Our society cannot live without the objects that make up our everyday lives. If we didn’t have any non-living items in the world, what would we all do with ourselves? We would go absolutely crazy, so as a society, culture, we tend to give meaning to such inanimate objects. We give value to the invaluable. In the documentary, Objectified, Gary Hustwit illustrates this idea, regarding the way manufactured design and the objects we use every day without even thinking about them affect our lives and become a part of our stories.
This really begins to make sense once you realize that from the moment we wake up almost everything that fills our world has been designed in some way. From the gardening sheer, to the post-it note, the things we use every day come from someone who created them for a specific purpose in a very intentional way. Although we barely think about the objects we use other then the fact that, “hey I bought this, lemme use it,” these objects tremendously improve, affect our efficiency and practicalities of our lives and they also make a statement about who we are.
(google images)
One of the most important and influential objects in our lives is the “car.” What was once a handcrafted product has now become a mass-produced design. The form of a car was intentionally introduced to society for improving transportation in a growing industrialized nation. However, it quickly become mass-produced and the handcrafted, individualistic design diminished, just like that of the Briar Pipe, now stripped of uniqueness for mass-production. Yet, nowadays, your identity is often linked to the car you drive. Again, we have put value and meaning to objects like metal and paint, to a car. How ridiculous, or is it?
Yet it is the elements of design, the medium that directly interacts with our own ideas and assumptions about value and functionality. And these values are culture driven, so it makes sense that our car-obsessed culture puts great valuable meaning on these objects we’ve brought into our lives. Even the look and feel of the “car”, its smooth sleek sides and massive protective body reflects how the feel=form and the form=purpose. And it is then in the context of usage for the object that reflects the content of its form. Where will you use it? Why? For Whom? It is vital to note how the content within the culture effects how the objects designed give such external agency through the design of its form and how it is used. In Social Scientist, George Simmel’s words, "culture refers to the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." Simmel presented his analyses within a context of 'form' and ‘content’ which shows how form and content have such a transient relationship. “Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship; form becoming content, and vice versa, dependent on the context.” In a way, you could say the interactions of form and content, are also of that between art and life.
No comments:
Post a Comment