With help of my professor Giulio Ceppi
I got in contact with the curator of
Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. He kindly agreed
that I bring Ninì and exhibit it among
the Saporiti exhibition.

The story of the designer could now be
combined with the story of the users
when taking seat. The user sits on the
chair adding a new layer a new growth
ring to the story of the chair. The story
of the designer reflected in the chair
continues through the interaction of the
user, using the object to merge these
multiple stories.

The photo shoot experiment at Fondazione
Pomodoro was to show this relationship
between the user and designer.
How the narration of the chair will
change through the interaction of each
user, each added layer.

From emperors to catwalks textiles have
been the tools to represent grandeur
and communicate culture. Textiles reflect
the colours the handcraft and the
customs of the culture it comes from.

The layers or growth rings in the chair
are shaped by shifts or changes in cultural
contexts, the stories that together
shape my world. I set out to find textiles
that would represent each of these cultures.
By then layering them one on top
of the other I would be able to create the
effect of growth rings giving you as a
user a view of my story, a way to interact
with my hidden storyworld.
The plywood forms the first layers representing
in a way my Finnish roots.

The plywood has been veneered with
Olive spicing up the traditionally finish
birch ply to show the combination
of my Finnish-Italian parents. The first
textile layer is in earth shade reflecting
in a way my almost nomadic life moving
from one culture to another. The Gustavian
striped textile is what is typically
used in traditional Finnish estates, the
microfiber is a reflection of the velvety
curtains and fitted carpets of the UK,
the silk oriental Damask for the current
middle-eastern influences and finally all
enclosed by Italian leather, the culture
currently surrounding me.

Separated these various textiles, or
representations of cultures live nicely,
but when mixed and brought together
within the same space, the same object,
a sort of competition for attention
begins. The underlying wavelengths for
each textile (the associated hues) begin
cancelling each other out. The differing
textures, the differing fiber, the differing
emotionologies associated with each
fabric creates a cacophony, an arrhythmia.
The object is left with an identity
crisis. The object does not know where
it belongs anymore.

What this showed me, like in the case of
trees, some stories are best kept hidden,
only letting them effect the most recent
experiences through their underlying
presence.

Ninì will not show itself in this sate of
lesser pride. She will remain hidden like
a child who stays indoors because her
favourite jeans are in the laundry.

Eventually the sounds of arrhythmia
shaped a melody and brushed out the
unwanted emotionolgies. The more
prominent hues overwhelmed the recessive
ones and a new compressed tale
began.

In the following post the final layer of the object will be added, the layer of the user, fusing the narration of the designer with the story of the user through an object.

I have used this contraption resembling a medieval torture device to convince the inserted sheets of plywood to take different shapes. By varying the angle of the clamps I was able to experiment with differing proportion and form for the resulting curves.

Most models get discarded but their story might still continue in other ways.

Here discareded shapes are used to create illustrations. The story of these elements continues to live and evolve although separated from the original path of becoming a chair.

Tout l’univers visible n’est qu’un magasin d’images et de signes auxquels l’imagination donnera une place et une valeur relative; c’est une espèce de pâture que l’imagination doit digérer et transformer.

(Baudelair)

The whole visible universe is nothing but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a place and relative value; it is a sort of pasture that the imagination must digest and transform.

An idea opens up shrouded in fog and the first thing we see is an obstructed structure of a product to be. Somewhere in the background there might be an incoherent mass, a material waiting for the opportunity to be shaped and transformed to fit this not yet defined creation. Moving in closer we begin to see details in high piles stacked everywhere like in a storage facility, a huge bank of raw data, imagery of differing characteristics ready to be tried on as clothes in a fitting room. Inside this enormous virtual castle of ideas begins the framing of the object. We frame out the unwanted characteristics until we get to an extreme close-up, so close that we reach a sort of isolation, a silence where the concept can with a whisper open up its story to us. We stand still and loose grip of our virtual pen that falls down and slides aside. Now we zoom back out and can see for the first time as a whole what we are shaping, a glimpse of the object that is taking shape and revealing itself in our mind.

And so like a classic mystery, the story is set in motion. We begin to ask ourselves, who or what is this object? Where does it come from? Why does it exist? The answers will eventually be revealed through us all, through our interactions and the values our imagination gives to these bits of data that form this creation. But for now we are still at the very beginning of the becoming of this new life. The shaping and transformation of the images in our mind are only beginning to evolve. Soon, through these transformations we begin to build a story, a means to create meaning, a relation with this object.

These first depictions are an attempt to picture the idea in its most infant state. To bring the virtual to the light, showing the concept in an almost sensual way, stripped down bare. It is a structure of a concept ready to be saturated with characteristics and imagery that we can then digest and transform.

]]> http://hongisto.com/becoming-nini/feed/ 1 http://hongisto.com/product-soap/ http://hongisto.com/product-soap/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:25:40 +0000 Laurent http://hongisto.com/?p=850

We have stayed up all night, my friends and I, under the dim flickering light and monotonous buzz of the projector I begin to see the carnage we have left behind. Consumed nacho packs all over, piles of popcorn accumulated in between the pillows and stacks of ice cream bowls filling the sofa tables. Yet another episode has come to an end, the decision now is whether to continue the story or go and get some shut-eye.

I can assume most of us have had a phase in our lives when we sat down eagerly once a week to follow the weekly TV series. Miami Vice, Lost, McGyver, Friends, Boston Legal, Star Trek, House, CSI… each week we get a peak into this alternative world and can follow the progresses and development of the characters within it. But now with DVD box sets and torrents it has become a custom to watch an entire season of a series in one sitting. You gather your friends for the weekend, stock up the nachos and ice cream, fire up the projector and immerse yourself into the storyworld of the show.

This marathon consumption of entertainment has introduced a new tempo to the TV show. The episodes are presented at a different timescale, the story may even seem collapsed in a way, though in fact it is only reinvented at another scale. Gradual developments, that watched say over the course of a year, might not be evident but now through this fast forwarded view of the characters’ lives they get emphasized. We are presented with consecutive isolated moments or aspects of moments, and out of these fragments we begin shaping patterns and notice trends. The multiplicity of these fragments, pieces of narration, episodes, begins to develop a story of its own.

To us the life of a tree seems static, but if you were to rig a camera to take a picture of this tree every hour and then play these pictures as a movie, you would be presented with an accelerated or collapsed life of that given tree, the tree’s life would have a new scale of duration. Through this reinvented timescale or time lapse video, a new world is opened up to us. We are presented in visual manner the vicious battle of the plant life, plants moving, stretching, and covering other plants from sunlight and water. What we effectively are seeing are consecutive discrete instincts, multiple frozen sections, freeze frames of the life of the tree, and when we watch these separate projected instances at a high rate we are able to process these incremental changes or differences and shape these relations into a story.

What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. (Bergson)

Alison from 1978 to 2011.

Air Jordan from 1985 to 2009.

We could think of the objects we design representing, in a similar way, a kind of snapshot view of our lives. An object is a reflection of us at a frozen isolated moment, a temporary of the space we are in. Capturing the present emotions, feelings, trends, people around us, and then translating these values into the object we create. How we relate to this given present is determined by the sum of all the ‘presents’ till that given point (see 8-bit Cognitive Dimensions), and thus effecting the outcome of each given snapshot. Through the objects we design we in a way leave part of our story exposed to transcend through time on their own converging, interacting and interweaving itself with the world.

So if we were to consider each product as one frame in a movie of objects in transition, how do we achieve the timescale at which we are able to play the frames and reveal the movie of these objects? We need a crowd – a big crowd with many individuals working on new frames, speed – better tools, movement, you can probably begin to recognize these qualities from Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo. We just need to add danger, being in Italy and twisting Matteotti’s manifesto is certainly risky business, but we could think of danger as the daring to veer from the mean, differentiate and share. So here we are with a modified manifesto with éloge to crowd sourcing, open source and the abstract world of cyber space.

The futurist manifesto of 1909 promoted an isolation from the past denouncing museums, libraries, history, and stasis of any form for that matter, abolishing time and space in a way. You could say that what remains is a concrete temporary, a moment. We as well shall live the moment or isolate time, but in the sense of a snapshot of a given moment, and through the multitude of the temporal we will create the much praised dynamism and movement typical for futurist thinking. We bring the stills to life through the motion picture they create when played at a high frequency. Even though time has been abolished at the given instances, frames, it shows itself through the differentiation between the numerous sections it is divided into.

Just a decade ago five years was considered a reasonable lead-time for a product – concept through product development to presenting the final product to the market. At this frame-rate it would take five years before external interaction with the product are possible, or before other objects can be created in response to this given object. Imagine you are having a conversation at a bar and you are talking to a girl and have to wait several years for each response, you will be 65 before you know her name or 95 if she has an unfamiliar more complicated name.

In the years of product development the designer will have gone through numerous iterations and versions of the product before arriving at the final design that is brought forth to the market. Now if we could tap into these ‘virtual’ concept objects and give a response at this phase, our frame-rate or conversation would advance with a much quicker flow. Stanford Kwinter writes, that in fact, the virtual, though it may yet have no actuality, is nonetheless already fully real. It exists, one might say, as a free difference or singularity, not yet combined with other differences into a complex ensemble or salient form. What this means is that the virtual does not have to be realized, but only actualized (activated and integrated) (Kwinter, 2001)

With developments in 3d software it has become increasingly quicker and easier to come up with photorealistic renders. So instead of a frame every few years we are able to bring the frequency down to days, the time it takes to make a 3d model and post it on a design blog. Until we have an interface that is able to translate our own virtual, our cognitive virtual into a comprehensible medium, 3d models are the platform to share the virtual with the world. The majority of this virtual actualizations never become realized but serve nonetheless as a frame, a moment, in the evolving story. Through including the virtual into the story we are changing the rhythm of design giving a new fluidity, a new consistency to everyday space. We take part as a crowd in the adventure of the developmental passage of the object from one state to another.

The virtual is gathered, selected, it passes from one moment-event (or complex) in order to emerge – differently, uniquely – within another. It invents through a continuous, positive, and dynamic process of transmission, differentiation, and evolution. (Kwinter, 2001)

YouTube brought video responses to our attention, soon the term product response will be a familiar one. This possibility of discussion using objects as our alphabet will result in a dialogue, a co-creation, a story of objects told by all of us. The products we create in respond to one another form the diverse complexes that create the differentiation or evolution of the product. The beauty in this speedy differentiation is that like in any discussion the product will live and take shape into the great unknown, into the unexpected, which has now come to be the expected within design. Users expect to be surprised, seduced if you wish, and if there is any organism that can deliver this it is through the great morphogenetic potential achieved through the collective crowd connected via the Internet.

The story of the object, its morphogenetic principle, is active and always incomplete, evolving. Objects interact with processes, across both space and time; it belongs to a dynamical, fluvial world. As the dialogue develops it absorbs, captures, or incarnates the fluctuating conditions and through them the narration is build. The product creates itself in the middle of, and by means of continuous flux. Thus the product movie or product morphogenesis, is less the result of specific, punctual external causes than the sum or the flow of the dialogue. What this entails is an attempt to think of the story of the object as a phenomenon, a discussion with multiple interwoven threads. The multiple or the profusion of frames act independent of an external, totalizing, foundational schema, each object playing a role, adding fragments, elements, to its own evolving narration as a whole.

Can someone make this picture a little bit better/brighter for my Mom’s profile on her company website? She’s also requesting a little airbrushing on the neck area & under her eyes…

These are words of an innocent request posted on a message board by a son asking for help to fix up a picture of his blessed mom. He did get his request in the end but with an unrelenting bonus showing the morphing potential of the web; Photomanipulations with everything from Mona Lisa to James Bond girls to a tattoo on the chest of 2 Pac. The act of fixing this picture had turned into a dialogue with manipulated images as the vocabulary.

This spring I had the pleasurable honour to meet up with the esteemed women behind the Bokja creations in Beirut. Hoda Baroudi and Maria Hibri agreed to share some of their experiences and stories behind their work and how they feel designing in the crossroads of multiple cultures.

I feel that in Lebanon stories are somehow intensified. I often hear people saying the country is fractured through the mix of cultures, to me its more like French cuisine were you get a mouthful flavours and all are really distinguished. I like to think of it in that way, how do you feel about this?

Maria Hibri

I like how you describe it. You know we always say Bokja is intimately linked to Beirut. We are very tuned to what is happening around us here, it is such an intense place. Beirut is not a normal place to be, everything happens every day and you live the moment (snap) like that and this shows itself in our designs. This is Bokja, this is what we do.

What does Bokja mean?

Maria Hibri

Bokja is the wrap were you put the dowry of the bride. It is something that is commonly used in different languages, but they always call it Bokja in all the Arab world. When the bride gets married, this is the day she is born actually, the women in the family start embroidering her dowry, and when she leaves home to go to her new life she puts all those hand-embroidered things made with love in that Bokja. They coul d put in bed sheets, linens, or anything prepared for you.

You could say it is a memory cell of the previous life?

Maria Hibri

Yes, exactly. It also accompanies every aspect of her life from child bearing to marriage to even death. All the things that would accompany her will be in that Bokja.

Our story is a story of women, we are two women and we work mostly with these handmade, hand-embroidered textiles. We mostly even work with women. When we get our textiles, we buy them from women.

Does this have some background in you, is this a choice due to some of your previous experiences? Is it part of your story?

Maria Hibri

In my family there was a lot of respect towards everything handmade or hand-embroidered. My grandmother used to make little things for us, she would embroider pillows and little napkins. It was something that we cherished, we respected anything that was not machine made, things with feelings. So many thoughts come to your mind when you are doing these embroideries, you can see that the fabric is different from any other, it is not flat, it has stories to tell and it transcends through time. We didn’t want to waste or forget any of these stories and so we started to do this assemblage made of little pieces. We wanted to honour the thoughts that had gone into each piece and through this we started what we are best know for, the Bokja assemblage.

How do you see this action of combining the past stories of the textiles with your craft projects onto the objects you create?

Maria Hibri

Initially the concept of Bokja was to re-invent our tradition, to breath a new life into it. So we use traditional textiles that are now disregarded and thought to be old fashioned. They have become invisible to us, we don’t see them anymore. This is why we try to present them in a contemporary way, so they would be once again appealing to the eyes, be more edgy. We hope this would make young people more sensitive to the textiles and they would try to honour our tradition in this way.


If I were to give my daughter some things that I’ve collected from my mother and grandmother she would consider them simply weird, but by posting them on an Eames lounge chair they become sexy. Presented like this she would definitely want these objects, she would try to have them.


You cannot forget your past and you have to really try to understand it and honour it. We have to move on and moving on is just to adapt. Geographically Lebanon is a recipient of many cultures, there is a richness here. But few people understand the meaning of Lebanon and how it is unless they come here, they will see how the east is open to the west, or actually, how it is arms wide open to the west. Somehow in this country we were able to make the best of both and this is why it is so attractive nowadays, and if we have peace it will be even more attractive.

You said that each object has its own story, does this give objects different roles or even a character?

Maria Hibri

It is funny that you are asking this because each Bokja has a passport. It is a copy of the Lebanese passport with birds instead of the Cedars on it. Inside we write the date of birth, the nationality for each chair. For us it is a thing out of this world. It is made in Lebanon but it addresses itself to the whole world, with the passport it is saying that there are no boundaries. We believe in the dialogue between cultures.


In the Salone del Mobile last year in Milan we presented two sofas that we made using fabrics from 30 different origins. We used fabrics from Italy, fram Margiela, from a skirt that used to belong to Hoda and put these next to a fabric from Afghanistan, Palestine, Brazil, Africa… Next to the sofa we put little swatches of each fabric with a our personal story of how we came upon these fabrics. Our message was to say that although the fabrics come from different origins, they speak a common language when it comes to beauty, aesthetics, but not necessarily only beauty, it could be an unexpected harmony of something that is not supposed to work together.

How do you feel the user can benefit from having these multiple backgrounds or stories within the object?

Hoda Baroudi

Anyone who would buy a piece from Bokja, we have many kinds of clients, but we prefer the kind who is already knowledgeable about what he is buying, so mostly we like to sell to people who know about the textiles, who know about the history and when they take this piece they take with them a slash of the culture of the pieces that are available there. I mean this sofa talks to you about many things it talks to you about a certain mood of the guy who embroidered it in central Asia, of the colours. Because of the desert in that land he used colours to compensate for the lack of flowers and for the aridity of the land.

Maria Hibri

People always say that a Bokja piece in the house has positive energy, maybe because of the unique approach and it is also like a smile in the house. We like to say that our things when they travel they go to tell our story in a way. This is why we are very keen for people to know what the ingredients in the chair or sofa are. In the passport of each chair we write a description with a list of the origins of each fabric used in the piece. It is very important for the people when they have the chair to know what they have between their hands, so it is not just another piece of furniture for them.

This surely creates an appreciation, knowing the origin, the story of the object you own?

Maria Hibri

Yes, our design process is not just about designing and being able to sell, we have a definite message that we are trying to say through what we do, and we like people to really be tuned to it.

Hoda Baroudi

Many people during our first years of business bought our products, sometimes we think, for the wrong reasons, for that added colour in their houses. Many in the Arab countries live in the deserts and they love those strong colours. As our work became more complex, as we were adding layers and layers of textiles, meaning layers and layers of cultures in that same piece, more and more we were attracting an informative clientele. A clientele from Europe, especially Germans, they love what we do, because Germans are very sensitive about traditional textiles.

How do you see your stories to evolve? What would be your next step forwards?

Hoda Baroudi

Maria told you about the exhibition we held in Milano last year, the two sofas with fabrics from 30 different origins. We wanted in a way to sort of say this is ten years of work, ten years of Bokja that sort of culminates in those two sofas. Ever since we are trying to make our work, if you want, more “abstract”. We want to continue the idea, we want to continue the message, and taking the essence and applying it elsewhere. We are working with this kind of condensed wool that is recycled and applying bits and pieces of textiles. It is becoming more the gist of Bokja than the layering of textiles as they are.

Maria Hibri

We are trying to invent a new word, which is to Bokjadize things. So we look at objects around us and we do the exercise; how can we Bokjadize this? We found out that it is possible, not only through textiles, in a way Bokja has become a certain way of seeing things and doing things. By being ethically conscious and trying always to be resourceful and have more fun.

Hoda Baroudi

Are you familiar with Lidewij Edelkoort? She is the director of Eindhoven School of Design. She is for many people the lady of design in the world, she is the lady who put Holland on the map, in terms of attracting people to Eindhoven. After that she started a company called Trend Forecasting this company tries to forecast the coming 10-20 years. She has regular exhibitions in Paris, in Amsterdam, all over Europe, in New York she does lectures. She did this exhibition and she saw our work in Miami in 2008 while she was planning for an exhibition called Archaeology of the Future in Paris. For this exhibition she argued that design doesn’t come out of nothing, design is always steeped in history. You cannot say that I have this idea, it is avant-gardist, it has no roots. Always a design has to be rooted in history. For her Bokja is a perfect example of that, because not only do we take the historical story and we re-invent it, and what makes it special for her is the attention we create between the traditional textile and the modernity of the piece of furniture that we use it on.

How do you feel you as a designer reflect your story in the things you create?

Hoda Baroudi

We did an interesting lecture in Lausanne last year and we brainstormed the issue on how best to present our work. We came to the conclusion that mostly our work is a reflection of us. Who are we? We are two women from Beirut, so in the end Bokja is a reflection of this city. You have a lot of contradiction in it, and you have a lot of worldly influences and you have a lot of contemporary feed, and this makes it beautiful. To the excel that we called one of the chairs we created schizophrenia to reflect the schizophrenic mood of the city in many instances.

Maria Hibri

We have years and years of influences, over time the shores were receptive to many civilizations. You have layers of civilizations from all over the world and this is what I think you see at Bokja.

You talked earlier that you want the object to give a smile to the people. Which one is the one that gives you a smile?

Maria Hibri

Don’t you have a smile when you see this sofa.

Hoda Baroudi

Or the schizophrenia.

Hoda Baroudi

This is the schizophrenia chair. We put the plastic because for us it was a twist on the taxis. The old taxi service in Beirut in the 60s, they always used to protect their sofas in the car by putting plastic. Once we sold a sofa to a hairdresser in Saudi Arabia and he put a big sofa in the saloon and he put nylon on it to protect it from the water. So it was a funny take on this old habit.

Digital cameras are getting increasingly more powerful, so powerful that my DSLR that I bought a few years back is out-pixeled by the new smartphones on the market. What this means is that my computer will require more and more power when I lighten your under-eye circles and smooth out your love handles in Photoshop. This is why I’m excited to read about the advances in the use of the 5th phase of matter. Now you say, wait, what, I thought there were 3 phases; gas, liquid and solid? Normally this would be the case, but under extreme heat you get plasma, the 4th phase, and in extreme cold you get a Bose-Einstein condensate. Shortly put this 5th phase is the foundation for matter lasers and thus quantum computing (impressively nerdy sentence).

With the continuation of Moore’s Law in good prospect and your love handles in check for the coming years we can look at what actually happens in this 5th phase. When first reading about the transformation that the atoms undergo in the extreme cold

(mouseover for info
In these low temperatures the quantum mechanical properties of the atoms become important. According to quantum mechanical theory, all matter behaves like waves. At ordinary temperatures the wavelength is extremely small and thus impossible to perceive the wavelike properties. But as an atom is cooled down to temperatures close to absolute zero strange and unfamiliar things start to happen, the wavelike nature of each atom becomes prominent.

So instead of the atoms bouncing around like billiard balls you begin to have little wave packets, atoms that are becoming delocalized. As you begin to cool the atoms further the size of these packets gets longer and longer until they begin to overlap each other. When the atoms overlap the system behaves not like individual particles, but as particles that have lost their identity, all atoms think they are everywhere. (Daniel Kleppner, MIT Physics Dept.) When the temperature continues to decrease more atoms will join this system until they are all in one great big quantum state, one giant matter wave is formed where all atoms are doing the same thing.
)

it triggered some familiar sensations. Not the cold winters of Finland, but the sense of delocalisation as experienced by the atoms. With each additional culture or emotionology (see 8-bit Cognitive Dimensions) added to my experiences it has in a way stretched my narration over a greater space. Individual cultures become less prominent and the sense of being from one location becomes less relevant. The cultures work more like a network that together form one great cultural system, in fact my companions have started to call me cittadino del mondo (world citizen). If I were to project this trend far enough into the future there would come a day that I reach the point of being from everywhere, I will be delocalized to the extent of losing my sense of identity just like the atoms.

But long before I get to the point of an identity crisis the objects I design will have lost their identity and be confused. Assuming that we all contribute to the identity of objects, the designer the engineers, marketing team, users. Each one of us projects part of our lives, part of our identity onto the object. The object is flooded with the identities of all these individuals, who on their own might be at the brink of crisis, creating a sum identity, a great cultural mixture of all of us from all over. The object could effectively result all over all at once.

Adapting the way Germano Celant writes about Arte Povera in 1969. The range of outside factors influencing an object, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a system of interdependent processes. These processes – transfers of energy, matter or information – evolve without the viewer’s empathy … A system is not imagined; it is real.

For the physics oriented individuals of you. The more interactions the object has with the outside, releasing energy to external factors, the colder the atom and thus a more emphasized/longer wave, a more delocalized object, more merged within the environment or system. Finally with enough interactions one could imagine the object to be part of everywhere, distributed all over. All the external inputs are working as one big quantum system morphing the object to take shape of the one great matter wave in a Bose-Einstein condensate.

We can continue on the notion of representing a product as a single atom. Each basic element has a distinct native wavelength, in accordance with quantum mechanical theory. In the case of an object we can think of this native wavelength as the sum identity of the object shaped by the system. And now bear with me, as is the case in the real world, we have multiple chemical elements, multiple products, and if multiple products occupy the space of everywhere they will overlap each other. Overlapping identities causes confusion in the best of cases; objects might claim part of an other identity as their own, the native waves get added together and form a sum wave.

Say you hold a warm cup of tea in your hand, your warm sensors (thermoreceptor nerve endings) will send signals to your brain indicating the level of heat. Now by accident you spill some of the tea on your hand, the heat level goes beyond the normal working range of the sensors, and in addition to the warm sensors your cold sensors will start erratically sending signals to the brain and thus confusing the sensation perceived by your brain. The overlapping hot and cold signals make a burn feel like extreme cold. If you want to do an experiment it might not be wise to burn yourself so I suggest next time you have spaghetti al pesto try to follow one of the spaghetti from end to end. You will most probably get confused and end up following another pasta, if not get bored before you get to the end. The spaghetti you drew in your mind will be the sum of parts of several spaghetti, several cultures.

So lets throw in some emotionologies extruded to the shape of spaghetti on a plate and see how they might mingle. We will put in a spaghetti identity of a wooden chair, a concrete bench, an inflatable beach mattress and a French poodle to spice things up. Now we let these identities boil for a bit.

Here are some approximations of what pictures you could expect these emotionologies on their own to draw in your mind.

Below left, Hybreed chair by Charlotte Kingsworth. Below right, Concrete chair by Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen.

We can think of these hybrids as overlaying sound waves, parts of the wave get cancelled while parts get emphasized depending how the phases line up. The wave as a result of these dissimilar cultures would give a distorted wave producing a dissonance, an arrhythmic out of phase object. Your chair might turn out to be half French poodle. An object exhibiting confusion of its identity or roles, it does not know who it is, where it belongs, or where it wants to go, the product is in multiple cultures all at once.

Maybe the shape language doesn’t correspond to the material it is made of like in the concrete chair by Tejo Remy and Reré Veenhuizen. The emotionology associated with concrete is of a hard material, concrete slabs, while this chair gives the sense of soft and inflated. An object might communicate different values than the materials it is made of. Consider a cardboard chair; you think eco-friendly material, recyclable, good for the environment. When in reality the short lifespan of the chair combined with the glue used to keep it together makes for a less ecological solution than a wooden or tubular steel chair. How many times have you picked up a product that is lighter or heavier than what you expected it to be?

In the previous examples the arrhythmia was produced through the combination of the designer’s cultural mix and the users’ emotional expectations of a given material or shape. The designer is not alone in shaping the identity of the object and thus the product identity arrhythmia could present itself through the integration with the environment.

Just as the poodle cannot control the elaborate variety of clips its master feels free to give it, products exposed to the elements wont be able to control the contextual cross breeding they might experience. Say you buy a new 48” flat screen plasma TV, you bring it home and since you blew all your money on the TV you place it in the 60s cabinet you inherited from your parents, in the process of installing the set you might have to remove shelves and drill some holes for cables. Voilà, both objects are unhappy, both make each other look bad through the cultural inconsistency. Or on the other hand you might be walking in town and you see a billboard with a high contrast B&W image taken in a slightly grunge apartment, Megan Fox in tight jeans is leaning over a table … and then you notice, it is a Tranetorp, dining table for up to 6 people, by Ikea. Ok, this was made up but you should understand the point. The objects go in crisis due to the arrhythmic context they are presented in, be it the user or the marketing team that create the dissonance.

Be it a mistake or an intentional effect, when differing cultures are brought to light within the same object, the associations, the emotionology, of each culture contaminates the perception of the other, leaving the object with a delocalized identity. Should we thrive to minimize the crosspollination of object identities keeping clean product families or should we let the system of interdependent processes evolve the objects identity as a life of its own?

As a designer it is interesting to see which emotionologies, cultural frameworks, shape the objects we design. How does the designers’ narration translate into the work he does and thus the identity of the objects? Do some cultures remain prominent or has the multitude of cultures contaminated each other resulting in a culturally cacophonous hybrid object?

In the following episode we will see an example of two designers who have used, let us call it, cultural arrhythmia to their advantage. They call their work an assemblage but to me it is more like an offbeat cultural composition. Through the combination of many out of phase pieces they have created a rhythm of the arrhythmia, a rhythm that goes deeper than the traditional quarter note time signature.

Last August a friend of mine Gholamali Baluch organized a workshop in Tehran. He asked a group of young iranian artists to create a visual impression of this intense city, expressing their ideas and inspirations using the language of fashion. The resulting works were then to be put on show back here in Milano as a sort of greeting from Tehran.

Here is one of the outfits that resulted from this workshop. The design is by Iranian textile and fashion designer Marjaneh AbbasiBorn. Iran 1959


Qualifications: BA in Textile Designing from Alzahra University in 1997; MA in Cultural and Historical Relics Restoration in 2002


As a professor in the following universities: Shariati University, Science and Culture University, Art University Tehran
. In her piece she explored a way in which to mix antique persian lithographs with a more modern textile, such as denim. To her this project was a way to bring art and cultural heritage back into our daily activities, using fashion to add the old colours and patterns to our lives again.

Photographed by me in the streets of Milano with wonderful Mahtab as the model.

We will go back in time, back to 1993 when playing Doom on your PC left an everlasting impression and the beat of Haddaways’ new hit song Life made you dance through the soles of your Air Jordans. Life will never be the same, life is changing… are the lyrics to the song. This is somebody’s story, maybe not yours, but several of you might share similar details and most of you were affected by the surrounding cultural context. Our social relations, personal disposition, talk about events, mental state, mind and body are all an integral feature of our emotion discourse (Edwards, 1997). It is the collective emotional standard of the culture we are in, or ‘emotionology’ as proposed by Peter Sterns and Carol Sterns. At this time I was 9 and even though I was not aware of how the world was changing around me, the different cultural contexts I have experienced have still left a lasting imprint on my narration.

The stories that surround us and how we are personally positioned within the various contexts form our world. This world is the sum of our experiences and our cognitive narration, it is our storyworld. Each of us shapes this storyworld through the way we narrate our experiences and memories.

Back in my 1993, in my spatiotemporal setting, we had as a family habit to go for long walks in the forest and along the rocky shores of west coast Finland. Countless sticklike trees limited by the harsh winter conditions, all grown tightly together barely letting any light penetrate the overlapping branches form the Finnish woodlands. A soft moss, like a fitted carpet thick as a mattress, covers much of the ground. Here I am in the dark forest pacing on the cushiony natural carpet and sometimes bouncing forwards towards new experiences. Suddenly the forest would open up and the dim light would change to a view over the sea. For as far as you could see the ground was broken, it looked as if the coast had been pushed through a shredder and then sprinkled all around the sea. As a child this was the sea familiar to me, but now, when revisiting these places it has a slightly unreal feeling to it. I enter into what I could call my Finnish mindset; the rest of the world is isolated, there is only me and the sounds of the leaves in the wind and the water softly playing with the rocks. It is a beautiful present left behind by the ice age that filed the bedrock into the thousands of islands that form the Finnish archipelago.

On these smoothed rock shores you would see the occasional tree growing in most particular ways. The 9 year old me went looking for these strange creations. I have memories of a tree growing out of a small piece of dirt with roots stretching out to other patches of dirt, growing on a big loose rock with the roots hugging around the stone to reach the ground below, curving out of the face of a vertical cliff, or twisted around its own exes shaped like a screw due to the unidirectional wind at the shore. This did not only show me the express adaptability that nature displays, but in a simplistic way how deciding the external relationships are in shaping the trees’ final form.

Effectively each tree starts out as the same, a pinecone will produce a pine. Its DNA defines what the tree is, but how it will grow and what shapes it will take are sculpted by the environmental inputs; rainfall, temperature, winds, nutrition, natural disasters. These are the interactions and the experiences with the world that eventually sculpt the story of each individual tree. In a similar way as us humans define ourselves through our memories, through our shared experiences, the tree is defined through the history stored within it. The growth rings are like archives full of collected and conserved documents of the past. Cutting into a tree we can walk down memory lane and view the life of the tree year by year. Each ring is a summary of events and by reading each of these rings we are presented with the life story of the tree, its autobiography.

The past is represented as layers of stories building up one on top of the other. Each new layer is affected by the sum of all the previous layers, all the previous stories. We as well are shaped by the totality of our experiences, the stories that shape our narrative world.

For this study I will accommodate my narration to the principle of growth rings. The different cultures I have been in, changes in the stories surrounding me, the emotionological world I am in, each change leaving a trace, a new ring. This a low bandwidth approach to map my story so I will call this my 8-bit narrative world. This low resolution image of my story will serve as a cognitive script, a map of some sorts, to navigate my storyworld.

Every culture and subculture has an emotionology, which is a framework for conceptualizing emotions, their causes, and how participants in discourse are likely to display them. (Herman, 2011)

These existing frameworks or scripts are the pixels in the low resolution image and together they will form a representation of me. You use these scripts as a way to guide your expectations, a way to fill in the blanks or render more detail into the individual pixel. Let us consider two pixels, two cultural contexts. (a) I am a designer and (b) I grew up, for the most part, in Finland. Now you will consider Nordic design, Scandinavian design, some of you will fill the blanks with Alvar Aalto, curved birch ply while others think of an attitude toward design that reflects a particular view of the environment and the objects that furnish it. Sensible, functional, natural materials, and emphasis on quality and timelessness rather than on trend-setting style. These are words or concepts that might come to mind, they are conceptualized emotions, an approximation of my likely discourse.

A new technology presented by Jack Gallant (UC Berceley) uses a similar methodology to view the images in our mind. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, people’s dynamic visual experiences can be decoded and reconstructed as images on a screen. You start by measuring the blood flow through the visual cortex while showing a set of video clips. The measurements are then processed by a reconstruction algorithm that uses 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos as a framework, a palette. The algorithm predicts the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject and uses the video clips from the framework to create a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie. In my 8-bit world, the growth rings are the visual cortex measurements, the frameworks or scripts are the YouTube videos and I am the final image that is created.

Now that we have the tools we can paint my narration, the designers’ story, using a cultural palette as our paint and growth rings as our paintbrush.

An illustration of my narration using the emotionological growth rings. Below you have the legend showing the colours for each culture.

We find ourselves in the Las Vegas crime lab and Grissom finds a strand of hair with a tag on it. He looks at it under the magnifying glass.

Grissom

A brown hair with a follicular tag. A person’s entire identity balled up in a few nanograms of matter.



Sofia Curtis

Assuming one’s identity can be wholly quantified by our DNA.



Grissom

Well, genetically, it can. We’re completely programmed as soon as the sperm hits the egg.



Sofia Curtis

So we’re defined at a cellular level?



Grissom

More or less.



Sofia Curtis

No. Identity is the totality of our life experiences and our brain neurons process our relationship to the world and each other.



Grissom

I stand corrected. DNA is what we are, not who we are.



Sofia Curtis

What we are never changes. Who we are never stops changing.



Grissom

Yeah. Whether we like it or not.

Our existence is shaped through the relations and interactions we have with the world around us. DNA provides us with a framework, the base to start building on. The details and characteristics, the fleshing up of our lives are added through the relationships we share with our surroundings

So let us put this in terms I, as a designer, feel more comfortable with. The DNA, the What we are is our backdrop, our empty canvas, and the relationships we create with our ambience composes the image depicted on this backdrop, the self we reflect to the world, the Who we are becoming. Our colour palette is defined by the people and things we choose to interact with; who do we choose as our friends, mentors, colleagues, do we choose to hang around our childhood neighbour whom we have known all our memorable lives, or do we seek new social experiences via Twitter, do we choose to go for the 8-bit gig or the barn party, do we ride the fixie bike to work, sway in a bus or sit nervous in a car, do we buy our cheap t-shirts from Zara, H&M or Bershka, are we the Window or the Mac guy. These components, some simple and seemingly insignificant and some that bear greater influence, together they form a pattern characteristic to us, they form the hues in our palette. The way you combine these elements or colours with each other will then form your image, your self-portrait. With time your interests and relationships will shift and so also the tones in your palette. The portrait of you is continuously changing just like a Van Gogh
painted over and over.

Each product/brand communicates thoughts and feelings, a certain tone. If the tone is in harmony with the colours in our palette we will feel comfortable linking these emotions to our self-portrait. Through products we tap into a sort of cultural opportunity, or as put by Douglas Holt, we buy into an identity myth. We buy a product to experience the story it entails.

The identity myth, well performed, provides the audience with little epiphanies—moments of recognition that put images, sounds, and feelings on barely perceptible desires. Customers who find this kind of identity value in a brand forge intensive emotional connections. Emotional attachment is the consequence of a great myth. (Holt, 2004)

To keep the myth alive a brand needs to continuously adapt to the shifting currents in society, the shifting hues. Douglas Holt’s study on the Coca Cola brand shows how Coke’s myth changed according to the social challenges of each period and so carried on as an iconic brand. In the 1950s Coke celebrated America’s triumphs against Nazi Germany in Word War II, promoting the American way of life. In the early 1970s Coke shifted to heal and furnish the world with love in a fractured post Vietnam society. The 1980s shifted the attention to racial divisions, turning Coke into an elixir of universal tolerance. These tonal shifts and the way Coke responded to the changes of the society displays characteristic that closely assimilate that of a living organism. A being overcoming challenges presented to him by changes in his environment. While my body will push out a fever to combat bacteria, Coke rides on the waves of peace anthems. Both acting in interest of the same motive – self preservation.

If a product or brand can exhibit characteristics of an organism. Could this organism have an identity? A certain smile?

For the sake of argument, let us pretend non-agentive objects have a DNA and cast them as their own narrative protagonists. In doing this we adapt ‘the what we are’ and ‘who we are’ distinction to a product. The DNA of a product is its bare framework, a summary of what it is for, the rudimentary tasks it performs.

a table – an elevated surface

a helmet – head protection

a cup – a volume to contain matter

The Who of the product is shaped by contextual characteristics, how and in what way it performs these tasks. Who the cup is, is formed by the relationships the object has with the world, its emotional and physical characteristics.

The designer, the engineer, the assembly team, the marketers, each one will reflect part of their identity/story to the product, each will leave traces of their colours. The Who of the product is thereby being composed. Say a marketing manager for a promotion chooses an actor from his favourite cheesy drama show, meanwhile the location scout selecting the setting, chooses an abandoned factory where his grandfather used to work. We are introduced to these distinctive elements of their lives through the ad they are shooting even though we might not be aware of their significance. We see the product in a context shaped by the marketing team and we merge it with the mental images this creates in our consumer minds.

Often as a designer we would like to carry our personal colours to the eventual consumer. We want to maintain a certain purity, an integrity of our creation. Should the designer act as a steward of his products ensuring that the ‘product essence’, the way the product was initially imagined to be, is maintained or do we let the product find its own way, letting the currents shape its soul? As a parent of a few teenage products it has become clear that the task of preserving this essence is rarely possible. Even before introducing a concept to less controllable factors like engineers and marketing the project continuously evolves and grows. It might sometimes get pimples, maybe a new hairstyle or a new hobby that results in a broken arm. Be it a happy accident, divine mistake as coined by Warhol or regular concept development, they all take part in building up a product, shaping its character.

In scriptwriting when developing a character for a story Syd Field writes in his book Screenplay; “you separate the components of his/her life into tow basic categories: interior and exterior. The interior life of your character takes place from birth up until the time your story begins. It is a process that forms character. The exterior life of your character takes place from the moment your film begins to the conclusion of the story. It is a process that reveals character.”

The character of the object, its interior life is shaped through the design process, the context it grew up in shapes its emotional past or the specific set of hues it emits. As a consumer you are presented with an object with a history, a product with ‘real’ experiences, the experiences of the designer, the engineer, the sales guy… The story you share with the object begins with, as Syd Field calls it, its exterior life, you interact with the product revealing its character in a new way. As in film, the story of our character does not only have one conclusion, the one imagined by the director, but it evokes numerous endings, as many as there are viewers or users.

The object sets a basis for a social link, a shared emotion, a shared passion. Through these communal hues we are re-establishing a sort of communal embeddedness, an emergence of neotribalism (Maffesoli, 1996). Take the Lomo tribe as an example. The experience around Lomo is a joint construction of the reality, a shared feeling about what is going on around the tribe supported by the collective (re)construction of its meanings. The Lomo camera was introduced in 1984 as a cheap low-tech full plastic camera. Now the Lomography phenomenon promotes themselves as a global community whose strong passion is creative and experimental analogue film photography. Photography is heavyweight, serious, demanding and difficult. Lomography is charming, easy, nice, happening. Because the newly appropriated meaning to the Soviet camera is common only to the tribe, it lends an added identity to this tribe and thus to the plastic camera as well. Together we as users will continue shaping the story of the product in its exterior life, revealing its character in new ways.

The interior and exterior life of the product shape Who the product is. All of us, from concept to consumption, contribute in creating/fabricating a life, a collective identity for the object. By embedding our experiences we give the object a past, a story to share with us, a way for us to interact on an emotional level. For those of you who were expecting the chromosome equipped communication devices with morphogenic capabilities, it is now quite time for that yet. However, the morphic force is within you, it is us that come to shape the objects we interact with. You are part of the objects quickly morphing life form, its evolution.