Submit article

Destroy the things you love

Posted By: warren | Date posted: 18 March 2008

when product design turns anarchist

Destroy the things you love

“Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.”
From the destructors by Graham Greene

Destruction is a liberating process; both physically and spiritually. Total destruction creates space for new, partial destruction can make new from old, or make something more a part of what went before.
Destruction in terms of a nuclear-war-head-blow-the-shit-outta-them and screw-the-consequences is obviously a short sighted view for us as humanity.
But stop and think about the aftermath…
A few fragmented homo-sapien survivors, scrambling over pock marked landscapes, fighting tooth and nail to survive, chased by super-intelligent cockroach warlords, all scouring the globe for untouched oases.
-Slightly fantastical but still quite intriguing.
The point being the end is not the end. It’s the start of something different.
Now scale that destruction down by about a billion or so and examine what you have in your pockets. Really stare at those car keys, or that mobile phone. Look at the torrid destruction reaped down upon these harmless inanimate objects by you. You are the a-bomb; you are a cataclysm for these objects. But they are yours. Not Bob, Geoff or Osama’s’. -YOURS.
Sure Bobs got the same keys as you, and Geoff has the same phone. You and Osama even bought your car the same week; same model and everything. But each of these objects changes as a consequence of the experiences you put it through. And because it changes it becomes more yours.
According to Bruce Stirling, a futurist thinker, we live in:
“An economy of experiences”
Objects are attainable disposable and not unique. Experiences are qualitative, living events that shape who we are. However these inanimate products can serve as a link to things with more intrinsic psychological value. They are the breadcrumbs that lead us back to the light of ‘that day when…’
Why hunt through stalls of perfectly square biscuits when you can have miss-shapes. All biscuits should be misshapes. (Arguably they all are.)
Be the person with paint on your jeans, a rip in your shirt and a crack in your phones screen.
Who cares about signal strength? You’ll try and make the call anyway. Or stand waving your arms like a lunatic sending the message. Because here’s the money-maker:
In a throw-away society, emotional value gains precedence.
If you want people to love and keep your designs make them emotionally indispensable.
Your mum wouldn’t throwaway a crayon drawing you did when you were four, but she hurls hundreds of pieces of paper out a week.
So I say we go forth and hurl our I-pod’s from the roofs of skyscrapers until their within an inch of their USB-plug-and-play-minimalist-full 65k-screen lives.
Then cello tape 'em back together and love them more for it.