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1.
Empty Boat
2. The East West Model
The physiological
needs, along with their partial goals, when chronically gratified,
cease to exist as active determinants or organizers of behaviour.
They now exist only in a potential fashion in the sense that they
may emerge again to dominate the organism if they are thwarted. But
a want that is satisfied is no longer a want. The organism is dominated
and its behaviour organised only by unsatisfied needs. If hunger is
satisfied, it becomes unimportant in the current dynamics of the individual
3. The Drawing upside-down Story of L - mode
and R - mode.
The Greeks say that to marvel is the beginning of knowledge
and where we cease to marvel, we may be in danger of ceasing to know.
4. The Placebo. The Symbol Story.
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes
it so" Shakespeare's Hamlet.
5. The Need to Engage
The
scenarios that I have just presented have, in my mind, a story to
tell.
I
believe that there is a niche of so far unexplored products. I like
to believe that this new niche that I am about to define has evolved
in response to the intense urbanisation, rampant consumerism, ecological
degradation, stress and feeling of isolation, that are today's real
problems. This new niche is one of the ways to combat these issues.
There are other ways, but I feel creating new kinds of products can
also be one of them.
The
product is an object; it can be felt, smelt, held and carried around.
If a product laughs at you, you will not mind as much as you would
if your friend did. Conversely, you may listen to a product more than
you would to your mother! In my mind a product may also initiate a
dialogue with me and myself. (This is why I see a connection with
the first scenario - the Zen story of the Empty Boat. The empty boat
is a product - because it was empty the boatsman responded and changed
course. If there had been a person on the other boat coming in for
collision, there would have been a fight.)
Much
has been written about Responsible design, Green design, Issue based
design and User Centric design. But to my mind most of it is still
overpowered by the dominant First World preoccupations and these are
the block to real new approaches being explored in the subcontinent.
This climate does not allow for new ideas to be congently articulated.
Books on these subjects tend to leave me with a "I totally disagree"
feeling but with no tangible connection with day-to-day struggles
of the Indian Professional Design Practice. The Indian design community
needs to be nudged into empowered investigation. As Amartya Sen once
commented, "Globalisation today is not only about the free movement
of market products. Doubt, in its most positive form of constructive
criticism, has also been globalised."
The
time for uncritical trust in what is basically a western paradigm
needs to come to an end. I find a basic problem with a lot of first
world paradigms in the heavy focus on esthetic and no sustained experience.
Form & Function alone have dominated the creation of things, with
a strong push from an old friend - Profit. It is time to look at human
fulfillment also.
A
scathing and rigorous attack on the way design is mostly articulated
in today's world is found in Gert Selle's article - Untimely Opinions
: An Attempt to Reflect on Design (Idea of Design).
"When the profound insecurities concealed behind the usual esthetic
hurly-burly are considered, the current preoccupation with design
can be regarded as merely a part of the monstrous machinery of repression,
which has discovered the esthetic as the last exploitable raw material.
The esthetic pushes itself through every fissure, spreads out, fills
the consciousness, cushions us against the pressures of modernisation
and is at the service of every expectation for compensation. Esthetic
experience is uncoupled from authentic experience and knowledge, leaving
only uncommitted play behind.
"
The implications are that design is not solving problems of ecological
degradation or improving man's quality of life proactively. It's just
adding to the problems of consumerism and stress. It raises the question
of "authentic experience and knowledge".
It is the point
of "authentic experience and knowledge" along with "uncommitted play"
that I want to explore further. My question is, "Can new product paradigms
create a sense of authentic experience and knowledge?" I feel no great
sense of love for my washing machine inspite of the ad showing me
a woman who kisses it. Like this ad claiming a feel of rush - I wonder?
My mixie or car don't create sense of knowledge and engage me to play.
I must add here that I need my washing machine, it's just that I feel
no sense of authentic experience and knowledge or committed play.
The need of washed clothes is addressed. I wonder if the need to have
a washed mind can happen next.
Let's
look at the whole picture of human need -
That brings me to my second scenario - the East West model proposed
by V.S. Mahesh. This model has evolved from the Maslowian Model of
Hierarchy of needs. The basic model outlines the needs as physiological
needs, safety needs, belonging-ness, esteem and self-actualization.
"A wise person who has a strong will to climb up the hierarchy towards
self-actualization will impose upon his needs, a "threshold limit"
for satisfaction. Further he will set this threshold limit as close
as possible to the point of separation between his justifiable "appetite"
and greedy desire for each of the need levels. While intrinsic motivation
will thrust upwards as soon as one's appetite needs are satisfied,
the effect of extrinsic motivation will be to increase threshold limits
and draw energies towards the satisfaction of desires."
Given
such a psychology of change, the pertinent question for a product
designer is, "Can a product pro-actively assist in lowering this threshold?"
It's like imagining a whole section of human beings wanting less,
and nobody actually forcing them to do so!! Utopian? I guess, but
I feel that if a whole lot of people can be seduced to want more,
then there must be strategy to reverse the process !!
In
Service Management parlance, Customer focussed companies talk of any
interaction with a customer as the "Moment of Truth". To use this
analogy with products, I have observed that the actual engagement
with products like White Goods ends at the time when a product is
bought. All the work that the retail stores, the marketing department
and the product designers really do is really geared to get the "guy"
to buy.
Look at this "nostalgic" product. On the shelf, its message is, buy
me if you like to remember your grandmother.
Hence the users "moment of truth" with the product "dies" at the point
of purchase. By interaction one is indicating something more overarching
than a mere physical dialogue. True interaction should be cerebrally
as well as a spiritually (in the broadest sense of the term) engaging
experience. How can one engage in this sense with a Mixie or a TV
once you have bought it? It now becomes a "known: commodity and therein
lies the reason for not engaging with it in a transformatory sense.
The moment when an object or a visual becomes "known" is when a human
looses the chances to engage with it in creative ways, ways that have
a potential to lead to new insights. Research on the brain has shown
that the dominant Left hemisphere performs the analytical, naming,
knowing aspects of seeing the world in a linear fashion. This dominance
very often obstructs real seeing and real engagement with what is
out there.
To get a creative response would require a product or a visual "not
to be known" when one's gaze rests on it. This feeling of "not knowing"
forces the Right Hemisphere to take over. The right hemisphere is
better wired to deal with insight and creativity. Betty Edwards has
applied this understanding of how the brain works in her drawing exercise,
which asks for the visual to be placed "upside-down", and then drawn.
Whenever I do this exercise with a group of students I am astonished
at its simplicity and effectiveness.
The insight led me to another question, "Can't "not fully known" products
harness the way our brain functions to lead to insights and serve
as points of departure for the user? Wouldn't this kind of approach
fulfill the need for authentic experience and possibility of knowledge?"
-Example of the stone arrow links up after PlaynSpeak has been talked
about-
Here
I find parallels with Jung's definition of the SYMBOL.
"What we call a symbol is a term, a name or even a picture (or
product) that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses
specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious
meaning. It implies something vague, unknown or hidden from us."
While
his definition uses the fact that a familiar product is endowed with
additional meanings, in today's age, new age products that emphasize
their symbolic position, need to be created. In Osho's words, we need
to give up our tendency to use old keys for new locks.
The
fourth scenario has the story of how the messages to the brain can
determine the physical health of a person.
Howard
Brody says, "Just as good physicians send healing messages to their
patients during every office visit, we can learn strategies to send
them to ourselves."
Taking a cue from meditation techniques, the process of strategy becomes
easier if it is provided a visualization or objectification. Here
the product then becomes the door or the catalyst for the strategy
to flow.
Imagine
you had a product that asked you to stab yourself in the thumb to
make you aware, that the mental pain you are inflicting by negative
thoughts of yourself is worse than the physical pain that you feel
from a stab of that pin, would you probably slowly change the habit
of negative thinking? There is a group of monks who use this technique.
I quote from a book on the body by Andre Platteel (Symbol Soup) -
"I once tattooed a Nazi skinhead with some tribal symbols. Afterwards,
he became so fascinated by tribal symbolism that he began to study
the history of these images. He developed sympathy for primitive tribes
and abandoned his racist feelings and opinions."
These are examples of the fact that there is an emerging interest
from serious scientific communities in the areas that till now they
had dismissed as "quack".
If we can apply the learning from these examples, we are talking of
an entirely new range of products that send messages not related to
use or status, but address the intangible process in a human beings
health, sense of being, thinking, learning and growing. Products can
also address the other human processes like bonding, mourning and
pain. This domain allows cultural variations and local tradition a
voice.
The
growing tendency of the virtual generation to be absorbed in the virtual
world gives rise to a new sanctity and position for the material reality.
Sociologist Abraham Moles notes the "seductive immateriality of today's
world rests firmly on a foundation of material support whose reliability
and stability the designer must maintain." Here I read the term reliability
as the "real" ability of a product to reach out to the humans as means
of a tangible sensory engagement.
Another quote from the Body book by Symbol Soup -
"As for the idea of the body going digital, well, I don't believe
in that cyber shit. It's too theoretical. The fun of your body is
exactly the physical aspect and the transformation it can make in
the real. In the virtual everything is possible, which is why nothing
is worth doing. It's no big deal."
So the "thing" is being looked at again - its "isness" is now more
important, more potent with possibilities, more capable of satisfying
more than needs. Never before has there been an age when the product
was so cheap in every sense of the word. So everyone can own a lot
of stuff - a different kind of democratisation is evident. The product
can now become a tool to combat the ills of other product interaction,
an almost homeopathic approach.
If
one looks at games like MUD's (Multi User Domains), what surprises
the uninitiated is the sheer degree of human involvement in artificial
worlds being created only with the 26 letters of the alphabet. Innocent
looking text strings become the vehicles for an alternate reality
which seamlessly co-exist with the more familiar, perhaps more mundane
one. But more than anything else what is truly startling in this scenario
is not the importance of virtuality, but the desire that validates
it. That desire is the drive to engage oneself into what one conceives
as a meaningful discussion.
And I think that it is this desire and the multitudinous possibilities
of it, which has a truly emancipatory potential. It is up to the product
designer to sojourn into this domain and map out the possibilities.
Different examples demonstrate the scope of this field. Some have
only gone into one level of engagement, others tend to take on the
vehicle of trends and still others address the need for multi-identities.
Let's
now look at people behind design :
Balrams book, Thinking Design, outlines many roles that a designer
can pursue. 15 years ago one could only think of the basic key areas
- Product Design, Furniture Design. Boundaries were more marked, engineers
were not "designers". Now with the CAD/CAM & 3D modeling tools, the
lines are merging. An engineer can produce a good-looking product
and a DTP operator does Graphic Design. This is another incentive
to search for new paradigms of products themselves.
While
a new paradigm product may be the end one is trying to reach, the
process of getting there also needs redefinition. The whole field
of management learning and problem solving techniques can be examined
to find new ways of looking at ideas and their actualization.
Practicing
designers need to link up with design institutions to use the platform
of institution for pioneering approaches. I also feel that the classroom
is an ideal place for processes of this kind to happen. Traditionally
we have been haunted by uni-directionality while talking about the
synergy between education and industry. We have to mould the classroom
into a platform that is dynamic, interventionist and crusading in
its essence. Only some part of the form of the curriculum can follow
funding, a fair portion of autonomy and pluralism needs
to bind the foundation of an educational institution.
There is a vast amount of new and useful information that is available
in the social, behaviourial and management sciences but is often ignored
or neglected by designers, and implicitly ignored by the design education.
An
educational institution needs to be the womb for new paradigms to
emerge - it should move the study of design away from objects and
into the broader world of ideas.
"Niels
Peter Flint walked out of a well paid job in the prestigious studios
of Ettore Sottsass in order to get a new paradigm design firm - O2
- off the ground. Flint's action can be seen as symbolising a shift
in the fundamental values away from designing "hundred's of fridge's
for the Japanese teenagers or 2000 separate pairs of door handles"
to "thinking about how to make things that cause as little pollution,
as little consumption of energy, as possible. That means right from
the production process through to its use; and then on to recycling."
While I have not designed 2000 pairs of door handles (in India?? Give
me a break!!) I just got tired at looking at products as merely performing
functions or being a lifestyle. And here I would like to quote a definition
of lifestyle that appeals to me, "cover for the professional middle
class taste, masquerading as ethically superior good design."
I took a breather from whatever had kept me occupied - designing,
being involved in business and teaching and waited for some clarity
on how I would deal with all these ideas floating in my head.
PlaynSpeak
is a company I have just founded as a platform to create products
that address the issues I have just highlighted.
I have created three categories of products that I intend to work
on.
The PlaynThink range uses ideas of living and symbols around us to
trigger the process of reflection.
The PlaynShock range uses bizarre and shocking juxtapositions of material
to produce shock. They are meant to poke fun on the values and ways
of human greed.
The PlaynStuff range is meant to draw the urban Indian customer in
to first buy "known" products for the home.
The retail outlet will have the communication on the wall and on the
packaging of these products to explain the ideas of the products and
our human interaction with them, in the hope that a better-educated
customer leaves the shop.
I hope to create awareness and trust that informed choices will create
changes without repression and without being cliched "you are not
doing enough for the country or the earth approach."
It's
clear that neither the presence of products nor the lack of products
lead to fulfillment in a human's existence. It's time we acknowledge
that simple fact and stop pretending that Nike can make you happier,
it can make you feel more comfortable and give you the illusion that
you are better off than the non-Nike guy. But it doesn't make you
really, really happier. Why? Can we not create communication that
addresses this issue for kid's my son's age. On reflection I find
that artists have been creating art impelled by very similar thinking;
the difference is that now the message can get to more people because
what we are talking about is not one-off art objects, but usable,
available household products. It amounts to taking art out of the
galleries.
Global
developments in diverse fields appear to help support Willis Harman's
optimistic view that a major paradigm shift is taking place that will
revolutionise the way Man perceives his place and purpose in the universe.
Harman calls this the second Copernican Revolution. I like to think
that this also means new definitions and paradigms for product design.
While
Form has allowed function, emotion, fun, tension, etc. now I think
that Form can follow possibilities.
I
would like to end with this quote :-
"We are disturbed not by things, but by the views we take of things."
Epictetus, The Encheridion.
HOWARD,
Pierce J. (1994) The Owners Manual for the Brain Leornian Press
MARGOLIN, Victor & BUCHANAN Richard (1998) The Idea of Design MIT
Press
WHITELY Nigel (1993) Design for Society Reaktion Books
EDWARDS Betty (1989) Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain G.P. Putnam's
PAPANEK Victor (1985) Design for the Real World - Human Ecology and
Social Change Thames & Hudson
BERGER John (1972) Ways of Seeing Penguin Books
MINSKY Marvin (1985) The Society of Mind Simon & Schuster
UNDERHILL Paco (1999) Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping Simon &
Schuster
PLATTEEL Andre (1999) The Body Symbol Soup
MAHESH V. S. (1992) Thresholds of Motivation - The Corporation as
a Nursery for Human Growth Tata McGraw Hill
PIRSIG Robert M. (1991) Lila Corgi Book
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