Hasta La Ideas

Martin Bone is one of us. The opening pages of his collaboration with Kara Johnson, I Miss My Pencil, include fetishistic shots of everyday objects like kitchen knives and attache cases that the authors know and love. In the short blurbs of text that accompany the beautiful product shots, Johnson explains a part of the product lifecycle that designers too often ignore. Recounting the effect of a ding on her experience as a car owner, she explains, “My previously flawless car now registered a dent above the back rear wheel. But my love did not waver. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, it grew: I love my car even more now with this little dent,” that now serves to remind her of a weekend snowboarding. After the personal introduction, Pencil embraces the holy grail of industrial design: infusing shiny new products with the same love that grows naturally out of a shared history (or dent).

No strangers to industrial design, both authors work at IDEO, with Bone as design director and Kara Johnson leading the materials team. A series of 12 projects done for the sheer joy of creation, I Miss My Pencil reads like a student’s wet dream of industrial design 101. The book is broken into three sections: Aisthetika, which deals with sense and experience, Punk Manufacturing, which combines craft and mass production, and Love+Fetish, which might be enough to titillate any objectophiles out there. Using about as much white space as I’ve ever seen in a book Mr. Bone and Ms. Johnson populate their tabula rasa with plenty of full bleed artful photographs and IM formatted conversations about their products. In yet another designer detail, the voices in those exchanges are each given their own font, with Bone speaking in dot matrix and Johnson a businesslike serif. At once joyous and confusing, I Miss My Pencil left me incredulous in the same way an avant garde indy movie produced by a major studio would. Every once in a while a completely impractical beautiful thing slips past consumer focus groups. At numerous times while reading, I wondered what sort of person would want to read a book about the joy of following absurd premises like “what does a laptop taste like?” to their logical (!?!) conclusions. Perhaps the audience for that sort of thing is tiny, but I think it includes us.

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