Objectified Page #3

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time to make it less conspicuous and less obvious.

And if you think about it so many of the products

that we're surrounded by, they want you to be very

aware of just how clever the solution was.

When the indicator comes on, I wouldn't expect

anybody to point to that as a feature,

but at some level I think you're aware of a calm and

considered solution,

that therefore speaks about how you're going to use

it, not the terrible struggles

that we as designers and engineers had in trying to

solve some of the problems.

That's quite obsessive, isn't it?

We now have a new generation of products where

the form bears absolutely no relation

to the function. I mean, look at something like an

iPhone and think of all the things it does.

In "ye olden days" of what are called analog

products, in other words they're not digital,

they're not electronic, something like a chair or a

spoon. "Form follows function" tended to work.

So if say you imagine being a Martian and you just

land on planet Earth, and you've never seen

a spoon or a chair before. You can guess roughly

what you're supposed to do with them...

sit on them or feed yourself with them... by the

shape of the object, by the way it looks.

Now all that has been annihilated by the microchip.

So design is moving from this culture of

the tangible and the material, to an increasingly

intangible and immaterial culture,

and that poses an enormous number of tensions

and conflicts within design.

I think there are really three phases of modern

design.

One of those phases, or approaches if you like, is

looking at the design in a formal relationship,

the formal logic of the object. The act of form-giving,

form begets form.

The second way to look at it is in terms of the

symbolism, and the content of what you're

dealing with. The little rituals that make up...

making coffee, or using a fork and knife,

or the cultural symbolism of a particular object.

Those come back to inhabit and help give form,

help give guidance to the designer about how that

form should be, or how it should look.

The third phase is looking at design in a contextual

sense, in a much bigger-picture scenario.

It's looking at the technological context for that

object, it's looking at the human-object relationship.

For the first phase you might have something fairly

new, like Karim Rashid's Kone vacuum

for Dirt Devil, that the company sells as so beautiful

that you can put it on display,

in other words you can leave it on your counter and

it doesn't look like it's a piece of crap.

Conversely you can look at James Dyson and his

vacuum cleaners. He approaches the design

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