Meaningful Stuff: Design That Lasts by Jonathan Chapman

Author:Jonathan Chapman [Chapman, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Criticism, Social Aspects, product, Technology & Engineering, Design; meaning; emotion; consumption; user experience; UX; sustainability; sustainable design; waste; material; longevity; obsolescence; circular economy; interaction design; product design; industrial design; fashion design; service design; interior design; architecture; craft, design
ISBN: 9780262045728
Google: 3uo2EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-08-03T00:26:08.385551+00:00

Stuff Is Spatiotemporally Diffuse

The fumbled idea that products exist within clearly contextualized moments in time, encountered by rational users, is pure folly. Critical designer and educator Anthony Dunne, for example, calls for visions of the future “that reflect the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be.”25 Material objects are spatiotemporal in their context and deceptively distributed across space and time, a complex hybrid of material and energy. They bring with them their own stories, which collide awkwardly with our own histories and futures. This collision comes to categorize the moment of encounter, the user experience, by which the subject works to reconcile a storm of meaning circulating around the object itself.

Products, and their materials, are spatiotemporally diffuse. As a result, so too are our experiences of them. Their contexts are continually shifting, held in eternal flux; our experiences of the material world are never quite the same and exist in constant flow. The notion that “everything flows” derives from Heraclitean thought, which likens the flow of a river to the eternal flow of change over time.26 In this analogy, the materials, objects, and environments we inhabit represent a continually shifting spatiotemporal assemblage, in perpetual flux. Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher commonly known for his doctrine of change being central to all things in the universe: “You cannot step twice into the same river,” and “All things move and nothing remains still.” The notion that everything flows is highly relevant for design—a field preoccupied with unwieldy universal principles, fixed outmoded doctrines, and enduring obsolete creative processes and intellectual frameworks. It implies the passing of time while also using the metaphor of water to show such change and motion at work.27 Heraclitus reminds us that in our pursuit of permanence, we place ourselves fundamentally at odds with the most essential underlying principle of the world: change. Indeed, Heraclitus’s river itself could be described as a different river from moment to moment, since the water flowing in it is different from moment to moment. Or to put it another way, a river may be understood as a process, not a thing.

Designing for uncertainty, and a world caught in perpetual flux, requires a fresh creative focus on flexible, dynamic, and adaptive products and systems, a focus on designing products with the capacity to change as the world around them changes. These protean systems reframe products as dynamic and unfolding processes, rather than static and fixed things. In creating products capable of adapting to meet changing circumstances, we avert generating enormous quantities of waste. This notion of a material thing also being a dynamic process is not as bizarre as it might at first sound. For example, children constantly change—their interests, ideas, dislikes, confidence, and so on. Yet we are predisposed to accept and expect this aspect of the process of aging and development. Importantly, like the changing Heraclitean river, the child does not become a different child with each change. Rather, the

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