The world of compulsive hoarders

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

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

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

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

book- list

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

Matt
-preface of the order of things

Rosario
- book

Modelling week Monday

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

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

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

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.