On (Design) Failure II

Almost exactly a year ago, I shared a story about failure in the shop. Perhaps, after 12 months of middling successes, I was due for another one. Unlike the previous failure, the Barrel Chair, this one works, in some sense of the word. 

Over the last few weeks at work, at the ReBuild Foundation, we've been in the middle of shuffling our studio and shop as leases change and new spaces come on line. As we palletized piles of material, we chewed through dozens of rolls of packing plastic -- a sort of industrial cling-wrap. It came on 3-1/4" diameter cardboard rolls. I found a few more tubes of a similar diameter in a dumpster in our building.

The raw materials.

The Brothers Bouroullec

Today, I took a bike ride down the side of Lake Michigan for my inaugural visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Despite having lived here for more than a year, I've never made it down to the MCA. Sitting in the shadow of the Hancock building and Mies' Lakeshore towers, the building is a strict concrete box.

They seem to favor the blue and green.

The show that finally lured me downtown was Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: Bivouac. The Bouroullecs are French brothers, born in the early 1970s, who have been practicing since the mid-nineties. They first started garnering some serious attention around the time I was an undergraduate studying architecture, popping up in the design glossies and various museums. By 2009, when they appeared in Gary Hustwit's industrial design documentary Objectified, they had ascended to a rare plane, working across the borders of art, architecture, furniture design, design theory, and mass-market manufacturing. They have produced pieces for  Cappellini, Ligne Roset, Alessi, and Vitra, amongst others.

L-R: Michael Darling, Erwan Bouroullec, Ronan Bouroullec.

Google Maps and the Design of Memory

A few months ago, I wrote a post about Facebook's then-looming IPO and a business model predicated upon the redesign of human memory. Today, I heard a podcast from The Story, an interview show out of North Carolina. One of the secondary spots in the program concerned Google Street View. Guest host Sean Cole introduced the piece with his own Street View experience, wherein he, as a young man, realizes his bike is stolen as he is on the phone with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. All of this crystallizes in his memory when Cole looks up his old apartment on Google. His bike is still locked up in front of the building, waiting for its owner to hop on and ride to a date with his girlfriend. 

That is a lot of baggage to hang onto a grainy, digitally refracted photo of an old walk-up in Brooklyn. But it gets heavier. Cole introduces Erin, an old friend, who has archived several Street View screenshots of the house she grew up in. The front yard still holds her father's beat-up old Suburban, covered in University of Wisconsin stickers. It has been gone for years, sold after her father committed suicide by jumping off of a parking garage. He left no note, but did leave voicemails on Erin's phone and, unconsciously, a faint imprint on the internet. So she treasures these things, as I think we all would, backing up the voicemails to her computer and saving these screenshots in case the SV team comes back and updates their data. 

My last apartment in Chicago.

The Neuroticism of Craft

Last year, I designed and built a series of six chairs from road signs, all nearly identical.  The chair shells were folded aluminum signs and the bases were made from good 'ol Alabama pecan wood, milled, sanded, and lacquered within an inch of their life.  They turned out pretty well. I wrote an article about them, got paid, and enjoyed them for about a week.  Then, one day after work, I sat down in one of them, and the two joints in the back legs blew out.  The chair collapsed.  I smacked my elbow and my head pretty hard on the way to the floor.


Time passed.  The rest of the chairs seemed fine, more or less; the broken one had a flawed joint in the back, which gave way once my weight was leaned back into the seat.  However, I was nervous every time I sat in one from there on out, and especially nervous that someone else, perhaps bigger than me, might sit in one and break it.  I'm fine with breaking my own creations, but the paranoia and anxiety and embarrassment around the idea of someone else possibly injuring themselves and thinking I was a moron was almost too much to handle.  


I had broken a cardinal rule of design -- putting form above function.  In my desire to have a sleek, light form, I had ignored some structural considerations.  The back legs were extremely slanted -- over 20 degrees.  That joint, where the cross-piece intersected, bit too deeply into those back legs, weakening the wood there.  The legs splayed in only one axis -- front-to-back -- which made the chair unstable side-to-side.  The stock for the legs, at 1" square, was not strong enough to resist the twist and tension in the folded aluminum signs, which meant the legs didn't all hit the ground evenly once the base was bolted to the sign.  The 3/4" dowels I used as cross pieces were also not strong enough to resist side-to-side motion.  The base was essentially a series of parallelograms, with no triangulation, which led to a lack of stiffness.

The original chairs, pretty as you please.

Algorithmic

On Monday morning, I went to grab a cup of coffee at a little cafe by my work.  I overheard two young guys having a business meeting at a table by the window.  One, in motorcycle jacket and stylishly-slashed jeans, was pitching to the other, talking about creating a decision engine for our leisure-time activities.  The rest of their conversation drifted in and out of earshot, but I couldn't get that phrase -- decision engine -- out of my head.  I paid for my coffee, dumped in some cream, and made for the door.  As I walked back to the office, cutting down the alley, I thought over that choice of words; a techie, slang-y take on an abstract concept that also sounds fundamentally dumb.  Break it down for minute: decisions are rational thoughts that generate human actions and behavior, while engines are big, brainless brutes that generate mechanical action in support of human behavior.  So, do we really want an engine spewing out decisions like so much horsepower?


Since the mid-nineties, Americans have greedily slurped up every hop, skip, and leap forward in technology, from flat-screen TVs to broadband internet to the now-ubiquitous mobile web.  I'm speaking to you now on a platform that has revolutionized people's ability to self-publish while actually reaching an audience.  Lots of things have fallen by the wayside, from pets.com to Napster -- one might call them the inevitable casualties of forward progress.  One fundamental success of Web 2.0 and beyond has been the rise of all of these engines, generating associations by plugging your eminently trackable web behavior into algorithms.  


Amazon comes up with recommendations based on books you've bought, books you've browsed, and books other people have bought.  Netflix analyzes what you've watched, what you've rated, and what's in your queue to come up with absurdly specific categories of movies you might be interested in.  Pandora builds a library of music upon your diligence in clicking on a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon.  Google has begun to filter and customize your search results based on your previous searches and cookies embedded in your browser, especially if you use Chrome.  Google Maps uses algorithms to determine the best route, based on a matrix of speed limits, lane widths, and number of traffic lights.