. Its both interactive and generative, and somewhat like an infographic or diagram, but three dimensional, large and architectural. It divides space in a very physical way. Curator Joanna van der Zaanden liked the idea and is taking it to Poland where it will grow for the first time under proper conditions at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Torun, Poland. I have an instruction manual and a few details to work out before its opens on the third of December, but I’ve already built a smaller scale prototype with artificial demographic data, so it at least has been tested structurally.

Above, the prototype in Berlin. It represents 50 exhibition visitors and fills up a room of about 22 square metres. In fact it escaped out the door and ended up on the street. With visitors in Torun estimated at more than 1000, the structure there will be perhaps 20 times larger.

Thanks to Mirak Jamal and Marwin Bald for the use of their cellar studio and  gallery in Berlin.

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I was recently featured in the July-August issue of Artichoke, Australia’s design and architecture magazine. It was a very nice profile written by Dutch design journalist Ingeborg van Lieshout, who also writes for a number of important Dutch entities like Bright, Frame and Mediamatic, as well as for her own site The Green Light District.

And soon after in September I was in Belle, the lifestyle and interior magazine, alongside Kyoko Hashimoto. We were instead asked to recommend things to do in Berlin for a travel feature, so we recommended some of the kookier bars, places to stay, and eat (especially Claudia and Nico’s amazing ad-hoc Sunday restaurant at Sowieso) and discussed the influence of the city on our work.

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The May 2010 issue of Art Forum has a review of the Marres Centre’s We Were Exuberant and Still Had Hope. Ettore Sottsass: works from Stockholm, 1969 exhibition. The author Saskia van der Kroef writes:

….designer Guy Keulemans provided “notes” to Sottsass’s Superbox. Keuleman’s Objects for Atheists, Superunfoldedbox, 2009, comprising different kinds of cardboard posters that function as a DIY kit, turned the institution’s second floor into a playful cityscape of ill-shaped miniature Superboxes. Mass-produced, touchable, light and disposable, they were in complete contrast with the originals downstairs. The young designer clearly broke with the Superbox’s sacral staging, directly invoking the conditions of consumption. At the same time, the work illustrated the promise of an entirely designable society, with the participation of the viewer – but not without an exuberance of its own.

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The celebrated young designer Tobias Wong died recently at the age of 35, officially by suicide. However, it appears he may have killed himself accidentally while sleep walking, a condition with which he had long been afflicted. In this post I speculate on how and why his ultimately tragic condition may have also contributed to the startling originality of his work.

Yesterday, a fascinating article in the New York Times written by Alex Williams, proposed that he didn’t intend to kill himself at all. Williams discovered that Wong was afflicted by sleeping disorders, and Wong’s boyfriend Tim Dubitsky is convinced he hung himself while sleep walking. Bizarre as this sounds, the anecdotal evidence is strong; his friends and family tell stories of Tobi getting up in the middle of the night and exhibiting strange sleep walking behaviour – cooking 3 course dinners, randomly billing clients and writing nonsensical emails. On one occasion he made costumes for his cats. When Tobi visited his mother in her high rise apartment, she would stack chairs by the doors to prevent him from accessing the balcony ledge. On another occasion, he was said to have removed a treasured painting from the wall and violently thrown it across the room.

I can believe it. I have a history of sleep walking too. Sometimes I wake up and act out conversations with strangers, or speak gibberish to friends. More than once I have left my room and woken up in strange beds, or found myself naked inside elevators, locked out of my apartment. Awkward situations. Parasommnias, sleep disorders and sleep walking tend to affect families, and my brother too once sleep walked while at college, falling down some steps and badly cutting his head open. Once, while camping in Croatia, my girlfriend tied her hand to mine with string, to prevent me from getting up in the night and falling off the nearby cliffs.  Never, ever, however, could I imagine a tragedy on the scale of what happened to Tobias Wong. And yet, it is not unknown; both the popular media and medical literature are rife with stories of misadventure, death and even manslaughter being commited by those technically asleep. In these conditions the pre-frontal cortex of the brain is disconnected, and the afflicted may have no more control over their actions than they would over a simple dream.

I think its interesting to consider that this condition of Wong’s may have been intricately linked to his style and approach to art, but I preface these ideas by saying its entirely supposition.

It appears he had a dual life; a waking life, and a dream life that was acted out, but vaguely remembered or known only through the recollections of family and friends. Did he feel like he had a dual identity? A somnolent doppelganger? Much of Wong’s work deals with appropriation of the work of others; my favourite is his Savoy doorstop. Its  a wry take on Alvar Alto’s famous vase, which was filled with concrete to make the doorstop. And each doorstop requires another Alto vase to be broken;  a bold move by a young designer to place his own work at a higher premium than that of the Finnish master. Of course, the other well known examples are the Starck chair he fitted with a light and the cut up Issey Miyake skirt.

Did he feel that these appropriations were possible, or more conceivable, because of his own fractured sense of identity?  Did he conceive that he was acting out the dream lives of those he appropriates by proxy? In a parallel universe does Starck dream of putting a light in his own chair? Did Issey Miyake have a nightmare of seeing his skirts turned into monitor covers? In our universe, Tobias Wong made these imaginery events delightfully real and amusingly tangible.

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At the Core 77 Design, Wit, and the Creative Act conference in 2007, Wong staged an interesting fraud by substituting his friend, academic Rama Chorpash, in his place as speaker and panel member. This is by no means original to Wong – its a core aspect of Dutch artist Barbara Visser’s oeuvre and more recently the avant garde International Necronautical Society pulled the same stunt at the Tate. However, one can speculate that Wong was not just playing with authenticity or circumnavigating his own fear of public speaking, but also performing a voyeuristic fantasy; an act of observing his identity externally. One can imagine that having his sleep walking activities related to him third hand, by friends and families, “the morning after”, may have cultivated an intense desire to observe himself in the way they did. Something he could not do while sleepwalking, could be done by proxy. Wong attended the event semi-anonymously and is described sitting with the audience, grinning with glee at his own prank.

Other examples of his work show an intent to observe himself externally. I had previously thought his 1997 self portrait The Stolen Shot, in which he photo bombed a picture at the beach by popping his head into the frame of a couples own photograph, was a early expression of his interest in appropriation and inserting his personality into the work of others. Yet, an alternate explanation is that he was struggling to see himself as his sleepwalking phantom, a ghostly and distant entity. Perhaps, a way to see himself in the same way his close friends and family had seen him. Was his later work, Sleeping at Agnes, in which he slept at night in the window of a boutique, visible from the street, an attempt expose his condition to the public? An attempt to share his families’ experiences with a wider audience? 

Some aspects of Wong’s life and work take on dark new meanings in light of his sleeping disorder. His well known tattoo, “Protect me from what I want” scribbled in pen by the artist Jenny Holzer on his arm and later tattooed permanently, now seems presciently sinister. Wong described his own work with the name paraconceptual. The prefix para, when used as from its Greek origin, means beside, adjacent, and resembling, but also abnormal. The term describes Wong’s work well, working alongside the mainstream and resembling it, but also subverting the mainstream with beautiful abnormality. I can’t think of a better example than his diamond ring, the diamond flipped around to act as a weapon, or tool for destruction.

However, the prefix para also has a Latin origin, from parare meaning “to shield” and its from this origin we have words such as parasol and parachute, objects which protect us. Some of his work expresses this concept directly, notably his kevlar rose brooch and duvet, but I think his work is also protective in a more abstract and significant way. Tobi Wong was familiar with the experience of somnolence, the feeling of automatic and aimless nocturnal wandering, the moving and performing of actions without awareness. Maybe he saw all of us as sleep walkers; wandering through life buying, producing and consuming automatically. Perhaps he recognised this somnolent-like, but daily behaviour as dangerous? If so, what Tobi Wong really did with his life and work was to give us is a collection of ideas and objects – things to protect and guard us from the problems of production and our own blind, happy consumerism.

NOTE: The majority of the images I use in this post were sourced from Tobi Wong’s own site www.brokenoff.com which is currently offline. But I hope www.brokenoff.com can be restored because it gives a good sequential overview of his work, including lesser known work from early in his career.  Update: looks like there is a mirror at brokenoff.net

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This saturday opens Die Grauzone, an exhibition at Kaleidoskop in Neukolln, Berlin. My project Greygoo is designed specially for this exhibition. The exhibition is part of the larger art festival 48-Stunden-Neukölln.

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I recently contributed to the magazine associated with Fashion Clash 2010 in Maastricht (June 4th to 6th), an event curated on the idea of fashion being produced by designers from fields other than fashion. Based on the photos posted online at Design.nl, and the ones posted by curator Matylda Krzykowski, the event was a mega-success.

My article in the magazine discusses the dressed-down minimalist aesthetic you see on the streets here in Berlin, and some of the eclectic shops that cater to it (specifically Nr4 and the Line Gallery) plus my own shop We Are All Made of Stuff. I’m eagerly awaiting my own copy to be sent to me by Matylda soon, but for everybody else its available from all Selexy bookstores, as well as the Bonnefanten Musuem in Maastricht and the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven.

The following images are by Peter Stigter. For more great images check out the Fashion Clash 2010 blog or Facebook page.

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In 1864 Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Informed by new discoveries about the geology and the age of the earth, the novel attempted to equate levels underneath the surface of the earth with a hierarchy of older and older geologic time. Which is why the protagonists encounter Neanderthal men, and prehistoric animals, ultimately dinosaurs, as they go deeper and deeper into the earth. We know now that this is complete shit and really the centre of the earth is a solid ball of iron the size of the moon – possibly a single giant crystal –  surrounded by a molten lake of liquid iron and nickel. Despite what we already know or can presume, scientists want to know more, and the latest idea is to start a nuclear fission reaction inside a big ball of radioactive cobalt, becoming so hot it literally burns through the crust and starts to sink towards the centre of the earth.

Most of what we know already about the earths core is comprised of theoretical modelling and real observation of the environment around us, even extending into space. For example, scientists can estimate the the type and quantity of elements that make up the solar system by analysing lightwaves coming from the sun and reflecting off other planets. The know from this the expected ratio of elements that make up the earth, but the samples we can physically access, from the earth’s crust, are low in iron. So its predicted that the rest of the earth, specifically the earth’s core, contains a lot of iron.

The study of seismic waves from earthquakes gives us other information. When an earthquake occurs, waves travel all over the world, both around the crust, along the surface of the earth, and also directly through the earth, which can be recorded and analysed on the other side. A certain type of wave doesn’t make it through certain parts of earth’s interior though, and these are the type of waves which don’t travel though liquid. So we know that part of the earth, the outer core, is made of liquid. More specifically, molten iron.

If the outer core is molten iron, the inner core can be considered frozen iron. Its not any cooler, but the increasing pressure of the earth raises the boiling point of iron, so that inner core is actually growing solid, collecting more and more iron from the liquid outer core, as the earth slowly ages.  Theoretically, there must be an exchange barrier between the inner and outer core comprised of trace elements with melting points different to that of iron. This should function like a super slippery lubricant, allowing the inner core to rotate independently of the liquid iron around it. So its expected that the earth’s core rotates slower or faster than the earth itself, but no one knows for sure.

Above all this seemingly unstable collection of iron and trace metals is the mantle. We know a bit about what the mantle is made from, because bits of it spew up out of volcanoes every now and again. Its where stuff like diamonds, bits of carbon crushed into incredibly tight molecular structures, are made over the course of billions of years. The mantle is where the big shifts in temperature and pressure occur, the closer materials get to the core, and subsequently the mantle has lots of different layers with different compositions of various elements. The mantle is really the source of all the stuff that comprises the crust of the earth and, using techniques I don’t attempt to understand, geologists can tell from which part of the mantle the rocks we find on the surface of earth come from. They can even tell from which level of the mantle specific diamonds come from, based on the study of impurities they contain.

an illustration of Kola Superdeep Borehole by Egil Paulsen, looking across the Kola Peninsula

A full understanding of how the mantle is constructed, however, will require physical access. The deepest hole in the world, the 12 kilometre deep Kola Superdeep Borehole, dug by some Russian scientists,  reaches no where near the mantle, but did go deep enough to prevent further drilling from the excessive heat of 180 degrees Celsius, and deep enough to inspire the hoax that they had drilled into the mythological Christian Hell. This was first reported  by an evangelical news station in the United States in 1989, presented with a sound recording of the screams of the dammed, you can listen to it here, recorded with a “special heat-proof microphone” that was lowered into the hole.

Hell

Some Japanese scientists have been digging into the much thinner crust at the bottom of the ocean. They haven’t reached the mantle yet, but are choosing especially weak places to drill, where tectonic plates overlap, so as to study the occurrence of earthquakes. They even want to drill into the epicentre of the earthquake that caused the 2004 tsunami. This all sounds very counter intuitive to me, but if it leads to a better understanding of earthquakes and tsunami, or more Godzilla movies, I guess its for the best.

All of the above is pretty small scale compared to what’s coming though. In 2003 planetologist David Stevenson, of the California Institute of Technology, proposed to crack open the crust of the earth with the use of nuclear weapons and pour a probe covered in molten iron into it. The power of the blast, several megatons, and the weight of the molten iron required,  between 100 000 tonnes  and 10 000 000 tonnes, would make the crack self-propogate right down to the core. The probe would descend down this deepening crack while sending back data to the surface. That the nuclear explosion would be in the megaton range makes me guess he was probably joking, but some Russian and British scientists have improved on the basic idea and seriously proposed a variation.

In a series of papers, 2005’s Probing of the Interior Layers of the Earth with Self-Sinking Capsules, published in the journal Atomic Energy, followed by 2008’s Exploring the Earth’s Crust and Mantle Using Self-Descending, Radiation-Heated, Probes and Acoustic Emission Monitoring, published in the book Nuclear Waste Research: Siting, Technology and Treatment, the scientists propose the design of a probe built from radioactive cobalt surrounded by a tungsten wall. The intense heat from probe will cause it to literally melt into the earth, travelling slowly down through the crust and then mantle at the rate of about 20 kilometres per year. The cobalt will continue to generate radionuclides for several decades, allowing it to sink deeper and deeper. Although the probe is essentially dumb, just a collection of nuclear fuel with no technological devices, the probe can be tracked by equipment listening to the changes in the earth it creates as it sinks; the melting rock and its re-crystalisation in the wake of the probe.

This concept has a historical precedent.  When Reactor no. 4 at Chernobyl had its catastrophic meltdown in 1986, there was a realistic concern that the exposed core would also literally melt in to the ground and start sinking down. Potentially this would made the disaster much worse, because there was an underground aquaduct below the reactor (used as a source of water coolant for the whole Chernobyl complex) and if the core came in contact with the water the resulting steam explosion would destroy the remaining three reactors above ground (which amazingly were still operating and continued to operate until the early 90’s.) Luckily this event was averted by having several helicopters fly over the reactor core and smother it in lead, clay, boron and canisters of liquid nitrogen. If the the threat of steam explosion was not present, would the reactor have been left to to burn its way down to  the centre of the earth?

When I first told my girlfriend about this idea of melting a probe down into the centre of the earth, she exclaimed “kowai!”, meaning scary, a word the Japanese reserve for phenomena like atom bombs, tsunami and Godzilla. She asked, “Aren’t they afraid they will set off a chain reaction and explode the earth?” I am not a scientist and could hardly guess, but I teased her with the information that the earths core may also contains a fair amount of nuclear fuel, in the form of molten uranium, but that the scientists are willing to take the risk anyway.

More interesting to me, as a designer and not a scientist,  is the difference the form of such a probe takes, when compared to space faring probes like Voyager, Huygens and Mariner. Those latter probes travel thousands of kilometeres to other planets and their moons carrying sophisticated cameras, sensors and other scientific probes, and transmitting back amazing pictures and data of their journeys. The cost millions if not billions of dollars and require the co-operation of the worlds best scientists and governments. Yet, to send something a few dozen kilometres or so into the centre of the earth, our best solution is dumb probe;  a bundle of nuclear waste bunched together and set it on fire so we can watch it sink into the ground. By modern scientific standards, its like finding a dead body in the woods, poking it with a stick and calling that an autopsy.

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In an “Abelard Snazz” story written by Alan Moore in 1982, Abelard Snazz, an egocentric and  immortal character with four eyes (literally), is imprisoned for eternity on the bare surface of a planet by some gods he has inadvertently offended. Until he can solve a Rubik cube. An easy task for a self-professed genius.

The problem is that the cube is 50 metres high and across. Solving the puzzle takes him 6 million years, of which the first 30 000 years is spent mining enough metal to build a giant crane capable of rotating the sides of the puzzle. The remainder is spent manufacturing parts, assembling the crane…. and etcetera. Millions of years later, and to Abelard’s frustration, just moments before finally solving the cube, he is whisked off the plant by “Amnesty Intergalactic”, who want to help him escape his unlawful imprisonment.

The idea to try and produce a complicated industrial product or tool from scratch, starting with the most basic materials and working upwards, is not new and was perhaps first proposed by Leonard E. Read in his 1958 essay, I, Pencil., an essay from which Alan Moore might have drawn inspiration. I, Pencil illustrates the complexity of technological infrastructures by describing all the actions which combine to produce a simple Eberhard Faber pencil; the mining and refinement of graphite for the lead, the logging of pine wood for the shaft, and the processing of various metals, plus rubber for the eraser tipped end. Read conjectures that no man would be able to single-handedly produce a product as complicated as pencil from scratch, without existing technologies, and even with existing technologies, excluding machinery built expressly for the purpose, making a single pencil would cost more than $50,000 in 1958 dollars. Indeed, this is what bringing new products to market can traditionally cost, at least until the division of labour and production efficiencies bring the price down, in the case of a pencil, to just a few cents. Read concludes that the production of pencils highlights the efficiencies of free trade and the capitalist market to synergise the efforts of individuals, working from self-interest, into a complicated and dynamic technological system for the benefit of all.

Inspired by the Read’s story about the pencil, last year Royal Academy of Art student Thomas Thwaites set out to attempt the impossible and build himself a toaster from scratch, using only the most basic materials and technology he could find. His aims included mining and smelting iron and nickel-ore, with subsequent processing into wires, springs and heating elements by hand, and obtaining some petroleum from which he could attempt to refine plastic for the outer casing.

While conceived as an art project to question the state of modern technologucal scoiety, its best quality is not that it exposes failings of the industrial world. Taken broadly I think the industrial world, having given us advances in medicine, transport, energy et al, are fairly impervious to criticism from conceptual art projects. However, the project does expose the trappings and inertia of industrial design, and the consumerism that supports it. His project shows us what actions must take place to produce a a toaster, and questions why it is made the way it is, and possibly, whether we need it in the first place.

The presentation of his project is infected with failure. Thwaites found the production of raw materials difficult. A 500 year old technique for smelting iron in a ceramic crucible proved impossible, so he resorted to using a microwave. An ingenious solution begging the question of whether he should have first tried to build a microwave. This irony is not lost on Thwaites and even feeds his later suggestions, such as his dream of flying to a offshore oil rig in a helicopter to pick up some crude oil. This goes unrealisd; with his project deadline approaching he resorts to melting waste plastic into the (very) rough shape of a Chinese factory made toaster. All these little concessions and cheats however do not diminish the project, instead they remind us that there is nothing discrete about technological processes. One step relies on another, and with each step the distance from a personal body of knowledge increases.

Radley Balko from the libertarian magazine Reason, in a haphazardly perceptive and occasionally humourous rant, responded by calling it a mockery. A mockery it is for sure; its final appearance is apocalyptic and when finally plugged in the toaster didn’t work, but exploded in sparks. Balko sees it as left-wing liberal arts crticism of the capatalistic free market which generates and shapes the industrial processes that produce toasters. Processes, he argues, that are periperal or intrinsic to many other technologicies, creating wealth, freedom, and leisure time from which Thwaites has been spoilt, and which he is exploiting in order to produce his art in the first place.

While Balko is right about the framing of the industrial processes in Thwaites work, I don’t see it as mockery of technological society as a whole, but a mockery of a certain type of design. Specifically, industrial design driven by a consumerist desire for new and shiny things, and which tends to hide and obfuscate material qualities. The projects ultimate importance is that it exposes the material essence of products, a confrontation to any designer building futuristic, blobby products whose realisation relies on more highly evolved and technological knowledge than they could ever hope to grasp, and whose success relies on the abscence of critical consumer perception. This is, once again ironically, illustrated by Thwaites’ display of that which he is attempting to reproduce, a cheap factory made toaster, the Argus Value Range 2 Slice toaster, filmed and idolised on a white pedestal in a video on his site, soundtracked with classical music.

Argos Value Range 2 Slice Toaster from Thomas Thwaites.

I can explain this design problem in another way, from my own experience. In 2008 I attended a Cradle to Cradle workshop orgainzed by Koekoek and Qreamteam in Venlo, the Netherlands. After some bland lectures, the organisers made groups and handed out half a dozen Phillips Senseo coffee machines, asking us to take them apart and count and sort the components. My group counted 43 components and 17 different materials in one machine, many of them unrecyclable composites. And I think we missed a few. The process was fascinating, especially as the group was a professional mix of engineers, businessmen and designers. We were asking each other, what is this material? What is its use? Why does a machine that fundamentally just heats up water need so many components in the first place?  The shallow answers to these questions are technical, as the engineers in the group were eager to explain. For example, the Senseo had a number of different plastic composites, including glass filled nylon and carbon filled nylon in various different ratios. This is because each composite has slightly different qualities, and the Phillips engineers, in the interests if technical mastery, choose the most appropriate material for the technical scenario that have created. This is perfectly well and fine if you are building something for NASA, or even a high technology consumable like a computer or high end digital camera, but not a low end digital camera. And when a coffee machine or a toaster is subjected to such technical rigour it becomes fucking stupid.

Well, possibly the coffee machine engineers actually want to be NASA engineers. And probably they were trained at engineering schools which don’t differentiate the training for either type of engineer, holistically at least, encouraging the mastery of choosing specific materials for specific problems.An important difference is that NASA engineers, or engineers for any high technology mission critical application, are pretty well connected to the product life cycle and use. When a part breaks down in space, its the engineers who designed the part with whom the astronauts want to talk. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had that luxury with our consumer products? While the coffee machine works perfectly well when unboxed by the consumer at home, the product lifecycle is compromised because it has too many complex parts, making it difficult to be repaired, re-used or recycled. It doesn’t come with the engineeer’s phone number, or even a repair manual. The engineers would be better off using their professional riguour to reduce the number of components and minimize the number of materials from which they are made.

Every time a designer introduces complexity to an object, they make it harder to understand. Fine. Some things are complicated, and require effort to understand. However, everytime a designer covers up complexity in an object, they make it impossible to understand. Its clear the Senseo has far more components than the Argus Value Range 2 Slice toaster, and that, from a Cradle to Cradle point of view, it is a clear disaster. The Chinese made toaster has fewer components and simple guts from today’s point of view. Yet, that’s a point of view refined by our increasing technological sophistication. Practically it makes no difference – for the people who would never dream of opening up the injection moulded casing in which the the coffee machine and the toaster are both presented. Philosophically, the coffee machine and the toaster suffer form the same problem; a design philosophy which emphasizies technical efficiencies and functional ease of use over life-cycle functionality and user intimacy. Their interiors are hidden away from the consumer with a shiny plastic shell;  a push-button aesthetic preventing users from deeper interaction with or knowledge of the products in their lives. Victor Papanek said that his first commercial job after graduating from school was to design a radio, a task he labelled “shroud design” and hoped it was the first and last time he did such a thing. This is just to show this kind of criticism is hardly new, and dates back to at least the 1960’s.

Incidentally, Papanek went on to make a candle heat powered radio with his student George Seeger in 1962, an object that parralells Thwaites’ toaster, although Papanek radio did, at least experimentally, work. It boldly shouts its aesthetic of openness and simplicity; an object one could easily and intuitively delve into. An object as much for screwdriver as the hands and ears. Repair and re-use… shouldn’t we be rolling our sleeves up and getting sweaty with the guts of our belongings?

A question any industrial designer can ask themselves when designing a new product is: how hard would it be to create this object from scratch, like Read’s pencil, or Thwaites’ toaster, if they must?

Its true, Thwaites’ toaster is extremely ugly, but perhaps no uglier than the philosophy behind the thing he sought to re-create.

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It is my dream to one day design a manhole cover. I have no idea how that might come about, but in the meantime, I’ve taken an interest the beautiful manhole I discovered whilst living in Japan. Like many things from Japan, they are finely designed and crafted, and sometimes wonderfully humorous.

I’ve discovered some more nice examples of manhole covers here, and even more interestingly, an article explaining the origin of Japan’s colorful manhole covers at the Japan Times. Apparently, the covers were initially a way for central government to encourage small towns council to cover the cost of installing sewerage infrastructure, so making the covers unique and representative helped the small town politicians justify the costs to their constituents. They were so popular that bigger cities began to upgrade their own covers as well when the time came. Previous to the 1970’s and 80’s manhole covers were more conservative, and sometimes even direct copies of foreign manhole covers (I assume American?).

hidden in a garden of an izakaya in nishi-Tokyo, probably Tanashi-cho.

near Shibuya station.

from a Japanese island, I think it was Miyake Jima.

from Araichi, Arai-cho, an area famous for the fireworks basket carried by the man depicted.

and again from Toyohashi, Arai-cho, a similar graphic with Toyohashi castle in the background.

for those who are interested, many more amazing manhole covers from Japan can be found by image searching the phrase “mannho-ru “- manhole in katakana. Some of my favorites are below (not my photos, but the images link to their original source).

… and in addition there is a wonderful series of manhole covers,  which together tell a graphical story, here.

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About a year ago I recieved a phone call, out of the blue, from Arne Hendriks of Platform21, to talk about my SMASH REPAIR project, the second prototype of which he had seen on my website. He wanted to exhibit it, I told him it was in the bin. I asked, could I make another for Platform21? Yes. Would Platform21 pay for it? Yes. Could I build it at Platform21? Definitely yes. And could I also present a lecture about my ideas and philosophy of repairing (and also get paid for that)? Yes…!

Well, its not often that I hear “yes” so much, nor have such an enjoyable phone call. But that inclusive and agreeable attitude is what made Platform21 so unique; an open-minded position that drew artists and designers from all over the world and from all areas of the community.

Platform21 was conceived as experimental phase, an incubator, to precede a bigger art and design centre called Supermaker which would have its own custom built workshop and exhibition space, however, and unfortunately, I just heard that Supermaker will not get off the ground due to a lack of funding. Which means Platform21 has finally ended. A shame, but I think everyone involved should be proud of the remarkable things Platform21 achieved. The website will remain up as an archive of the cool projects they did (Hacking Ikea, the Breakfast Machine, Repair Manifesto etc.)

Platform21, goodbye.

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After setting up the Sottsass exhibition in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I traveled back to London with copies of the die-cut models. At a pub in Shortditch, I passed some around and invited my friends to assemble them together. I was interested in seeing how long it might take someone unfamiliar with the design, especially I was not going to be at the opening. The results were decent. Most could do the boxes in less than 10 minutes, even after a couple of beers. A some took longer and a few gave up – on closer inspection because they had made a incorrect assumption early on which frustrated all their later assembling decisions… Overall, pretty fun. I clocked myself at about 2 minutes for the easiest box (Yellow), but thats after making several hundred of them in Maastricht the day before

My write up of the actual exhibition and purpose of these cardboard models is here.

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