The LED Sundial

Part of my research into Material & Emotional Values.

The LED Sundial is a conventional timepiece that reflects the cyclic nature of the world around us.  In our technology obsessed lives we need a reminder of the forces that define our days and nights – the sun and moon. 

The wall clock takes the form of a traditional sundial, where the sun and moon are represented by LEDs set into the frame of the clock.  As the sun moves throughout the day, the LED sun moves around the outside of the clock, casting a shadow onto the hour position.  As the sun rises and sets the LEDs change colour, simulating sunset.  During the night, the moon becomes the time keeper as it rotates around the clock.  The LED cycles are set to mimic the natural solar and lunar cycles over Manchester.  At this time of month, the moon rises early in the day, shines with the sun and sets at around midnight.  This natural progression is replicated in the clock, meaning that at certain times of year, the moon will eclipse the sun and the clock will cast no shadow.

We often feel very disconnected to nature, and the LED Sundial is designed to ground you and gently remind you about the outside world. 

Superloon - Jasper Morrison

Visually, the LED Sundial was naively inspired by Jasper Morrison’s Superloon light, and the recent works of Nendo – naively in a sense that I found them to be some of the most inspiring works I saw while in Milan, and though I came about my project from an entirely different route, my design somewhat echoes the visuals of these works. 

Calanish Stones, 2006 - F. Lefebvre [Source]

From a personal level, I have had a fascination with cosmology for a long time, and am constantly inspired by the natural cycles of the world and how humans have interacted with them throughout history.  The face of the clock and simple black gnomon were inspired by the Callanish stones in the Outer Hebrides – a Neolithic stone circle designed to align with the moon during a lunar standstill that happens once every 18 years (Astrocal, 2007).

My aim is to continue to develop this product as part of my Final Major Project, looking more broadly at the subject of time and our perceptions of it.

References

Astrocal. (2007). Astrocal - Lunar Standstill at Callanish. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from http://www.astrocal.co.uk/standstill_callanish.php

Exploring the Ageing Timepiece

Part of my research into Material & Emotional Value.

While in Milan, for Milan Design Week, I came up with the idea of a watch that shows its own age.  My initial idea was to design a watch face with raised numbers made of sandstone.  As the hands of the watch wound down, they would wear down the sandstone numbers.  When you are young, time is so important to you – you clock-watch, count down the minutes and often wish your time away.  As you get older, the exact time becomes less important to you and you begin to appreciate where you have been.  This was the ethos behind the wind-down watch; as the watch ages, the time becomes less easy to read and eventually all you have left is the loose sand from where the numbers once were.

Chrono-Shredder - Susanna Hertrich: Source

In his essay on products and their relationship to time, Stuart Walker hypothesises that time has two distinct progressions; secular time and sacred time. (van Hinte, 2004)  Secular time relates to the everyday life of a person, it is linear and fleeting.  Sacred time is circular, it represents the changing of the seasons, the rotating of the earth, birth-life-death-renewal.  Our lives are dominated by the linear progression of time; we feel it slip through our fingers like grains of sand.  I personally find this concept quite depressing, and so enjoy taking time to notice the circular passage of time, which is much more uplifting and less finite.  Many critical design products play with the concepts of finite time – Susanna Hertrich’s Chrono-Shredder (Herford, et al., 2011) pessimistically shreds calendar days in front of your eyes; where as the Clock of the Long Now (Stuff You Should Know, 2012) tries to focus on the distant future, asking people to consider the impact their lives will have made in 1,000 years.

Clock of the Long Now: Source

To get the most out of the project, I decided to explore the concept of an ageing timepiece from as many different perspectives as I could; I made it my aim to come up with 10 different ideas around the theme.  Through brainstorming both the topics of ageing and timepieces separately and researching them I was able to come up with 9 individual ideas, including my original wind-down watch design.  Some were more fleshed out than others, but from the 9 I was able to narrow my selection down to 3 possible designs, one of which I would produce for the end of this module.  Given the timeframe, I decided to prototype the LED sundial.

References

Herford, M., Fast, F., Hundertpfund, J. & Kroger, M., 2011. Now. Perceptions of Time and Contemporary Design. 1st ed. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag.

Stuff You Should Know, 2012. SYSK: What's the 10,000 year clock?. [Online]
Available at: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/whats-the-10000-year-clock/
[Accessed 25 April 2015].

van Hinte, E., 2004. Eternally yours: time in design. 1st ed. Rotterdam.

Interaction and Time

Part of my research into Material & Emotional Value.

At the end of my Contextualising Design Practice module, I produced this poster to show the designers I had looked at, the products I had created, and how they fitted in with my design ethos.

At the start of the course, I felt torn between a more flippant, fun design style, and the clinical practicality of modernist designs.  Through the design of The Food Porn Project, I realised that a key part of my design ethos is fun, giving me my key agenda words of simple, passive, utility and fun.

In this module, as I've been researching narrative and material, visceral and emotional values, I've begun to refine my own design agenda further.  I've been fascinated by the humble objects that absorb their surroundings through use.  Like the wooden spoon, I think it's important that our objects be defined by the people that use them; it's through the use of an object that it becomes yours.

In the rest of this module I will be designing an object that fits with this brief.  I don't know what object it will be yet, or how the user will interact with it, but I would like it to show the idea of time passing in physical form through change, whether that be through destruction or adaption.  These are my aims for this design module.

Natural vs. Unnatural

Part of my research into Material & Emotional Value, looking at visceral design.

Recap:  The way we respond to things (outside of culture and emotion) is dictated by our subconscious mind; it tells us when to run away, what to be repulsed by and who to find the most attractive and is hard-wired into every human to try and increase their chances of survival.  These reactions can be broadly grouped into 4 main categories of self-preservation:

Food // Shelter // Danger // Reproduction

What about products that are styles to look natural but don't look quite right?

Liquid_Light: Drop_1 - Büro für Form: Source

There's something off-putting about Büro für Form's Liquid Light.  The lamp is meant to echo the natural form of a water droplet but to me it looks much more anatomical.  The same could be said for Frank Tjepkema's Artificial Plant, though that project was never intended to look natural; actually, Tjepkema wanted quite the opposite.  "...the first artificial plant that is not telling a lie, it's artificial and it's not trying to pretend it's not." (Source)

Artificial Plant, 1996 - Frank Tjepkema: Source

Between the oversized globule made from PE and the punctured latex base of the plastic blades of grass, I begin to feel quite queasy.  This doesn't quite equal disgust, but I feel genuine un-ease at the sight of these products.  In their attempts to resemble nature they appear vulgar and to my mind emphasise nature's most unsavory points.

Ok, so I find these things off-putting, and the more I think about them, the more vulgar I think they are.  The descriptions that form in my head sound a little like this:

Liquid Light: A giant white dripping mucous-like globule, slowly extending it's gelatinous way towards the floor, with a light inside it.
Artificial plant: Translucent brown flesh, sparsely punctured by stiff blades of hair fixed in place by whelts.

It quickly becomes clear that I find these items so unappealing because of the associated imagery they conjure up.  Both remind me of diseased skin, infections and viscous secretions, which all humans are disgusted by as a form of protection.  It's your subconscious telling you not to go near them.  What is interesting is whether or not I am the only person to subconsciously extrapolate these feeling with regards to these products; does everyone feel as put-off as I do? Are they over-riding their danger signals because they know that these plastic objects cannot harm us? Or am I just more sensitive to these things than most?

TL;DR: I don't like these products because they remind me of disgusting things - danger. Does everyone else ignore their repulsion because they know these things are safe?

Touch vs. Sight

Source

Part of my research into Material & Emotional Values

Visceral (adjective): relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect.

Tasked with the job of looking into visceral design, I began by defining how we classify visceral design, and how we can segment our subconscious responses to make analysis easier.

The way we respond to things (outside of culture and emotion) is dictated by our subconscious mind; it tells us when to run away, what to be repulsed by and who to find the most attractive and is hard-wired into every human to try and increase their chances of survival.  These reactions can be broadly grouped into 4 main categories of self-preservation:

Food // Shelter // Danger // Reproduction

Find something cute? If it's big eyes and large proportioned head mimic those of a baby, it's your subconscious telling you to nurture it - that goes under reproduction.

Find something disgusting? From open wounds to mouldy food, that's you subconscious telling you not to go near it because it could make you ill - danger.

Is that M&S food advert making you salivate? That's your food response.

And shelter? Well, that's more difficult to define but revolves around protection and security.

I started off by attempting to find deliberately provocative pieces, but this proved more difficult than I has envisioned and so I started analysing designs that I had previously felt a reaction to.

Alquimista, 2003 - Robert Stadler: Detail taken  from 21st Century Design by Marcus Fairs

Robert Stadler's Alquimista lamp with its shag-pile appearance looks invitingly touchable, asking you to run your fingers through its tasseled fur.

I realised pretty quickly after looking at this design that my flat is filled with soft furnishings just like this.  I have a vivid green deep pile rug from Ikea that looks just just like grass, and a cushion that has dense fine curly hair that looks soft like moss.  Both of these things are immensely fun to interact with; running your hands over them or walking barefoot on the rug evokes childhood memories of being outside and playing on long grass.

Though the green colouring of my products at home produces an emotional and cultural response, Stadler's lamp is only appealing through it's texture - so why do I want to stroke it?

It turns out that the long-pile texture of this lamp produces a pleasure response in us.  The nerves in our bodies can be broadly split into two categories, fast nerve fibers, and slow nerve fibers.  Fast nerve fibers are responsible for feeling pokes, pinpricks and pressure, where as the slow nerve fibers sense deep pain, temperature and pleasant touch. Fast and slow nerve fibers are processed by different parts of the brain, with the slow nerves being processed in an area that also controls emotion (hence why deep pain and pleasant touch give us a long lasting emotional response). So why is pleasant touch related to emotion? Well, it turns out that pleasant touch (stroking, cuddling etc) helps us develop mentally to social situations - its the same ancestral bonding techniques that our nearest relatives use when social grooming, and so it fits into the shelter part of the subconscious brain!  So this lamp is an unnatural product, that evokes a response normally produced by natural interaction (human touch, running hands through hair/grass etc).

TL;DR: We want to stroke the lamp because it feels good.  It feels good because its a subconscious mental development technique used to develop social skills - shelter.

The Wooden Spoon

In my parents house there is a wooden spoon.  It is completely unremarkable, has no brand to speak of and is looking a little worse for wear, but it is one of my favourite products in our home.

My families wooden spoon

For our newest module, Material & Emotional Values, we have been tasked with researching the history behind objects, their materials and associated narratives and our visceral reactions to them.

I started by looking at objects that reflect my personal history, and the wooden spoon quickly came to mind.

Home cooking in important in my family and my sister and I were taught to cook by our mum from a young age.  The kitchen has always formed the heart of our home; whether we spend time there cooking, or doing work at the kitchen table, it is the main congregation point for my family in any house we have lived in.  In the same way that our warped little old oak kitchen table is fondly remember by my sister and I (and we both try to shotgun it for future houses), this wooden spoon symbolises the family bond based around our kitchen - it is a personal emotional value that this humble object reflects.

As part of the module, we were asked to find modern products that carry a similar emotional value to what we had chosen.  I came across the Motherspoon concept by Okan Akgöl.

Electrolux Motherspoon Concept, 2012 - Okan Akgöl: Source

This concept was produced for the Electrolux future homes competition in 2012.  The idea behind it is that you and a family member (for example your mother) each have a spoon.  As your mother cooks, she puts the spoon in the food and it "tastes" the ingredients, storing them as a recipe.  When it is returned to it's cradle, it transfers the recipe to your spoon, so if you were to re-create the recipe, it could tell you what to change to make it "just how mother used to make it".

The theory behind the Motherspoon is similar to the narrative of my wooden spoon, but the product is made of some form of metal and doesn't take a traditional spoon shape, which gives it a sterile, surgical appearance.  This emphasises the importance of material in a product.

Joseph Joseph Serving Spoon - Gillian Westley/ Derek Roberts: Source

Another example would be this serving spoon by Joseph Joseph.  Though they are renowned for clever kitchenalia, the plastic and silicone material holds no emotive value.  Yes, it is heatproof and easy to clean, but so is a wooden spoon.

To me, the emotional value the wooden spoon has is heightened by the fact that it is made out of wood.  Every time you interact with the spoon, the wood it is made from changes; it absorbs colour from the sauces you make, it burns when you accidentally leave it in a hot frying pan, it scratches when you scrub it while cleaning.  The material it's made from visually represents the times you have used the spoon and that is why it is such a powerful symbol and holds such emotional value.  In this case, the material holds just as much narrative as the form of the object itself.