IDFuel, the Industrial Design Weblog - Post details: Dreams Made Real

Dreams Made Real

06/06/05

Design can be the fountain of pragmatism. Building an understanding of society, making personas which accurately describe users, crafting interfaces for optimal usage, using materials which are environmentally and economically frugal; These are the foundations of our art. And together they work to make our products as efficient and functional as they can be. But this is only the aspect of design that makes the world move smoothly. Just as books, and art, and music can be simply technically thrilling, or something beyond that, good design has the opportunity to challenge what we believe is real and imaginary. Beyond what merely sustains our lives, design can be part of our wonder at the world. Part of what we stay alive for.
060505_whimsymain

Many design theorists, like Donald Norman, and Cagan & Vogel, have explored how products that fulfill a fantasy of the user can form a strong emotional bond with the user. There's no doubting that this is a useful thing to be able to do.

Alessi, among others, has used this strategy to become one of the most recognized high-design brands in the world. Playful plastic toothpaste caps and wine bottle openers are fun stuff. But they aren't really what we're talking about.

If you grew up in the U.S. public school system, it's very likely that you read one or more of Madeline L'Engle's fantasy books. Her most famous, A Wrinkle in Time is, for a fifth grader, a mind altering mix of reality and imagination that makes you examine good, evil, conformity, and connection from completely new perspectives. It's not that the story isn't outrageous -- it deals with bending time and space, conjuring yourself across the universe, and lots of wacky science -- but it is made powerful by how the imaginary parts are mixed into a world that is familiar to every 5th or 6th grader. Brothers and sisters fight, parents don't listen when kids have the answer; It is every kid's life. And because of this, when the normal kids in the book do fantastic things, it ignites a fire in the reader like nothing else (Alright, so you can guess by now how much we loved these books).

Design has this same opportunity. Take for example, the incredible work of Judson Beaumont, and his company Straight Line Designs.

Straight Line makes some of the most playful furniture that you can find. Everything from chests of drawers that look like they could teach English, to bureaus that are so tired out they just need to recline.

Balanced right at the edge of being corny, these designs capture enough humanity and animation to make you look twice. Enough to make the illusion real, if only for the first second that you walk into the room.

It's those seconds of suspended disbelief that we're talking about. In movies, plays, books, and radio shows, actors and writers use tricks and our own limited sensory input and interaction to stretch this twilight of dreaming out for minutes or hours. Where these media cross into the real world, the sense of embodied dream is made even more real. This is where the appeal of ARG games like ilovebees and the more recent Perplexity comes from. It's also what made Orson Wells's and the Mercury Theater's 1938 performance of War of the Worlds so powerful, and so terrifying.

Taking this theater of reality to an incredible extreme is French puppeteer/actor troupe Royal De Luxe. After previous exploits with quarter-scale horse marionettes, and giraffe searches through city streets, they broke all previous precedents of scale last month for the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne's death.

Residents of Nantes, France woke to a space capsule crashed into a smoking pile of rubble in the central square of the city. Later that day, a giant animatronic elephant and entourage of the Sultan paraded into town to visit the mayor.

Then, on saturday, the capsule opened to reveal a giant animatronic girl who walked through the streets, mischievously sewed a row of parked cars to the street with a shipping Hauser rope, rode a scooter, and even asked that the crowd give her some privacy while she used the toilet.

This play went on all day -- the Giant and elephant slept curled together in a park -- for an entire weekend. People were completely involved in this fantasy, and you can only imagine the effect it has on the imaginations and passions of children.

Users are reminded to often of their own limitations. We feel too weak, too slow, too stupid, or too... whatever. There is good to be done in mitigating these lacks with good, solid, pragmatic design. But there is also room to look them straight in the eye and say "screw you". Design can be a problem solver, but it can also be a force that imagines opportunities so far beyond any problems that yet exist that the solution is like magic.

Thanks to Ming for the spark.

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Dreams Made Real

06/06/05

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