This week I have ben researching material for a project I am doing o furniture design. I wanted to somehow put the love back into furniture. in this Ikea generation furniture is seen as a disposable object that is perfectly acceptable to be thrown out as fashion changes. Times have changed, it seems hard to imagine that people used to spend the equivalent of a whole years wages on a piece of furniture. This created a sense of pride and people rarely threw them away. I want to get rid of the wasteful state of mind we have in today culture and design a piece of furniture that someone would be proud to have for the rest of their life and also hand down to their children. Someone who will have nothing to hand down to his children is Michael Landy, who in a piece of performance art he named "Break Down" destroyed all his earthly belongings. His car, his art, everything except his cat and girlfriend. In my group we discussed the things that we thought made people hang on to things these days, and so started to make a college of people with their sentimental objects and a small statement about why the object was so important to them. A lot of people discussed the secrecy of their possessions and most of the people we spoke to said that their object had a memory attached. This sparked our imagination to create a piece of furniture with a secret compartment for all your secret memories.
Please email me if you have any sentimental objects that you would like to be put in the college.
A.Fitzpatrick@dundee.ac.uk
To elaborate on my design process further my group and I looked into the qualities of older furniture that gives it that little thing that makes you love it. Today in the studio one of my group members accidentally leaned on the light box and switched it on. When i flicked the switch the noise and feeling of the switch felt great. you know what i mean, i hope. Turns out this light box has been with us since some of the staff studied at the university. So incorporating some kind of satisfying movement to trigger this secret compartment maybe ? I think this will make people fall in love with their furniture more and be less likely to part with it. I know ill be sad when the light box finally dies.
ReplyDeleteInteresting how the introduction says
ReplyDelete" This is what a honda FEELS like"
The add should really say "Sounds". Or should it?. This is the type of satisfying quality sound I mean. Honda have played with this as their advertising campaign because they know that these noises have connotations of their product being expensive and well made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjyWP2LfbyQ
Honda has nice noises
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGngcQb_0qg