{"id":1032,"date":"2012-02-01T19:51:21","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T19:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1032"},"modified":"2012-02-01T23:40:28","modified_gmt":"2012-02-01T23:40:28","slug":"object-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1032","title":{"rendered":"Object lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I finally got around to watching Objectified<\/em><\/a> on Netflix. It\u2019s a documentary about industrial design, by the makers of Helvetica<\/em>. Both films are excellent. As I was watching it, I realized that many of us actually live inside an almost entirely pre-imagined world. This is true even if you dwell in the suburbs. A house and lawn are both products of human design. They involve completely natural components, like mice and chickadees and grass and rain, but the grass is cut, and\u00a0 chickadees nest near the bird feeder and mice are sniffing peanut butter in traps and rain gets sluiced off into downspouts. The overall feel of living in a suburban home, or really almost any home, is an experience produced by shaping, tending, adjusting, and adapting to an imagined vision of what daily life should feel like. But for city dwellers, or anyone who lives in some kind of urban environment, you can go through a day and encounter almost nothing that isn\u2019t the product of the human imagination. Spend a day walking through Manhattan and you are living inside a completely imagined world: it was all thought-up by somebody at some point. The roads, the lights, the buildings, the billboards, the vehicles, the hot dog stands, the subway, the signs in the subway, the t-shirts on the people in the subway, the guitar somebody was playing which gets smashed over the musician’s head by somebody who doesn’t like the guy’s acoustic version of Free Bird<\/em>\u2014everything but the few scarce bits of vegetation poking up through the concrete and the little rectangle of sky overhead. Even the faces and poses of other pedestrians or subway riders are consciously shaped, designed to express indifference and aloofness, usually, if we\u2019re talking about New York. The point is, the world you inhabit was, at some point, an act of imagination. The filmmakers don\u2019t make this point explicitly but I think it was really behind the motivation to make the film: an insight into the fact that we invent a design for our world and then, subliminally and ubiquitously, that design begins to invent us, or at least our experience and behavior. Human design literally structures the world we inhabit. Painting also creates the sense of a world, though it’s one only your imagination can inhabit. Design is an imaginative act, but its ultimate goal is behavioral: it governs how our bodies and minds interact with the physical world all day long.\u00a0 One Japanese designer in the documentary, Naoto Fukasawa, says that he looks for the moment when “design dissolves into behavior.” In other words, it becomes so integrated into how we make our way through the day, we forget it’s there and it becomes almost categorical, something that undergirds experience, a foundation of behavior, like gravity\u2014it actually becomes part of the way our bodies and minds work. (Think of how software design shapes your daily experience through computers, phones, tablets, ATMs, all of the things you do only because the software makes it possible.) This particular Japanese designer was a delight to watch as he talked about his work. He looked as if he\u2019d brought a spirit of playfulness into everything he did: he said when he was a kid his mother would peel potatoes with a knife and he noticed how a round natural object became this geometric model with all these little sharp edges and flat surfaces. It would become a kind of polyhedron. So he designed a cell phone that had all those same little flat surfaces, a potato phone, basically, with very few curves, like a sort of shrunken, deflated geodesic dome. He said everyone who used that particular phone would play with it compulsively, palming it, turning it, rolling it around in their fingers, just subconsciously impelled to feel all the edges. He grinned at how the design of the phone could inspire a compulsive, tactile experience\u2014how it \u201cdissolved\u201d into that experience. It created behavior.<\/p>\n

Design and visual art are separate but overlapping fields. Painting isn\u2019t about usefulness at all, but more about stirring the subconscious with an intuition of something whole, the intimation of a world of values and a sense of the isness<\/em> of life itself. But when you look at a painting it\u2019s an immersive experience: it becomes your world, even if briefly. It creates a world. Most of our daily life is an experience of living inside a world previously imagined by the human mind. This is what most struck me as I watched the film. Human beings are now able to imagine and then create the world we want to inhabit which is reminiscent of Romantic notion of imagination as the world\u2019s central creative force. Painting is only one way the imagination shapes a world into being\u2014yet anyone who uses any humanly fabricated product, or lives inside one, as we all do, understands intuitively why painting matters. It\u2019s about visualizing a world, a sense of life as a whole. It can be about imagining the world you want<\/em> to see, and it always is, to some degree, even when it\u2019s realism attempting to get the banal surfaces of ordinary life down just right. Something else gets imbued into the image on the way from eye to hand–because that line of transit\u00a0 usually passes through the heart. The urge to paint is, at some level, the same as the urge to build a better mousetrap. It\u2019s, at least in part, the urge to feel a little more at home in the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finally got around to watching Objectified on Netflix. It\u2019s a documentary about industrial design, by the makers of Helvetica. Both films are excellent. As I was watching it, I realized that many of us actually live inside an almost entirely pre-imagined world. This is true even if you dwell in the suburbs. A house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nObject lessons - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1032\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Object lessons - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I finally got around to watching Objectified on Netflix. It\u2019s a documentary about industrial design, by the makers of Helvetica. Both films are excellent. 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