Think Tank

• More than meme?
• A different type of prototyping

New digital design tools have given birth to something new, potentially wonderful, often silly, and dare I say even "green": the transition from the "experience of the artifact" to the "consumption of the idea of the artifact."

Take for example Worth1000.com, which hosts contests that draw hundreds or even thousands of design submissions. Members use Adobe® Photoshop® to alter images, based on a given competition theme—from Alternate Materials-Wood (where designers reimagine manufactured goods as solid wood), to Supersize It! 7, where designers explore gargantuan food portions. Designers try to out-do one another by interpreting the theme as creatively as possible.

Still at Worth1000.com, make-believe starts to bump up against the real world, as in the competition to design Apple's Next Product (A conspicuous number of toilets show up in this one; favorites here are the "iReallyGottaGo," the "iToilet," and the sweetly-named "iPotty.")

Figure 1: The "Carpet Lounge" Imagined on Idealist by Felipe Zanardi.

Of course, the second-guessing of the next Apple iTeration has been going on for years: Early forums were ipodlounge.com and random posts throughout engadget.com. In fact, juried design competitions are, by definition, sandboxes for creating ideas for things that don't exist—call them “fictional products.” But what is new is the high power (and low price) of the tools used to create these fictional ideas, coupled with the speed, ease, and reach of the tools for distributing them. Thousands of designers all over the world are churning out ideas for products that will not—and probably should not—ever be manufactured. And suddenly, what at first seemed like a humorous aside now seems to be taking over the center stage.

At a site called Idealist, designers upload images of fictional products that they concoct in 3D rendering software, and post for critique...in the form of everyone's favorite internet metric: voting. Here, Lego's Ice Bricks ice cube tray has garnered 224 votes, while Anna Lopez's Cario Notebook—a catastrophically bad idea—has tallied up a mere 12.

Now, Idealist is a great place to go for a laugh and an even better place for design prospectors trying to spot the next commercializable product. And there's confusion here, since it's so hard to tell the real prototypes from the "fake," or fictional, ones. It's tempting to think that for designers visiting the site, the fictional projects help to define a creative space free from market constraints. But it's more likely that people posting fictions are just as interested in voter validation as those posting for-production prototypes. Is all the cream that rises to the top suitable for consumption? That depends what you mean by consumption.

Figure 2: "Sketch Furniture" by Front Design.

Front Design's "Sketch Furniture" stunt was blogged the world over and enjoyed by most as a YouTube video. Now, the thing about the Front Design piece is that it is perfectly consumable as an idea. We probably don't need to see it live, and we certainly don't need to buy or own the furniture itself—it's probably not very good by any straight metric. But it's REAL good as a design gesture—for exploring the relationship between 2D and 3D; the nature of manufacturing and production; the notion of mass customization and personalization; or the grace notes of dance, or poetry, or instant gratification, or myriad other lenses you could view this video through.

The same goes for a popular video (well, a video of a one-off product) called "Walking Table", where an unassuming dining table has been outfitted with legs that "walk" when the thing is pushed across the floor. I don't need to own that table, and nobody really needs to manufacture it. I wouldn't mind pushing it across a gallery floor mind you, but it's probably best experienced as an "idea" of a product, rather than an item that gets shipped via UPS.

Figure 3: The "Walking Table" as seen on YouTube

More than a meme?

After you've scrolled through some iDesign imaginings, fictional products, and YouTube videos, what exactly are you supposed to do with them? You can forward away to a friend in an email, or you can blog them if you're a blogger, or you can simply close your browser and get back to work.

But I'd argue to not dismiss them quite so easily; that these design ideas, even when they're patently absurd, provide something that is very worthwhile. They exists as small stories—discursive gestures, narrative indulgences, even evocative abstractions. They travel virally exactly because they are there first to tell a story, not because they serve a function. And when you think about it, this isn't such a bad place for design to be right now. Too many of our products are function first/form second—or form first/function second—with narrative, story-telling elements nowhere to be found. How bad would it be if our products began with narrative in the first place; with an idea of the experience of the product in mind, before that product ever had the chance to turn into landfill? Not bad at all, really.

Scott Klinker, 3-D Designer-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, argues that more and more product designers are now exploiting the power of storytelling to probe user behaviors, find experience "touchpoints," create novel forms, and ultimately deliver new product experiences. "'Designer as Author,'" he reasons, "is an emerging concept in education that seeks to fill this cultural void—where products are not slaves to function, where sometimes Form follows Art, where products can be ideas first and utility second, where new stories lead the market—not follow it, and where design proposals introduce alternative social values into pop culture."

Figure 4: "Blendie," the interactive blender, by Kelly Dobson.

Kelly Dobson is an artist and technologist who just completed her PhD at M.I.T., and spends much of her time creating machines that challenge the relationship between human and machine. (She grew up in a junkyard, for what it's worth.) In her most well-known work, Blendie, she outfitted a kitchen blender with a microphone and software such that users "growl" at the machine in order to activate it. Growl low and slow and the blender will spin to match; high and shrieking and you'll have the equivalent of purée. In another work, she created a pouchlike chestpack in which users can scream—the pouch both muffles the scream from others and records it. Wearers can then play the scream back later by squeezing the sides of the pouch. For some, her work is an exploration of what could be; for others though, her pieces are complete works. They're designed and engineered, and they function well. But they're not intended to be mass-produced. Which begs the question: To what degree are products like these real at all? Or rather, to what degree are these products, well, products?

Many designers are getting wise to the incredible power of the design blog space and the opportunities it provides designers to submit design gestures to be appreciated as ideas, rather than for some far-off goal of manufacturability.

A different kind of prototyping

Most of the artifacts discussed so far weren't designed for mass production, but they were designed for mass consumption. Indeed, many designers are getting wise to the incredible power of the design blog space and the opportunities it provides designers to promote their creative ideas, regardless of manufacturability. This is a sweet, post-modern idea of a meta kind, echoed in the current mania around "design art"—limited edition pieces that straddle the art world (in price and exclusivity, mostly), but grounded in design intention. And one could argue that products "produced" once and mass-distributed online are in some sense no less real than physical, corporeal products. They're just real for a different purpose. And they're consumed in a different way. Maybe a better way.

Branku Lukic has explored this territory in a book he's putting together entitled NonObject: Design Fiction, edited by Jennifer Leonard, and with a preface by IDEO's Bill Moggridge. Branku sees fictional products as a way to re-imagine our design artifacts, and to break the cycle of deductive, linear thinking. "There isn't any object in your home that isn't the result of a business proposal," Branko asserts, aluding to the limiting nature of persona-based design processes, endless focus-grouping, and obsessive risk reduction. "I left the world of design consulting precisely because I felt that the power of design hasn't near been realized." Jennifer Leonard, who's no stranger to imagining futures (she co-authored Bruce Mau's Massive Change tome) further articulates the difference between the design business-as-usual, and the promise of Lukic's initiative: "NonObject is all about unabashed, even absurd, imagination provocation," she remarks. "And I am all for that, especially since design has more buttoned-up tendencies than its art, fashion and film relatives. I think it’s largely because of the hefty load design is carrying around these days. So projects like NonObject do design a lot of good. They give design permission to drop its baggage and go outside and play."

One could never underestimate the value of play, of course—especially for designers—but what of the sandbox itself? Does this fictional design space have a name?

Well, even when we're generating virtual artifacts expressly with the purpose of creating something funny to email, or of getting published on design blogs or in magazines, what we're really talking about here is the notion of prototyping. Only it's a kind of prototyping which—since it's so easy to do (the increased power of tools part), and so easy to share (the internet collaboration, aggregation, and dissemination part)—offers the potential of a large return for a little effort. For some artifacts, this prototyping represents a kind of graphic discussion then (the competitions on Worth1000); for other artifacts, the prototyping is aimed at getting to the conceptual import of the thing (Sketch Furniture, or Blendie); for others still, the prototyping is just for prototyping—for evaluation, iterating, reducing risk, and trying to learn something before you commit the farm (the "real" prototypes at Idealist).

Maybe the most useful question to ask here then is whether working "virtually" changes what we do "in real life"? And of course it does. On the prosaic level, we can try-before-we-buy to our hearts' content: from annual reports in InDesign to wind tunnel simulations on PCs; from spinning 3D models of cell phones to Flash demos of interactive banking kiosks. But on a conceptual level, I hope the answer is also yes. Playing out "what if" scenarios has well served designers, conceptual artists, and provocateurs of all stripes to explore their craft; to take license (or to take "design permission," using Leonard's phrase) with what is expected, what is sensible, or what is pragmatic. Design fictions remake the playing field into something beyond a commercial go/no go enterprise; they let designers ask "what if?"

When we consider the near-future of on-demand printing, rapid prototyping machines, and home fabbers, the distinction between "prototyping tools" and "production tools" breaks down almost entirely. And for much of what designers produce, there may be no mandate to mass-produce their work at all. If the "ideas of design" are just as effective at communicating thoughts around experience, behavior, culture, and enterprise as the injection-molded kind, there's really no necessity for these virtual artifacts to ever leave the virtual realm. It may indeed be best to leave them in the sphere of ideas—consuming them through pixels and sharing them across networks and communities—rather than hauling them around in shipping containers and disposing of them as soon as we're bored.

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