Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary

"There’s an interesting paradox in the ambivalence of something obvious but nevertheless extraordinary. As you engage with a well designed object, you realize that it’s showing up for you in a very thoughtful way, as if there’s almost a spiritual intelligence in the object. Because it’s crafted so well. As an industrial designer you worry about the footprint, the sustainability impact that your product will have, the way it relates to climate change, all these urgent issues. If I’m going to introduce a new affordance, I don’t care who the client is, it is critical to ask whether that affordance will actually be showing up for people in a thoughtful way, and in the context of their realities. Ideally, it will be something that can become better with time. However, that’s something you need to establish at the outset. So I definitely want to think about sustainability from the very beginning. Can this object easily be taken apart? Recycled? Repurposed? Is there longevity to what I’m helping create? It’s an artefact that will have a lifespan. Does it actually deserve to be out there? That’s my hope for what I create, that I’m not just feeding into the unfortunate present paradigm of marketing marketers, consumers consuming, the never-ending production of just another object that gets tossed to the junk drawer in a year. Thoughtful design has to deserve to be there and stand the test of time. Absolutely. I think about it in my own home. I know what it meant in my earlier years to buy furniture and not have it last more than a year or two. It’s more costly, not in the long run but even in the short run! And then there’s the cost and time consumed in replacing it time and again with every house move. It’s simply not the way that we should live. I’m trying to scale down, to minimise and make sure that any artefact in my home and my family’s experience is actually built to last and that we enjoy it for years and years. The modular Vitsoe shelves that you and I both use for our library are a fine example. I think it makes perfect sense. Let’s consider the design books that we mentioned. We have to be careful to not let technology dictate or prescribe what human experience is or should be. To do so totally misses the point of intentional design. Digital design has certainly accelerated things, and created great efficiencies because of the speed of everything. I think sometimes it pays for us to slow down and appreciate those chords of human imperative, bring that front and centre in our practice as guiding principles for the work that we do. Unfortunately, speed sometimes becomes an implied authority. Although I am an advocate of slowing down, I am already working on book number two, a month into that writing journey. If you believe in reimagining design, then it’s fair to ask, what does fully empowered design look like? What does it feel like? That’s the unifying thread in the books that we talked about for me, showing people design’s capabilities beyond the formulaic, what we are often conditioned to think of as design. In my practice I also want to lean into design opportunities that are more thoughtful, human and intuitive in nature. It’s an aspiration to be a living example of what that approach to design, as illustrated in these books, what it means for the world. To me it means a richer array of disciplines, personalities, perspectives, brought round the table to create not just the objects of our lived world, but also the institutions that bring us all together for useful collective enterprise."