more is less

the mobile workshop

2009-09-19T08:28:00.001-07:00

Cups of tea!

2009-06-19T05:57:00.001-07:00

Sitting in one of my pieces

2009-06-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

images of prototypes

2009-04-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

Don't know why the colour is weird!

wooden chair inspired by life

2009-04-22T01:56:00.001-07:00

Milan drawing

2009-04-18T15:04:00.000-07:00

Ron Arad

2009-04-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

“The world doesn't need another chair. No. But the world doesn't need another love song" Ron Arad.

"Culture begins where necessity ends. If you're hungry you'll eat anything. If you're less hungry you'll put spices on it, look at your cookbooks, think about the wine to go with it. If you need a shelf you'll put a plank up. If you're past that need you'll talk about style. If you're drowning you shout ‘Help!'. If you have more time you say: ‘Help me if you can I'm feeling down'. That's what we do. I don't pretend I'm solving the world's problems. But I do solve problems".

"Now that there is a solution, you can understand what the problem was".

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5961632.ece

pschologist student

2009-04-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

play to peoples psychological conditions

self cleaning chair for ocd sufferers etc

Possible words for website and........catalogue?

2009-04-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

More is Less

‘More’ is celebrating our behaviour with belongings. Allowing the practice of disposophobia to take place. Making form out of possessions creates ‘less’ original furniture. Structure is created by the way material is manipulated, material creates function.

“A quarter of the population said they had been forced to stop using a room because it was so full of stored possessions”, Simon Hattenstone, (on the life of an extreme hoarder; The Guardian, Saturday 28 March 2009).

My outcome is a process of suggested solutions which have created an alternative use for typically hoarded objects, considering ways to facilitate and manage the possessions, this is practised on individuals and their environment.

Furniture vs person

2009-04-11T03:45:00.000-07:00

Found a hoarder who likes to hide the stuff under material and boxes etc. Maybe I could use the slinky sofa for this particular case, or the glass tea table that will compress but display and celebrate the stuff.

Bas Kools

2009-04-10T09:25:00.000-07:00

slot it

2009-04-06T10:51:00.001-07:00

teeny experiment

2009-04-05T12:32:00.001-07:00

I found a stool with no seat in it so i have filled the emptiness with the excess of clothing.

This has lead me to think about filling emptiness and creating empty furniture. And how I can encourage the filling of this.

Hoover = eames

2009-04-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

A mock up of an idea that encourages you to roll around and celebrate your own stuff in a healthy way. You hoover your room up, objects of different shapes and sizes and transform it into a piece that you will use. The bag is attached to the handheld hoover. When the bag is full it can be attached to a seat or even something else that will encourage its function. To hoover is an easy and hassle free way of collating stuff.

the life of an extreme hoarder

2009-04-05T06:01:00.000-07:00

No way out

Gordon Stewart died alone, drowning in rubbish piled solid to his ceiling. How did he end up in such a state? Simon Hattenstone on the life of an extreme hoarder; The Guardian, Saturday 28 March 2009.

Amid all the things he hoarded - the carrier bags, the books, the magazines, the cat food, the bottles - the one thing that hasn't come to light is a photograph. It makes a kind of sense. After all, Gordon Stewart died buried in the detritus of his own life, his identity obliterated by his junk.

Stewart led a quiet, unremarkable life. He had not been in trouble with the police, he had made no outstanding contribution to the local community, he had no relatives and, at the time he died in January, he seemed to have no friends. Perhaps the one remarkable thing about his life was the manner of his death - it became national news. The headlines were cold and disturbing: "Man found dead in tunnel of rubbish at home", "Human mole Gordon Stewart dies of thirst", "Loner who built tunnels out of rubbish dies". The reports told us he was 74 years old, he wore a ponytail, he cycled everywhere, his neighbours did not know him well, though he had lived most of his life in this house in Aylesbury, and it had taken Thames Valley police many hours to discover him, then dig him out of the rubbish.

How could he have allowed himself and his house to get into this state? Why didn't neighbours do anything to help? Where were social services when they were needed? The death of Gordon Stewart raised many uncomfortable questions. It also touched many people who had never known him. Condolences appeared on a memorial website: "I hope that you have now found peace. It's just a shame you had such a lonely life," read one.

Aylesbury, part of the London commuter belt, is a quiet former market town in Buckinghamshire. The private estate where Stewart lived is just that - private. There is a Neighbourhood Watch badge on many doors, but this is a place where people keep to themselves and respect each other's privacy. The houses are semi-detached, with small but lovingly tended gardens. Stewart's house stands out. A week after his death was reported, windows, front door and garage are boarded up. The house is a two-up, two-down called Sandown. In the garage, a 50s car was found - it looked as if it hadn't been touched since then. The downstairs windowsill, visible below the boarding, is stacked with an extraordinary array of rubbish - cat litter, shredded newspapers, wallpaper, sandwich boxes. It's more a landfill than a living room.

Two environmental health officers from Aylesbury Vale council have accompanied me to the house. Richard Swan met Stewart twice. Neighbours had called out environmental health because of the state of his garden. The irony is, Swan says, his garden wasn't that bad - the grass slightly overgrown, bits of rubbish scattered, a bush in need of pruning. Stewart didn't let anybody in, so Swan had to catch him when he came home on his bike. Swan asked him to tidy the garden. Stewart agreed. The downstairs window was becoming an eyesore - Swan could see the rubbish mounting up. "Look at the curtains upstairs, they are all dirty. It was like that downstairs. I mentioned it, and he put a lovely white curtain in. He went to a lot of trouble to make sure people didn't see what he was doing. He was a very quiet, private, polite person."

There was little else environmental health could do because there was no obvious problem with smell or rodents. "I haven't been in even now because I can't get in through the door," Swan says. "We didn't have access to the house at all until the police broke in last week." They had been called by neighbours who reported not having seen Stewart for a few days.

Swan and his colleague Jacqui Bromilow talk about how their work has changed since the Human Rights Act became law in 1998. Before that, if individuals were deemed incapable of looking after themselves, the council could intervene. Now, so long as they are not causing a public nuisance, they can live how they like. "We haven't got the right to knock on people's doors and tell them how to live inside their houses," Bromilow says. But that can be frustrating: "So many people, particularly the elderly, are proud and don't want to accept help when they need it."

Swan and Bromilow say hoarding is frighteningly common, and recite any number of cases they've come across. "There was one like this where we didn't find the guy for three and a half months," Swan says. "I'm not particularly squeamish, but the smell was pretty awful. The thing that shocked me, though, was not how bad it was, but that it didn't affect me till I found out more about the guy afterwards. They had to cut his fingers off to fingerprint him. What I found was basically a lump of meat. But what I found at the inquest was a person. The parents turned up, and I discovered that the chap was a professional carpenter, and loved music, and we found his guitar, and after that it was really sad."

Bromilow says there are many triggers. She remembers one hoarder in particular: "There were kettles in the bath, razors in the sink ... Everything was ordered, that's what was unusual. He was in a concentration camp and it's thought he hoarded stuff because in the war everything had a value, whether it be for bargaining with officers or other inmates. So he couldn't throw anything away. Whereas lots of hoarders would just pick up rubbish off the street, here everything was filed."

Next door at number 87, the lawn is perfectly mown and two flowerpots stand to attention at the front door. At number 83, two cars are in the drive, but nobody is answering the door. The few neighbours willing to talk don't want to give their names. Perhaps there is a sense, unspoken, of collective guilt. "He was just Gordon," says an elderly lady. "Tragic. Tragic for all the neighbours, too. We just accepted him. We had no idea what was going on in there. He wasn't a hermit, he was out on his bike all the time."

Some are less sympathetic. A young man passes the house. "Neighbours have been trying to get social services involved for ages but they weren't having any of it. He'd been stinking the place out for years." But social services tell me they were never asked to visit Stewart.

I walk through the town centre in search of clues about Stewart's life. Charity shops seem a good place to start. Nothing. Nobody recognises the description - an elderly man on a bike with a ponytail. But they recognise the symptoms. At the Helen & Douglas House hospice shop, the assistant says she read about Stewart in the local paper, then corrects herself in the next breath. "No, it was a woman. Apparently she felt safe only when she was out shopping, so she bought all this stuff she didn't need. Mountains of stuff. Eventually her shopping fell on her and killed her."

Down the road at the Florence Nightingale hospice shop, manager Joanne Richards says she knows all about hoarders. "One woman in particular. Always ceramics. You could hear her wherever she walked because of her bag - clink, clink, the ceramics. They know they can get things cheap that make them feel happier."

Harj Cheema, owner of the local chippy, apologises for its punning name - TCI [Thank Cod It's] Fried Day. He smiles as soon as I mention Stewart: "He used to come in here every week. Always left his bike outside. He had a nice new one. Always had the same order - cod and two chips. Always by himself." Was he a big man? "No, quite small, frail. He always gave money to the guide dogs." Cheema points to the box in the corner. Was there anything remarkable about him? "No. His hygiene was not too good. I'd have my back to him at the chipper and know it was him because of the smell. He didn't look his age. I'd have thought he was in his 60s. I was shocked to find out how he had died. I read about it - as soon as they said ponytail ..."

Stewart's death has created problems for Parrott & Coales, his solicitors. The circumstances are so mysterious, they have some detective work to do before they can proceed with the will. Tim Friedlander, a partner in the firm, will have to place a statutory public notice in the local paper and wait three months to see if creditors come forward.

He met Stewart 16 years ago, when he made his will. He recalls the bike, the mild eccentricity, that Stewart had been exceptionally close to his mother. He says there is a beneficiary, but cannot provide a name until the will is published. He doubts whether Stewart will have left much of value apart from the house, left to him when his mother died.

A few days later the contractors arrive to empty it. They wear boiler suits and masks, and say they have seen nothing as extreme as this before. The door has been removed, and the sight is even more shocking than we had been led to believe. Supposedly Stewart had burrowed his way in and out through tunnels, but the rubbish is piled solid to the ceiling. Behind one layer of rubbish is another layer, then another - bags of rubbish upon bags of rubbish, TV guides from 10 years ago, a lawnmower, a 4ft electric drill, a couple of mopeds, an unassembled worktop, hundreds of tins of cat food. Every time a bag is carted off, more corroded cat food falls down the stairs. I can't see any tunnels. There doesn't appear to be a way out. It seems Stewart made the decision to barricade himself in and bury himself alive.

I go up to the front door. The whole house looks as if it is about to burst. The rubbish has made it impossible to work out where one room starts and another finishes. Martyn Chuter, environmental health manager for Aylesbury, says the astonishing thing is that there are no flies buzzing around. Neighbours never complained about the smell. "Did he think this was normality, or did he realise there was something strange in the way he lived?" Chuter asks, as if to himself.

Outside, the executor of the will is checking nothing valuable is put into the lorry heading to the landfill. He doesn't want to talk about Stewart. His elderly mother is sitting in the car. She is more talkative. "He loved his cats - he had four or five. I wonder if they're still in there. We knew he stored stuff, it was a bit of a state, but not like this."

None of the neighbours has come out to watch. As people have said, this is a town where privacy is respected. Perhaps a little too much, at times.

In the local pub, the Plough, I make a couple of phone calls to Stewart's neighbours. Terence Dumpleton has lived in the street for 20 years, "The only time I spoke to him was when I was doing Neighbourhood Watching and I asked if he wanted to join. He didn't."

At the bar, Hayley Ball stiffens when I mention Stewart. Yes, she knew him all right. "I helped him when he fell off his bike. It was just after Christmas 2007. I was with my cousin and he got clipped off his bike by a car just in front of us. Not serious, but he hurt his leg, and we just got talking.

"He was going to Tesco's to pick up a prescription and we asked if there was anyone who could do it for him or would he like us to do it, and he just said, 'There is no one, but I'll be all right, I'll do it myself.' He was very independent, quite proud of it, I think. He was all right. He spoke a lot about his life. The fact that he had no family. He talked a bit about how he worked in one of the local firms before they made him redundant. He didn't have another job after that. He just lived on his own. He gave us his address so we could go and see him, but we just didn't get round to it. We saw him about and he'd always say hello and call me Hayley - so he remembered.

"It was shocking really," she says of his death. "I go past his house on the bus and I always think, I hope he's OK. When he gave us his home number he said, call before you come because my house is a bit of a mess. It made me feel guilty when I heard about him because he kind of reached out and I hadn't helped maybe as much as I should." She says even though she didn't really know him, he has left a mark on her. "I've got a two-year-old daughter. It makes you appreciate things like that."

As I leave the pub, the icy wind pinches my face. Maybe Hayley knew Gordon Stewart as well as anybody after chatting to him that day. The thought makes me feel melancholy. I'm beginning to understand what environmental officer Swan said about fleshing out the fact of a death. I have never seen so much as a picture of Gordon, but I'm sure I'd recognise him if we passed in the street.

More stories crop up in the papers about lonely people dying alone, surrounded by their own rubbish. In the same month Stewart dies, we learn about Tony Baxter, 85, from Pinner, who emptied his neighbours' rubbish into his home each week; Joan Cunnane, 77, who was crushed in her Stockport home under 16 years' worth of unopened goods she had bought; and 89-year-old Harold Carr, who hoarded mountains of memorabilia, including a 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante, one of only 17 ever made, which sold for £3.2m at Bonhams' RetroMobile auction in Paris last month. Recently, research carried out by Hammonds Furniture concluded that Britain was a nation of hoarders - the average person accumulates more than a tonne of unwanted stuff, and a quarter of the population said they had been forced to stop using a room because it was so full of stored possessions.

Of course, Gordon Stewart wasn't alone. His hobby/obsession/condition is common enough to have a number of names: compulsive hoarding syndrome, disposophobia, Diogenes syndrome, Collyer brothers syndrome. The disposophobia website states that "disposophobics are generally very smart people who can't, don't or won't make fast value judgments about their 'stuff', so their solution is to keep everything". The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, are the most famous disposophobics in history - films have been made about them and books written. They were born in the 1880s, the sons of an eminent Manhattan gynaecologist. After university, they started to hoard and withdrew from the world. The more I find out about them, the more eerie I find the comparisons with Stewart: like him, they collected books and newspapers, and went on from there. Like him, they couldn't, or wouldn't, let anyone in, stacked stuff from floor to ceiling and burrowed their way through tunnels. Like him, they had long hair and are thought to have died of malnutrition.

27 January, the day of Gordon Stewart's funeral. More than 40 people turn up. The Rev Alan Harvey says most didn't know him, though they may well have seen him out and about on his bike. But, he adds, there is a special person here today, Stephen Fennell, a former member of the congregation who will pay tribute to his close friend. The sun is shining through the church windows and the world no longer seems quite as lonely or hopeless as it did a few minutes ago. At the front, a man in his 30s, with a black beard and intense face, is translating the minister's words for his deaf and dumb wife. A few minutes later, he stands at the pew and starts to colour in the blanks of Gordon's life.

"I especially wanted to say something because I believe I was Gordon's closest friend during the last five years or so. To the best of my belief, Gordon Stewart was born on the fifth of May 1934. He never married. He left school at about 13, able to read and write, though not fluently. He lived with his mother till her death in 1975. He was always very attached to her, proud of her, and I am very pleased to think he asked to be buried in her grave at Tring Road cemetery.

"Gordon was a gentle man, highly appreciative of well-made things and art. He owned a number of rare books that cost him tens or even hundreds of pounds, not because he was attracted by their monetary value but because he so admired the workmanship that had gone into them. One book he often told me about was a famous rare book of American birds painted in the 19th century by Audubon. Another was on South American butterflies. He loved animals. My first meeting with him was an illustration of this. I was walking to church, going over the canal bridge. A swan had been chased up from the canal over the pavement by another swan, which was snapping at its tail. The fleeing swan was desperately trying to run across the road to escape and could have easily been hit by a car. I saw Gordon try to block its path with his bicycle. The swan would not give up. In the end someone called the RSPCA. That was the start of my friendship with Gordon.

"He visited me once every two or three weeks, and we would have a meal and chat long into the night. He would tell me the history of Aylesbury as he had witnessed it, the shops that were there in the 30s and 40s, the names of the shopkeepers, who they married, even what school they went to.

"He was unable to invite me to his house because, to his own shame and grief, he'd allowed it to get into a dreadful mess and was too ashamed of it to invite anyone in. Though he could not reciprocate, when we had a meal in my flat he was astonishingly generous and would buy me milk and delicious bread and ham and other groceries.

"Because the newspapers have made so much about the state of his house, I want to say a little in partial defence and explanation, though he knew it had reached an appalling condition and he hated it himself. Before retiring due to ill health, he had to work long hours in the local cash-and-carry store. He would have little time to attend to the house when he got home at night. For some reason he became afraid his neighbours would complain if he put his rubbish out. Before long, the build-up of rubbish inside the house had become so bad that I think he was paralysed at the thought of how to sort it all out. He could not see any way of sorting the good stuff from the bad.

"I'm ever so sad when I think I will never again open my front door and see Gordon." He breaks down, stops, and continues. "Before his death, I did not realise I would feel this as much as I do."

After Fennell's beautiful tribute, we leave the church for Gordon's committal at Tring Road cemetery. Fennell talks with great affection about his old friend. Stewart told him his mother was born into the Hodder publishing family, and he often said he would kill for her. When Gordon was one, his five-year-old brother died. Shortly after, his father passed away. That just left Stewart and his mother. Then, 23 years ago, she died. In later years, he suffered diabetes, and the bike rides up the hill to Sainsbury's, then on to Fennell's home, left him exhausted.

Did Gordon want to die? "He didn't, but he found the state of his life, his home, so horrible, so embarrassing. Like many single men, he was lost. We often talked about tidying up the house, getting a skip. But he was a procrastinator. Me, too."

Fennell throws soil into the grave. He says it was tough for Stewart when he got married a couple of months ago and moved away. Just before Christmas, Fennell and his wife, Virginia, briefly returned to Aylesbury. They planned to visit Gordon, but ran out of time. It was only a few days later that he heard of his death.

What did he like about Gordon? "His simplicity. His friendliness." Did they have much in common? Fennell smiles. "Yes. I used to be messy." He looks at Virginia. "A few years ago I was in a very bad way. My wife is very tidy. I've had to move up several notches to marry Virginia. I often said to Gordon, in years to come I could end up like you."

Jason Miller

2009-03-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

hoover

2009-03-27T06:06:00.000-07:00

7 weeks to go

2009-03-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

I am considering designing furniture for a living room.

1. A tea/table that shreds or blends the stuff and forms the table.
2. A light that displays the stuff, such as newspaper cuttings.

the furniture will apply to typical items of hoarding. Celebrating the hoarding.
A compulsive hoarders living room.

What a hoarders furniture would be? The above items, a hoover? kettle? iron?
Not using the typical look of a piece of furniture. The design would suit a hoarders way of living? Considering not using design baggage, almost reinventing the design of the particular furniture.

ultimo grito

2009-03-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

ron arad chair

2009-03-25T08:11:00.001-07:00

Memo bean bag, 1999

Plastic, styrene beads
Design: Inflate and Ron Arad
Production: Inflate, UK

Memo bean bag, 1999
Plastic, styrene beads
Design: Inflate and Ron Arad
After the British designer Nick Crosbie gave a lecture to the product design students at the Royal College of Art in London on the inflatable furniture he was developing, the department head Ron Arad suggested that they work together to rethink the Transformer seat which he had developed in the 1980s. Having agreed to create a seat in the form of an air-tight bag with an adjustable valve and styrene beads inside to add rigidity once it was inflated, they developed a series of prototypes in the hope of producing a comfortable and robust bean bag. Memo was unveiled as a pre-production prototype at the Milan Furniture Fair in April 1999 and went into full production a few months later.

ron arad book worm

2009-03-25T08:02:00.001-07:00

Eames chair

2009-03-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

key words

2009-03-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

ways of compressing/ facilitating

alternative use for the items

hoard

2009-03-18T12:45:00.000-07:00

run out of room

duplicate of items- 'on offer might be useful'

Alternative ways people filled the chair

2009-03-15T04:49:00.001-07:00

Quique Corrales presents film

2009-03-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

Ways of seeing!!

All the time your view is changing. You are constantly completing what you see through memory.
Lajete Terry Gillians
Hockney in art
Zbignien Rybczyuki: tango
Mein Fenster
Milos Tomik: clay pigeon
Svankmajer; passionate discourse
Mclaren
Tetsuo
Jasonpink.com luz
Michel Gondry

Below is the official list:

GOLDSMITH WORKSHOP.

QUIQUE CORRALES.

e-mail: enrique.corrales@uem.es

info@zaunka.com

website: www.zaunka.com

films: www.zaunka.com

http://vimeo.com/zaunka

http://vimeo.com/user1401516

FILMAKERS.

CHRIS MARKER

LA JETÉE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw0UIhLArTM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBnQKslFQYQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN5YJi_XuEE&feature=related

BIOGRAPHY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Marker

ZBIGNIEW RYBCZYŃSKI

TANGO/STEEPS

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2421

Web

http://www.zbigvision.com/

BIOGRAPHY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Rybczy%C5%84ski

SVANKMAJER

DIMENSION OF DIALOG

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gtpo_jan-svankmajer-dimensions-of-dialog_shortfilms

DARKNESS/LIGHT/DARKNESS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuBwXfg3Mr4

BIOGRAPHY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%A0vankmajer

SPIKE JONZE

http://www.directorslabel.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmNLBUPrnGM

Reversal Video Clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmNIvlVt40M

Real Slow Motion Video Clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPT7q825gwI

MICHEL GONDRY

http://www.michelgondry.com/

http://www.director-file.com/gondry/index.html

http://www.directorslabel.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXhEDuL5DGg

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8far_clip-video-white-stripes-michel-gon

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16v4r_michel-gondry-solve-rubik-cube-with_fun

STILLCAMERASFILMS

http://vimeo.com/1525089

VIDEO

Vimeo http://vimeo.com/hd

Blip.tv http://blip.tv/

Smugmug http://www.smugmug.com/

TV ON LINE

Ustream http://www.ustream.tv/

Mogulus http://www.mogulus.com/

Stickam http://stickam.com/

DSRL FILM MODE

http://i.gizmodo.com/5042209/nikon-d90-official-first-dslr-ever-with-hd-video-recording

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08091705canon_5dmarkII.asp

CAMERAS ACCESORIES

http://www.letusdirect.com/cart/letus35-ultimate.html

http://www.redrockmicro.com/lensadapter/index.html

Different processes of shoving stuff together.

2009-03-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

Different processes of putting stuff together.

Bind staple stiffen weave rip stain allow squash squeeze dye scrunch chew wet plat push pull blow stick twist suck fight roll curl tie knot melt glue lather paint sculpt carry sit on jump on skip on

Habits - picking/ biting nails/ scabs
Addictions- smoking drinking

Using vices for positive solutions.

only 9 weeks to go

2009-03-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

The stage my project is at.

Facilitating the management of hoarding.
Not seeing hoarding from a negative angle. Accumulation is accepted.
Reverse of loss, accumulation to deal with loss.
Integrate mess into different types of furniture.
Make it part of everyday life.
Explore ways of making form out of stuff.
Different processes of shoving stuff together.
How it is held together.

Invisible and visible forms.

Making form and how the hoarder might accumulate stuff.
The furniture giving form to the stuff.

Allowing the management of hoarding.

Accumulation of stuff as a response to the issues.

Form/ material making through accumulation.

What furniture is it?

-Domestic?
-To do with therapy?

A double comment about accumulation and therapy?

*Look at three more classic pieces of furniture. Like the Freud chair.

How to give structure to material
Structure is created in the way material is manipulated

Crushed in alternative ways to create elements of furniture.

Types of therapy applied to furniture.
What furniture are they using?

Furniture that allows the practices to take place.

Allow for filling up, object is finished when it is full.

Marti Guixe: building up books to create a seat. Nice and simple. Needs filling to function.

Konstantin Grcic designed a magazine holder.

CHAIR

2009-03-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

Noam Toran

2009-03-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

"Accessories for Lonely Men is a collection of eight fictional products designed to alleviate loneliness after the departure or loss of a woman. The objects propose that most forms of human intimacy are crude enough in their physicality that they can be replicated with electronic objects, and are meant to question what we think we miss in a relationship; the individual or the generic traces they leave behind".

A critical design tool. I am trying to understand how I can approach this. And this is how I would like to highlight and question certain things about hoarding.

Tom Price

2009-03-08T05:33:00.000-07:00

Meltdown series. Each chair is ordered with striped clothes, furry clothes and grey clothes. Is it for aesthetic purposes as part of his meltdown series?

Luis Eslava

2009-03-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

My mess 2006
"Celebrating mess as an acceptable part of human behavior. I am a lazy
person and so the house where I live is a messl piles of clothes, cds, and books...
these piles of objects becomes the landscape of my life. The project encourages people tp
be proud of their mess. Helping them discover beauty in their chaos. One of these objects
is a clothes hanger that work as a space divider, light diffuser and curtain.
The user will customize it with their clothers and it will grow with everyday use".

Mark Owens

2009-03-07T12:21:00.001-08:00

A series of objects which examine obsessive compulsive behaviour.

"Owens develops critical projects within the design discipline which address issues of identity and ethics. His work is research based and spans subject matter as diverse as the convergence of real and virtual spaces, the development of fantasy experiences, and the manipulation of emotion through interaction with objects".

The hoarding chair

In conversation with Henny

2009-03-06T14:11:00.000-08:00

1. Facilitate the reason and cause of hoarding to prevent it. Such as introducing an object that can fulfill the needs of the person that cause the hoarding. I need to look at the underlying issues that start hoarding.

Homeless people have dogs, one reason why is to have something to look after. Henny talked about a robot dog that was given to old people to look after it showed that they enjoyed having the dog. Something that could help fill the issue.

What about swapping opposite roles to see if it takes affect. Such as the programme supersize versus superskinny. Design a space for someone to use.

2. When an event happens it may stop the hoarding. "My housemate got a girlfriend and stopped hoarding". Look at why a hoarder hoards.

Do I want to have an aesthetic approach or a therapeutic approach? What kind of approach shall i take? Usually my work makes a critical response to the subject matter, it is somewhat difficult in this case as it is not easy to have my own opinion about compulsive hoarding. I am not the sufferer, I would need to create empathy. Be sensitive to other people.

3. The chair that prompts accumulation encourages hoarding. The more items compressed the more likely you are to hoard more. Make and finish this idea. It just encourages the illness.

4. Do i design for a specific hoarder? As various hoarders have different reasons for hoarding.

5. Addictions are used to escape from problems people don't want to confront.

6. If you go into the subject you have to be prepared to answer it.

7. Apply "the potential of a candle idea" to the project and the process.

8. Nadine Jarvis work suggests that there are solutions.

9. Create space for the hoarders to deal with her loss. Create objects for her to create an escape. Design a really nice object that she can turn to such as a monument or piece of jewelery.

CAKE!

2009-03-05T15:48:00.000-08:00

Guessing the weight of the cake!

Ray wins the cake with the nearest guess of 2.2kg
Ray generously shares his win!

Gestalt therapy

2009-03-05T09:51:00.000-08:00

"Gestalt therapy is an existential and experiential psychotherapy that focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist-client relationship, the environmental and social contexts in which these things take place, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of the overall situation. It emphasizes personal responsibility".

This encourages change for a moment in time. Enforcing change on the person for a moment. Like saying "i" instead of "it". Or changing your movement to an exagerration. Could i make an installation where someone has to change their behaviour for a moment.

I am considering the key words of each kind of therapy. Gestalt therapy:
-Take responsibility
-Facilitating the process and then changing it
-Prompting you to imagine and deal with that person straight away.
-Discover your own process
-Recover the loss potential
-Talk about how you feel right now

Caged model

2009-03-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

The idea is to push the clothing into the space to make for a more comfortable seat. I quite like how it is playful in that you can position it.

I am starting to consider how I can bring in playfulness to the furniture, such as a childs dart board with Velcro. The reason for this is to not look down on the hoarding; as the psychotherapist said hoarders feel as if they are in the wrong they seek to be perfect. The idea is to encourage you not to feel bad about it, and by turning the furniture into something fun and enjoyable also helps the hoarder live with the compulsion a little easier, for the short term.

small model: poke chair

2009-03-04T11:45:00.000-08:00

The idea is to poke the clothing through the holes. Except the clothing couldl be much longer than that so i need to consider whether it will still be functional.

teteknecht

2009-03-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

I'm blue prototype

2009-03-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Zawila

2009-03-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

"When approaching this subject area was not to encourage a behaviour?

When I first began researching OCD i thought it would be best to design objects/interventions to help people to carry out there compulsions but was advised by many doctors and pscychologists not to encourage a compulsion, rather to help sufferers to recognise a behaviour and try and control it.

I just focused on research to gain a good an understaning as possible, and also talking to people, sufferers, their families, self help groups, all offer valuable insight".

landfill

2009-03-01T05:05:00.000-08:00

How do objects get compressed in landfill?

How do objects get compressed in landfill?

"Landfills may include internal waste disposal sites (where a producer of waste carries out their own waste disposal at the place of production) as well as sites used by many producers. Many landfills are also used for other waste management purposes, such as the temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or processing of waste material (sorting, treatment, or recycling)".

Wok media

2009-03-01T05:04:00.001-08:00

Peter Traag

2009-03-01T04:30:00.000-08:00

"Traag is fascinated by mass-production and how it might be thwarted to make products less ‘generic’; the things he makes are governed almost entirely by his desire to challenge and unpick furniture manufacturing processes".

LTD

Vacuum moulded wool upholstery

"He began by looking at the by-products of a process: when objects are vacuum-formed, in plastic or plywood say, there are always parts that sit outside the mould and are discarded. But if you worked with fabric as structure rather than skin, the drape and gather effects at the edge of the mould could actually be quite attractive and even functional. Peter had recently been experimenting with making chairs and shoes from layers of fabric bonded and stiffened with polyethylene. He had initially used a press with a positive and negative mould to form the chairs, but eventually arrived at the vacuum-formed pieces in My World.

The fact that the form of the LTD chairs is derived from sucking multiple layers of fabric into a void is quite revelatory to grasp. It seems unfathomable that sucking gluey upholstery wool through a 2-dimensional circle or hourglass template could yield curves so perfect — twin curves indeed — or a seat so comfortable.

In a nice concession to industry standardisation, the sequence of layers making up the sofa and each chair is one-third of the exact configuration of colours in textile manufacturer’s swatch book".

Sponge

"I started thinking about the mould as a container that holds a material together, but that doesn’t have to define its form. Instead of using steel, I started working with more flexible materials like Lycra and PVC that will deform when the foam expands. The shape of the chair therefore is not completely predictable and every seat will be different.
Inside the flexible mould a fabric cover is placed which is hugely oversized so that every time the foam is injected it can go its own way producing all the wrinkles in a random fashion. Once all the foam is injected the mould is closed and the pressure of the expanding foam builds up and forms the chair".

What happens if you form the chair by sucking an upholstery skin too large for the unstable volume of material within until it fits? What happens, of course, is that you get infinitely varied crumples of fabric and compressions of foam and lots of different chairs out of a single mould and process.

130

"I started thinking about the mould primarily as a container that holds a material together, but that doesn’t have to define its form. Instead of using steel, I've worked with more flexible materials like Lycra and PVC that will deform when the foam inside is expanding (± 20 times it's volume in just 60 seconds!). The shape of the chair therefore is not completely predictable and every seat will be different.
Inside the flexible mould a fabric cover is placed which is hugely oversized so that every time the foam is injected the chair can go its own way producing all the wrinkles in a random fashion. Once all the foam is injected the mould is closed and the pressure of the expanding foam builds up and forms the chair".

Wieki somers

2009-03-01T03:59:00.001-08:00

Zinoo park

2009-03-01T02:23:00.002-08:00

Nodesign

2009-03-01T02:23:00.001-08:00

Julia Lohmann

2009-03-01T02:14:00.001-08:00

As an experiment on growth and decay I hung potatoes in tights in the window. Exposed to light, the potatoes start growing and eventually destroy the tights.

An exploration of form based on cloves of garlic.

Simone LeAmon

2009-03-01T01:46:00.000-08:00

House's I'd hate to live in.
If one’s internal world could supply an architectonic expression then what type of space would manifest through usual human affections of anxiety, heartache, loneliness and dislocation? If feeling states could be authentically translated into an architectural language I wonder if any of us would wish to live in our architectural skins?

Florence Doleac

2009-02-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

2009-02-26T08:54:00.000-08:00

Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram

2009-02-26T08:42:00.002-08:00

Joris Laarman

2009-02-26T08:42:00.001-08:00

Stephen Burks

2009-02-26T08:38:00.000-08:00

Anteeksi

2009-02-26T06:31:00.000-08:00

design for accumulation

2009-02-25T02:43:00.001-08:00

sainsburies bags created with an african technique

2009-02-24T08:24:00.000-08:00

compacting clothes

2009-02-24T08:19:00.000-08:00

interview with Harry Tyrangiel

2009-02-21T04:04:00.000-08:00

Therapeutic approach concerning a psychotherapist;

Gestalt Therapy
Transactional Analysis
Behaviour Modification

Therapy

Internal dynamics; concerning OCD.
- Sense of control and security, snese of mastering own life, defence mechanism of the anxiety.
-Dealing with underlying experience

Hoarding
- Isolating people.
- Start by relating to people, to speak about it and relate on a level contact makes them feel safe.
- Hoarding is only a replacement.

OCD is a drive to be perfect.
Give them experiments allow them to not make mistakes. Allow them to experiment.

Get them to think and then deal with the feelings.

In hoarding;
"I would focus on the process, so that she becomes aware of how she doesn't become close, strong, etc so she can observe herself. Give the patient the permission to experience her own feelings, to be vulnerable not have to be strong, not tell her to change her own behavior. Start thinking, deal with that behaviour understanding how she behaves. Seeing if there are other ways she can be comfortable and safe.

Design

Design things in which they can play and do things with others.

Design a cupboard that messes things up.

Design could help in creating things to be playful and not be perfect. Opposite of things that are well structured. Produce chaos and let them enjoy it. Hoarders want to be orderly?!!

"Art therapy?"
Yes it would enable them to be playful and experimental.
You could get her to draw, so she can experience her internal mess.

You need to understand the dynamics of hoarding. Research this.

chairs needing completion

2009-02-20T07:19:00.000-08:00

how we position ourselves in the seat?

random chairs

2009-02-20T07:09:00.000-08:00

random

2009-02-19T09:35:00.000-08:00

Saint-Etienne Design Biennale 2008: Assorted projects
http://www.core77.com/blog/archive/200811.asp

We make Remake

2009-02-19T09:33:00.001-08:00

Skirt Chair

Every Shoe Needs A Box

2009-02-19T08:37:00.000-08:00

"Retaken and reproduced in different woods, reinvented and embellished by natural tones and textures, it evokes memories of contexts and contests, of rules and rituals of shoemaking. The shoe is the omnipresent yet invisible leading figure".

Conran

2009-02-19T08:36:00.001-08:00

100 chairs 100 days

2009-02-19T08:26:00.001-08:00

Wouldn't It Be Nice..

2009-02-19T08:12:00.000-08:00

Food for thought...

an image for inspiration

2009-02-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

Martin Hampton

2009-02-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

"The film questions whether hoarding is a symptom of mental illness or a revolt against the material recklessness of consumerism".

"This is a very common and growing problem. If you know anyone who is clearly a hoarder, please try to show them this film. I would be very interested to know how they respond. A feature of the disorder is that people often deny there is a problem".

"It's a very complex problem without a quick fix, but with care and understanding it is possible to get on top of it".

"I am now researching the next stage of the project. I am trying to compile a collection of peoples experiences of OCD and other anxiety based disorders. I have found from experience that although symptoms might be similar, the actual particularities of the obsessions and compulsions are often very varied".

http://vimeo.com/603058

Post prototype presentation

2009-02-19T04:44:00.001-08:00

Rosario;

Don't do a collaborative project.

Start to make objects.

Talk to psychotherapists about project and colleges concern.

A chair can be good example.

Idea: Objects prompting accumulation. Things that grown a certain structure that prompts growth. Needs completion by accumulation. Have a structure.

Test the ideas on students considering the messy environments. Document how they use them.

Test the items on Hilary when they have been designed at the end of year before the degree show.

Art Therapy

2009-02-13T03:29:00.000-08:00

What is Art Therapy?

At some point in their lives, people may find themselves overwhelmed by the intensity of their emotions which are difficult to face either by themselves or with others. Art therapy offers an opportunity to explore these intense or painful thoughts and feelings in a supportive environment. It involves using a wide variety of art materials, for example paints, clay and batik, to create a visual representation of thought and feelings. Art Therapy can be an individual activity but is often used very successfully in group situations.

http://www.vickyb.demon.co.uk/

It's for everybody; including people with mental health problems.

As an individual, on a personal level it could be used as a means of exploring inner issues. It is a safe way to express strong and sometimes sensitive or destructive feelings. It can be used for stress and anxiety management. To enhance communication between individuals, groups or professional teams. It is used to explore change. It is of particular benefit to people experiencing difficulties with written and verbal communication.

"It’s not about being an artist, it’s about using visual symbols to explore feeling and emotions.....it’s about seeing feelings, making them visible to yourself".

Antanas Mockus Mayor of Bogota columbia

2009-02-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

"One of former Bogotá Mayor Antanas Mockus' many inspired strategies for changing the mindset - and, eventually, the behavior - of the city's unruly inhabitants was the installation of traffic mimes on street corners". Harvard University Gazette

This is a revelation in altering behaviors.

Signer

2009-02-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

Swiss artist Roman Signer might at first be thought of as 'artist as trickster.' For years he has probed simple phenomena, properties of the physical world, and the artist's relationship to often surreal realities of corporeal existence.   "Signer adds a further dimension to the concept of sculpture as we know it, a medium which, in the course of the ongoing subversion of traditional boundaries launched upon in the 1960s, had already been expanded to include unconventional materials and actions. Put simply, he examines the basic elements of fire, water and air in terms of their sculptural qualities, albeit not in the manner of Land Art, which tends to effect an overt rearrangement of natural materials within or upon the landscape."

Just doing things for the hell of it, ignoring or breaking judgements. I don't consider compulsive hoarding to be looked down on. It would be great to put an interesting fun spin on something that is perceived in a negative light. I enjoy the flying objects. It is a fun and light hearted twist.

Antoni Task 1

2009-02-10T11:51:00.000-08:00

Antoni
Lick and Lather.
{1}*used these objects to illustrate herself. Can this be applied to an experiment with a hoarder? What would it reveal?

{2.} Record people's reaction to hoarding?

"When a boyfriend dumped her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 100 women to read it - and became the star of the Venice Biennale, reports Angelique Chrisafis" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.art

Jennifer Leonard

2009-02-09T14:13:00.000-08:00

Jennifer writes about design and has recently started her own projects. She joined Bruce Mau in writing Massive change.

Lecture notes:

Dictionary mode

Identifying the root of the name, its structure, learning the rules before breaking them.

ie; Picasso, John Cage, James Joyce..

John Cage;
A distributor of a convention/ medium - music.

In design people are tearing up the notion of what design has been.

Water walk; using objects containing water to creat music. Music is about making sound, so lets make a rule of it and follow it.

Jennifer is often asked; 'what kind of design does she talk/ write about?'
Design as verb not a noun.

"Couldn't everyone's life become a work of art" Foucault.

Meaning and questioning meaning.
Look at structures and challenge them.

Janine Antoni; lick and lather.*1 . Antoni used these objects to illustrate herself. Can this be applied to an experiment with a hoarder? What would it reveal?
"When a boyfriend dumped her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 100 women to read it - and became the star of the Venice Biennale, reports Angelique Chrisafis" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.art

*2. I am curious about how technology alters behaviors, and creates convenience. Someone was recently split with on facebook, all her friends new about it apart from her.

*3. Signer, does a few crazy experiments as an art form. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA58UzPVfDg One particularly applies objects being fired out of a house, which makes me consider experiments i could create with a hoarder...

Sketch mode

Leonard set out to understand how different disciplinarians try to find solutions. She asked a range of people for their sketch book. One person doesn't have a book he worked with prototypes to figure his idea.

*4. Sketch about odds and ends?

Sculpture mode

Joseph Beuys "Every human is an artist"

Social Sculpture

7,000 oaks, community sculpture.

Participation art.

Miranda July;

"Art thats about for and other people, because i think i just need that for myself to keep sain"

*5. Can I set Sylvia various tasks? instead of the therapist.

LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE: Carol Fletcher and Miranda July

"So many opportunities to put a picture of your face online, or write what your hobbies are, and at a certain point its like who cares? Braid assignment, how many opportunities do you get to see the back of someones head"

Assignment #: Take a flash photo under your bed. Can the hoarder take photos of her home, and show them to me?

"What I like best is the complicated messed up truth!" Miranda July
"You will find it banner, in a messy room" a reassurance to the person living there that beneath all the imperfection she will find it.

Leonard did a project with students she was given a sentence to finish. "My soft spot is... inviting everyone to the party".

All disciplines identify a problem and try to solve in a similar way- I see that the work they do is design. Design is uniquely positioned to bring everyone together; multiple perspectives.

Leonard set up an exhibition called "bedroom gallery" commissioning an artist to create art for one night only, once a month. The event creating the party, with no expectations. The next event was called Joystick.

Buckminster Fuller;
"Design is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventors, mechanics, objective economists and evolutionary strategists".

What design means to you, Do something about it.

Don't let politics hold you back, break the rules.

Personal goal; "To show the great opportunists rather than the bad news on TVs, there are brilliant case studies out there that are not announced"

"I am intrigued with people who blur the boundaries"

OCD UK

2009-02-04T03:49:00.000-08:00

The signs of a compulsive hoarder are the following:

Compulsive acquisition - hoarders acquire extras of things, just in case, more than they'll ever use.

Disorganisation - hoarders find organization difficult, so things end up in haphazard piles.

Difficulty discarding - they really can't throw anything away without severe anxiety.

unrecognised neurobiological malfunctions that standard treatments do not necessarily address” Dr Saxena added that “The results emphasize the need to rethink how we categorize psychiatric disorders. Diagnosis and treatment should be driven by biology rather than symptoms,"

Unlike other forms of OCD in which patients often recognise their behaviour as irrational and senseless, hoarders tended to believe they were acting rationally, and did not need help.

Tips and suggestions for Hoarders
Throw things away straightaway without checking.
Throw things away at times the refuse collectors are coming.
Get help sorting.
Get a paper shredder.
If you cant remember the reason why you have it, get rid of it.
Buy things in limited quantities.
Stop junk mail, newspapers etc.
Set reasonable targets.
Carers and family members should change the subject when the sufferer gets angry.

the hand

2009-02-02T14:18:00.000-08:00

I am interested in the idea of designing without an object, and the potential of the hand and the expression it has of ones self.

From my context report I wrote;

"The references below form a small project.

At the German Museum of Architecture, the “Design Without an Object” exhibition included Kunstflug’s “electronic hand calculator”.

I enjoy the idea of designing without an object as a way of understanding the human aspect of design. It is fantastic how we can adjust ourselves to a particular way of using objects, and I would like to portray that in an animation of the hand, as a small project.

“The hand does not leave informed things, as it were, alone but that it continues to wave them about until the information contained within them is worn down. The hand consumes culture and transforms it into waste”. I would like to create a more humanistic approach by looking at the body’s way of dealing with objects.

“We have certain knowledge of these intimate, spaces, classifications that appear to live partly in our hands”".

There are also some key quotes from the 'hand signals' book, by Ikon gallery. These i have found support my ideas about the hand.

"Hands were often of greater significance than faces: specific gestures and movements told a story within an understood religious narrative" (pg 12)

"Tony Bevan: It is probably no accident that the hand is linked to the insight of the person: the hand seen as a mirror for parts of the mind". (pg 26)

"Images of hands can be so powerful in expression, obviously due to a generous axis of movement and a versatile set of independent fingers" (pg 34)

"How the position of hands in relation to the body (whether making a deliberate gesture or not) imply different emotional and intellectual states". (pg 9)

"Hands are both signs of self and signals which indicate content- and so the possibility of interpretation" (pg 11)

"Hands are crucial to everyday communication, expressing love, friendship, hate, surprise; acting as didactic tools (pointing things out) or, as with Kennedy and Bush, indicating acknowledgment of an audience (whether real or - through the media - invisible). (pg 11)

"Something has been created by 'the artist's hand' reveals not only the physical source of production and creativity, but also the uniqueness- and so authenticity and value- of the object". (pg 18)

order

2009-01-31T12:40:00.000-08:00

How we have conformed to order and how it affects our day to day lives. I intend to illustrate this through various projects.

Mapping out various areas of the project creates small experiments and projects.

The world of compulsive hoarders

2008-12-17T07:40:00.000-08:00

In 1947, Homer and Langley Collyer were found dead inside their New York City mansion, buried under more than 100 tons of junk. As a result, the term "Collyer Brothers" is now widely used to denote compulsive hoarding. This essay investigates the oft-made claim that Homer Collyer was a maritime lawyer and discovers he actually was a property lawyer.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5396/is_200710/ai_n21299538/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

The documentary interviewed a British man who liked to hoard rubbish. He would go out at night, collect rubbish he was interested in from dustbins. He would also keep his own excrement. This would become a health issue, as he kept some in his kitchen. This was packaged in bottles and bags, one of the health inspectors commented on how he believes the hoarder cared about it considering the way he packaged the stuff.

Whats the difference between a collector and a hoarder?
Collector; has a motive, stores the stuff in an organised manner.
Hoarder; obsessed, extreme, not necessarily happy and proud.

When hoarding its a nightmare to find anything. I want to make a drawer where you can never find anything in the drawer, this often happens when your in a hurry.

For hoarders "things replace people".

task

2008-12-09T03:54:00.000-08:00

What i want to achieve from this year?

What skills i would like to acquire?

What I would like to have created by end of year?

List some rules

Second mentor session

2008-12-08T13:46:00.000-08:00

Objects
-how do you order them
-each form of personal ordering varies from person to person
-different forms of ordering, different properties to order in several ways

Who will the end user be?

Behaviours
OCD, autism, different behaviours.
Procratination

different types of objects

Some kind of object designed for someone by end of term.

Clarify why there are objects in order.
Photograph peoples rooms and annotate it.
Why do people feel they need to categorize anything?

Take an area specifically such as books. Move away from ordering.

Become more flexible in the way you think. Reverse ideas.
Relationships with objects and behaviours. Peoples behaviours around objects.

Brain storm
-Objects
-space
-

Sean Hall

2008-12-08T13:19:00.000-08:00

Meanings
-How we create order and disorder
-Taxonomies

Order out of nothing

500 gnomes- abnormal- catches the eye
1 gnome - normal not interesting

A new species- where to categorize them

Order things in kinds- haircuts

Look into- types, kinds, categories.

The way in which we perform ordering on the world.

Disorder- when we can't see a link.

Bottom drawer is in order as it belongs to someone?

How does design come out of it?

I like design for items that catch attention and seem clever.

Putting disorder within order.

E.g. Every garden gnome is the same colour except one, which catches your attention.

Create a pattern, have it observed with disorder.
E.g a chair with a plastic leg is unusual.
-How little elements of disorder on an item grabs attention.
-the unexpected
-not point of order that makes it interesting
Create orderly things and implement disorder on it.
Fooled by order?

Sameness of look

Put images together order and disorder. Throw a spanner in the works.

Look at images repeated in google.

things to do

2008-12-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

book- list

Peter Marigold
-islamic patterns
-honey bees
-google storage systems

Matt
-preface of the order of things

Rosario
- book

Modelling week Monday

2008-12-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

words

-where disorganisation happens
-sameness
-doesn't want to be thrown away
-trapped
-regulation
-storage systems
-private space
-Behaviours
-Anti design
-stuff
-the mind
-peoples behaviours around objects
-archiving

Peter Marigold tutorial:

Items falling down back of drawer, imagining what object is holding the drawer back from closing properly.

Ways of regulating mess.

Private space;
-Someones mind
-revealing someones behaviour

-Google storage systems

Geometry
-Islamic patterns- building imperfection in designs
-Honey bees- if a bee lets a shape of honey go wrong the bee is killed.

Modelling week Peter Marigold

2008-12-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

Peter Marigold;

rejection of ostentatious and wasteful ornamentation reveals a new direction that is refreshingly free of pretence.

explore ideas rather than ‘come up’ with ideas.

During this time I have learned to think more with my head than with doodles in my sketchbook.

The world that I live in is chaotic and densely populated by junk, both collected things and simple rubbish. It’s not a perfect place but it is consistent. Like wise, English homes are usually consistent in their shared irregularities – pokey architectural spaces, weird under-hangs, and unusable corners. I was interested in how a piece of furniture might adapt to and therefore reflect our acceptance of living with these innate problems.

altering behavioural patterns

I began chopping up the geometry of simple fruit boxes, learning how the ratios between top, bottom and sliced side worked best in terms of versatility of the overall dimensions and physical behaviour. I then progressed to larger units that also incorporated crate making materials and elements – such as cheap shuttering plywood and cut out handles. I was interested in how the dual identities of the units – as shelves, and as boxes – could suggest a feeling of temporary existence (as well as adapting to the different spaces, the units can be used as packing crates when moving house).

why should we (people who make things) be attempting to imitate such processes at the initial stages of product development?
(Quotes from design museum interview with Peter Marigold)
Presentation

"British design has the ability to carry design baggage and not start from scratch"

"The nature of design, what happens when things go wrong"

"Order is chaos"

"The world is order, part of humanity"

"Breaking a drawer back down into its raw material"

"Imagining that inside objects there are other objects"

"Finding unexpected order"

"Chopping up geometry to see what happens"

"Turning a table into a leaf- turning things inside out"

Eternally Yours Time In Design

2008-12-02T02:36:00.000-08:00

by Ed Van Hinte

Notes

"Try to make products last longer"

"Because of what we are, it is quite complicated to organize ourselves in such a way that one planet is is sufficient to support us for generations to come"

Making a product last long nowadays is difficult because of technology, launching a better alternative to the previous model happens very often.

Consumption world

No limits

" We have the capacity to achieve great things in art and technology, as well as to cause extreme suffering and tragedies n each other on a daily basis".

"In addition one part of our human condition is addicted to acquiring and collecting for more things around us than we have time to handle"

"Most of what we own, we have difficulty in remembering it exists at all: 'oh yeah I have one of those too!'"

"The less money we have the more we are forced to use it to fulfill our basic needs, like food and shelter, and the more indeed we care about what we possess".

"Consumption can be regarded as an addiction"

"Clothes are acquired to keep up with fashion, or to feel warm, or just for the thrill of buying"

"By and large we put as much money into products as we can afford, just to be OK until we're dead" (Objects ordered how you would like when your dead, would you care? would you turn in your grave?)

"Marti Guixe, champion of immaterial design""job is to process diamonds as accessible non-luxurious, non-glamourous objects". "Diamonds represent an extremely high concentration of money". (www.guixe.com and www.verylustre.com)

"A posession hierarchy of value"

"Brand new things, products used everyday, objects which one has a special bond, and of course at least one car".

"We don't necessarily feel a bond with things that are used a lot, like household equipment and frustrated when something is wrong with them, or when they're gone".

"Vivian is a new product that has the potential to be kept in use for a longer time" " Vivian should remain at least acceptable despite scratches, discolourations, a few broken parts and possible repairs".

"Design is mostly a one shot deal, meant to present an identity and to immediately convince observers of an idea, or to seduce them to buy, or both".

email

2008-12-01T07:33:00.000-08:00

My project is to do with order, I want to identify an area within this
topic to create a contextual report from. I am currently unsure about what
this is. I have been reading books such as "sorting things out,
classification and its consequences" by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh
Star. "Eternally yours time in design" by Ed Van Hinte. "Joseph Cornell
vision of spiritual order" by Lindsay Blair. These books have been
inspiring and influencial. I have also been reading "The order of things"
by Michel Foucault, but found it very mundane and didn't get much from it.
I am interested in our ordering of objects. Rationalising our lives by
categorising everything, us as humans can be unrational. How order feels
like we have control in our lives. I am interested in how objects
correspond to the user/owner and technologies impact on our behavior. It
is all quite unclear still and confusing. I think order is a strong area
to study, I am just unsure about which element to start with.

I have some key words;
Categorising, Labels, Objects, Person, Space, Home, Profession, Material,
Storage, Sorting, Hoarding, Cluttering, OCD, Rigidity, Perception,
Archiving, Structure, patterns,Infrastructure, technology, visibility,
standards, disorder, privacy, habits,the self.

OCD

2008-11-30T07:26:00.000-08:00

"A mental order characterized by intrusive repetitive thoughts resulting in compulsive behaviors and mental acts".

Joseph Cornell' vision of spiritual order

2008-11-30T06:19:00.000-08:00

notes

"He kept a record of everything he thought, saw or felt in his dossiers, those files that he meticulously stored, clasified and returned to throughout his career".

"Cornell identified the creative mind as his ultimate subject".

"It is clear that one reason his art remained so self-concerned was because he sought always to recreate the remembered qualities of this childhood".

"Andre Breton, in his first Surrealist manifesto of 1924, wrote that Surrealism was psychic automism in its pure state, by which one purposes to express- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner- the actual functioning of though, in the absense of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aestheric or moral concern".

"Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought".

"As can be seen from his celebrated definition, the emphasis is on process, and a process that resembles the free association of psychoanalysis rather than anything to do with creativity or craft"

"The function of art is very much to reveal to the creator the actual workings of the mental and creative processes. From here it is easy to see why collage was so much a favoured form for the Surrealists"

"Cornell's work was part of a continuing struggle to come to terms with consciousness", He "completely validated his researches into the self"

'Nothing, after all, could be more selfconscious than an obsessive habit of noting, hoarding and storing the history of one's own mind"

Cornell once said according to David Mann who exhibited his work; "You don't know how terrible it is to be locked into boxes all your life, you have

no idea what a terrible thing it is".

"His largest dossier, yet one that has received little notice, displays the neurosis that threatened to envelop him as he strove to create a system of classification that would make some order out of the relentless tide of associations that flood

ed his mind".

"He had wanted to invent, recreate a miniature universe- this we see most acutely in his Soap Bubble Sets"

"either timelessness exists or all times do"

"It was his spirit that essentially, he tried to recover in his boxes".

"The artists urge towards self-revelation is everywhere apparent".

"His work is always a dialogue with- as well as a projection of -the self".

"He ordered and catalogued his responses in an elaborate system of dossiers,a system he maintained throughout his life"

"He noted in his diary 'the prospect of cluttered cellar- / creative filing / creative arranging / as poetics / as technique / as joyous creation'".

"We can see that his decision to work wth dossiers" "- was an attempt to control, categorize and label the wealth of material that flooded in".

the order of things, Michel Foucaut

2008-11-30T05:21:00.001-08:00

notes

"these proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations"

Order is a matter of convenience

the limits of the world

the writing of things

'that is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, on vast single text".

"because things hide and manifest their own enigma like a language and because words offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered". (page 39; language).

"It must therefore be studied itself as a thing in nature"

"language is not what it is because it has meaning; its representative content, which was to have such importance".

Bernd and Hilla Becher

2008-11-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

"Their work embodies an ethical model of discipline and painstaking persistence, made unforgettable in the controlled beauty of the images they give us", Charles. B. Wright, Pennsylvania coal mine tipples dia center for arts.

"The minehead constructions for hauling the coal to the surface called tipples, are made from simple materials, adapted to the particular topography, the location of the coal beds and the conditions to removal of the coal".

Fantastic images, the tipples alter in shape and size. I made some sketches of the constructions. I am curious that each construction was different in shape and form but were all built to do the same thing. The combination of pieces that form the tipple looks random but obviously serves its purpose. They are intriguing as I can't believe some of them can perform sufficiently.

Becher on Becher by Kahn

"Idris Kahn's super imposed photographs, trade on a rigourous methodology of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Khan's photographs superimpose each photograph from one of the Becher's series onto one another to form a single photograph". http://www.gravestmor.com/wp/archives/2006/06/25/becher-on-becher-by-kahn/

Different forms of order; wikipedia

2008-11-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

* "Order is a decoration. Order of the thistle. Order of Garter (above).An object, such as a medal, that is awarded to honor the recipient ostentatiously. Modern orders are usually open to all citizens of a particular country, regardless of status, sex, race or creed. Once awarded, an order may be revoked if the individual dies, commits a crime, or renounces citizenship. Rarely, a dissident becomes awarded, and due to personal beliefs refuses to accept it. Honor".

* "Chivalric orders are orders of knights that were created by European monarchs in imitation of the military orders of the Crusades. After the crusades, the memory of these crusading military orders became idealised and romanticised, resulting in the late medieval notion of chivalry, and is reflected in the Arthurian romances of the time".

*"A "fraternal organization" or "fraternity," is a brotherhood, though the term usually connotes a distinct or formal organization".

There is a lot of categories concerning this type of ordering. I will look into at a later stage, this is related to what I have already been looking at.

The aspect of order that i am most interested in is ordering items, not dictating order.

*"Metamodeling, or meta-modeling, is the analysis, construction and development of the frames, rules, constraints, models and theories applicable and useful for modeling a predefined class of problems".

*"Data synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data on remote sources and the continuous harmonization of the data over time".

* "In computing, a canonical order is the order of elements that obeys a certain set of rules or specifications".

* "A classical order is one of the ancient styles of building design in the classical tradition, distinguished by their proportions and their characteristic profiles and details, but most quickly recognizable by the type of column and capital employed".

This encourages me to think about Bernd and Hilla Becher who photographed buildings that appear mundane, are slightly different and ordering them. Except that the design is not considered.
"Predominantly instrumental in character, who's shapers are the result of calculation and who's processes of development are optically evident. They are generally buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style. Their peculiarities originate not inspite of, but because of the lack of design"
Anonyme Skulpturen, Becher.

*"In urban planning, the notion of "public order" refers to a city containing relatively empty (and orderly) spaces which allow for flexibility in redesigning the city's layout; such perceptions played an important role in the establishments of suburbs. According to this point of view, the traditional notion of a "downtown" is often seen as disorderly".

It is interesting that because there is an unused space it has a necessity to be filled, I don't see why, is it our greed that encourages us?

"It has been suggested that cultural affinity is a means to find protection from the perceived disorder of the rest of the city".

*" David Bohm proposed a cosmological order radically different from generally accepted conventions, which he expressed as a distinction between the implicate and explicate order, described in the book Wholeness and the Implicate Order:

In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders (Bohm, 1980, p. xv)".

I intend to evaluate these items further..

sorting things out

2008-11-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

Sorting things out; classification and its consequences. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star.

Quotes that I find interesting.

“Materials that constrain and enable biological researchers. Rats, petri dishes, taxidermy, planaria, drosophila, and test tubes take center stage in this narrative”.

“Many classifications appear as nothing more than lists of numbers with labels attached, buried in software menus, user’s manuals , or other references”.

“In the built world we inhabit, thousands and thousands of standards are used everywhere, from setting up the plumbing in a house, to assembling a car engine to transferring a file from one computer to another”.

“There are standards for paper size, the distance between lines in lined paper, envelope size, the glue on the envelope, the size of stamps, their glue, the ink in a pen, the sharpness of its bib, the composition of the paper and so forth”.

INFRASTRUCTURE
“Embeddedness; Infrastructure is sunk into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies”

“Transparency; Infrastructure is transparent to use in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks”.

“Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice; for example; the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by affect electrical power night rates and needs”.

“Built on an installed basis”

“Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are backup mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now visible infrastructure”.

notes

Ubiquity

"classifications schemes and standards literally saturate our environment".

"In the built world we live in thousands and thousands of standards are used everywhere"

"Becoming irate"; "Becker had succeeded in unearthing a little of the hidden classificatory apparatus behind the scenes of the airline. He notes that the interaction after this speeded up and went particularly smoothly". I familiarise with speeding up a piece of technology that is standardised. When I used to put credit on my phone I would have to follow a sequence of questions and say yes or no, or press a number, i would press it as quickly as possible just as the question is about to be asked, sometimes it worked and other times it didn't. I am curious about how we can manipulate technology the way it is programmed. It is interesting how we quicken up, because often when you buy a state of the art piece of equipment we are startled and excited by how clever it is, it feels so powerful, that we can't understand how to use it. But once we understand it and get into the habit of using it, its like second nature to us. So we become cleverer than the item, once we have sussed its limits. Often my impatience encourages me to mess around with the item and explore its limitations.

"We also need concepts for understanding movements, textures, and shifts that will grasp patterns within the ubiquitous larger phenomenon".

"Other's are everywhere, structuring social order"

Materiality and texture

"built into and embedded in every feature of the built environment"

"physical entities, such as paper forms, plugs, or software instructions encoded in silicon, and conventional arrangements such as speed and rhythm, dimension, and how specifications are implemented".

The indeterminacy of the past

"Multiple voices and silences are represented in any scheme that attempts to sort out the world"

Practical politics

"Investigating categories and standards as technologies".

"Arriving at categories and standards , and, along the way, deciding what will be visible or invisible within the system".

"even when everyone agrees on how classifications or standards should be established, there are often practical difficulties about how to craft them. For example, a classification system with 20,000 bins n every form is practically unusable for data entry purposes. The constraints of technological record keeping come into play at every turn".

Infrastructure and method: convergence.

Standards, categories, technologies, and phenomenology are increasingly converging in larger-scale information infrastructure"

"we are concerned with what they do pragmatically speaking as scaffolding in the conduct of modern life".

Resistance

"Donald MacKenzie's (1990) wonderful study of "missile accuracy" furnishes the best example of this approach. In a concluding chapter of his book, he discusses he possibility of "uninventing the bomb" by which he means changing society and technology in such a way that the atomic bomb becomes an impossibility".

"Standards and classifications, however dry and formal on the surfaces, are suffused with traces of political and social work. Whether we wish to uninvent any particular aspect of complex information structure is properly a political and a public issue"

"Others are almost accidental- systems that become so complex that no one person and no organisation can predict or administer good policy".

conversing with Isolda

2008-11-28T08:30:00.000-08:00

Concluded with possible ways to take my project.

Hiding away stuff- objects representing temporary situations. We have the skill to forget and move on. Except the object is still the same, but we can perceive it in a different way.

An objects life span; the order is how we have established its life to be. Is the objects life over because its old? out of fashion? broken? deteriorating?

Broken, break object on purpose and see what it reveals? The object doesn't need to be 3d it could be a graphic piece, guessing what could be inside. It could be metaphorical, relate to exposure and how an open wound feels like exposure.

Do we like to have order in our lives to have control?

Since we were born we have lived through an established type of order.

Labels in ordering? Everything around us has a name. Different meanings for particular words.

Dance; breaking free from order, to feel visible and feel important boosting confidence. Break the mould. ( I am afraid of my

What can bring freedom of order?

A tool for control. There are christmas songs everywhere that we are forced to listen to.

What are the aspects of freedom dance? - tactile - patterns- language established within dance.

Creating a path of destruction

Experiments

*A room that once stepped into changes the structure of the music and causes disorder. It could be a good thing or a bad thing. (create many objects, sites or situations where something is in order but changes once something is implemented).

*A space that controls the way you behave. It moves you around in the space.

*Create a space for different people to live in for a certain amount of time, and catalogue what they do in the space. Order it? work in it? Looking at peoples behavior within a space. Spacial order.

*OCD, is it a fashion?

*Joseph Cornell; perhaps order brings uncanny things?

"He kept a record of everything he though, saw or felt in his dossiers, those files that he meticulously stored, classified and returned throughout his career".

Spend a week recording everything?

*Document the order of my room, I don't always like being in the same order, so i often change it around. Such as the positioning of my bed.

*Catalogue visuals within order.

old post it list

2008-11-28T08:06:00.000-08:00

I am reflecting on a list i found in my diary put together for post it note day. I think they were more like wonderment. I thought it could help me in my progress but in fact I have identified that what i am working on now is much more intelligent. The below in bold is some things that might have some relation to my project.

1- Designing for abandoned children in Bulgaria

2- Mobile phone era

3- Language and communication constant change

4- Influences - moulded by society and family

5- Body changes - how we can alter ourselves and manipulation

6- Intimidation

7- Music and technology

8- Different eating habits

9- Addictions

10- Using existing material to transform into another object

11- Programming; romanticism, politics.

12- Global warming

13- Cycling in London

14- Drama

15- Design art debate

16- Articulation

17- Greed

18- Designing without focusing on end product

19- Constantly proving ourselves- being graded

20- Valuing products is a matter of boasting confidence and ego.

21- Designers position these days, what the job encompasses.

22- Negativity in London

23- Speed

24- Excitement over celebrities

25- Creating different kinds of design practice

26- Further an old degree project

ORDER

2008-11-25T09:08:00.000-08:00

Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. This is commonly called alphabetisation, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet. Collating lists of words or names into alphabetical order is the basis of most office filing systems, library catalogs and reference books.

Collation differs from classification in that classification is concerned with arranging information into logical categories, while collation is concerned with the ordering of those categories.

Advantages of sorted lists include:

one can easily find the first n elements (e.g. the 5 smallest countries) and the last n elements (e.g. the 3 largest countries)
one can easily find the elements in a given range (e.g. countries with an area between .. and .. square km)
one can easily search for an element, and conclude whether it is in the list, e.g. with the binary search algorithm or interpolation search either automatically, or, roughly and perhaps unconsciously, manually.

A collation algorithm, e.g. the "Unicode collation algorithm", differs from a sorting algorithm: the first is a process to define the order, which corresponds to the process of just comparing two values, while a sorting algorithm is a procedure to put a list of items in this order.

Collation defines a total preorder on the set of possible items, typically by defining a total order on a sortkey. Note however that in the case of e.g. numerical sorting of strings representing numbers, the strings are only partially preordered, because e.g. 2e3 and 2000 have the same ranking, and 2 and 2.0 also. The numbers represented by the strings are totally ordered.

Gabrielle Roth

2008-11-25T08:08:00.000-08:00

5rhythms

"Begin to practice staying open to how you feel, whatever it is"

" People maybe experimenting with being loud, big, bold, timid, intimate, self-contained"

How we order ourselves within a space

The five rhythms:

1. Flowing

2. Staccato

3. Chaos

4. Lyrical

5. Stillness

"Each rhythm is a teacher and you can expect to meet different and sometimes unknown aspects of yourself as you dance unfolds"

"A series of healing maps for the body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit that provide a lifetime of self discovery and a path to awakening".

"Like the body, they are alive and designed to catalyze the dancers movement expression in the moment. You are different everytime you walk into the room, so is the group and so is the teacher"

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xYMdlKWaEEY

For people "Trapped in self-consciousness" worried about their weight for example.

"Drown out that voice by the beat"

5rhythms not only "work out the body but the soul"

"Chaos is art, nature of life itself, inhale and exhale collide" "connect to individual pattern"

"To get to know ourselves in a field of energy".

People in order

2008-11-25T07:56:00.000-08:00

People in order by Lenker Clayton and James Price

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GUHLa1qSy24

First mentor session

2008-11-19T03:35:00.001-08:00

Group discussion

I am in a group of four students with my mentor Alex. I explained the point my project was at. Ordering randomness.

Alex suggested the book "sorting things out" Order classification systems.

Come away from randomness

Therapy OCD - traits

Look further into OCD

Things being regularly ordered.

Peoples perception of random.

Peoples ordering practice- screwing up paper.

Perceptions of random.

Perfection.

Organise a research process for self- pulling out observations and insights.

Find an area; utopian idea of perfection.

Expanding more.

The Bodlien Library needs expanding, there is an obvious ordering problem.

Archiving;

Institutional forms of ordering.

Personal ordering- hoarding

How different things are ordered.

Into order and out of order.

Implementing a system within order.

Books are an obvious thing to order. What else can be ordered?

Measuring, to what extent is it beneficial?

Alex's advice

Sharpen up analytical skills. Be critical of area. Be inquisitive. What else could it be. Think about what something is. Make an analytical move so it changes. Go out and find more information. Get involved.

Peoples ordering practices

-what kind of conditions related to OCD.

Disorder is more interesting than random.

Institutional practices.

Take in different types of ordering.

-what could I order?

(myself could be uninteresting)

A disorderly process of things becoming disorderly.

Bernd and Hilla Becher two German photographers, implemented photographic ordering systems on buildings.

Technologies of orderings

classification systems

Gene material

Objective; Much firmer idea of what I'm interested in. Say exactly what the project is about, it will be grounded.

Mapping my project

2008-11-18T01:32:00.000-08:00

Putting randomness in order

When reflecting on information I have subjected myself to I can start to see links.

Mapping your creativity putting it into order, measuring your stages.

Taking pictures of my desk as my idea of a diary. Is cataloguing the randomness I am creating in my own space.

The exhibition we saw with Rosario in Ealing Broadway. Catogorising objects to convey information.