Hasta La Ideas

In high school we were taken to meet a guy who made “antiqued” furniture. It was all freshly made in his shop, but he had an array of objects—chains, bottlecaps, and even carefully-selected rocks—that he’d flay, pound, drop and grind against each piece to give it a calculated weathering. The results were convincing, but one of my classmates sniggered something about it being fake. The man asked the kid if his jeans were pre-faded, or if he’d bought them like that.

Whether clothing or furniture, there’s a history for beating things up for aesthetic reasons; but how far should we take that? Francesco Pavia, a designer who hails from Venice, has extended it into luggage with his Crash Baggage line.

What is the first thing we think about when we buy a new suitcase?

We worry that it might get ruined.

The damaged case! An innovative travel philosophy that has opened the way to a whole new way of conceiving the suitcase: that of the non-handle with care, where damage is no longer a problem.

Crash baggage already has the typical dents that are caused by frequent use. Indeed, over time, the new dents give even more personality to the suitcase. All this without forgetting the functionality and comfort of an object that has been created using the most advanced materials.

I kind of wish he’d make these perfect and then throw them down a concrete staircase, but the consistent dents indicate these come out of a mold.

In any case, what say you—yea or nay?

See Also: “Free Fall” Chair by Ezri Tarazi; “Do Hit” Chair by Marijn van der Poll for Droog

(more…)

Ok so this is sort of just a pet peeve, but it’s relevant enough in this day and age of push-button journalism and SEO to warrant a quick post here: As an editor and former philosophy student, I have an abiding interest in the English language and I generally can’t help but notice typos that I invariably encounter in my daily media consumption. Case in point: the commonplace omission of the first “o” in “skeuomorph.”

I’ll refrain from pointing a finger at the perpetrator of the typographical error—I figure an eagle-eyed copyeditor will eventually spot the mistake and dutifully insert the absent vowels—and I take no issue with the content of the article itself, but this particular instance of the common misspelling happened to inspire a bout of etymological investigation on my part. I knew that the word was derived from the Greek word skeuos, which means ‘vessel’ or ‘implement.’ “Skeuomorph” and its related forms are the only instance of the word in English, but the root has biblical significance as well, and based on those definitions it also seems to mean ‘instrument’ to underscore a direct relationship between form and function.

Origins aside, I would venture to guess that the common misspelling is due to the word’s pronunciation: it is typically vocalized as “skew-morphic”—an easy (albeit imprecise) shorthand for its actual definition, at least to the effect that one thing is bent or contorted to resemble another—and even the proper pronunciation, “skew-a-morph,” is phonetically equivocal. The heterographic ambiguity is compounded by its highly unconventional spelling: the letter sequence “-euo-” is extremely rare in the English language. In fact, the only other words that I could find with this highly unusual three-vowel sequence were scientific names that started with the prefix eu- (i.e. good).

Corollary: “Skeumorphic” may also seem like the correct spelling precisely because the prefix eu- is understood to mean good, where the sibilant “sk-” somehow cancels—i.e. “x’s out”—the meaning of a back-formed quasi-root “eumorph,” which would mean ‘good or proper form.’

The irony, then, is that the word itself is decidedly not skeuomorphic: its spelling doesn’t look like any existing words, that which might inform one’s best guess as to its spelling. It’s another one of those weird cases of a term that must be committed to memory: a possible mnemonic might be to remember the root as skeuOS, as in a certain highly skeuomorphic Operating System.

Of course, this admittedly discursive linguistic analysis has little bearing the actual practice of design, skeuomorphic or otherwise: the UI/UX phenomenon is not so much a case of Justice Potter Stewart’s oft-repeated notion that “I know it when I see it” but rather “I know it because I see it… all the f’in time.”

As our own An Xiao Mina noted in our recent Year in Review series: “While skeuomorphism sometimes has its place, it’s often mired in an unnecessary past, rather than open to a expansive future.”

(more…)

This clock is lying. And that’s why you don’t have a broken ankle

It was the advent of railroads and the Industrial Revolution that really pushed the clock into widespread usage. Timekeeping devices had been around for centuries, but with much of the world living in an agrarian society, there wasn’t much need to know the precise time; you woke up when the sun rose, worked the fields, and went to bed when it got dark. But once you needed to be at the factory by 9AM, or catch the 11:53 to Chicago, it was better to look at a mechanically-powered circle with indicators than to squint up at the sun and guess.

So we’re surprised to see that a particularly famous train station has been gaming their clocks for years, eschewing honest accuracy for the sake of social engineering. It turns out that New York’s Grand Central Terminal, more popularly known as Grand Central Station, purposefully sets their clocks to all be one minute fast. Why?

The idea is that passengers rushing to catch trains they’re about to miss can actually be dangerous—to themselves, and to each other. So conductors will pull out of the station exactly one minute after their trains’ posted departure times. That minute of extra time won’t be enough to disconcert passengers too much when they compare it to their own watches or smartphones … but it is enough, the thinking goes, to buy late-running train-catchers just that liiiiiitle bit of extra time that will make them calm down a bit. Fast clocks make for slower passengers….

You might call this time-hacking; you might call it behavioral engineering; you might call it comical. Regardless, it seems to be working. Grand Central boasts the fewest slips, trips, and falls of any station in the country—quite a feat given how many of its floors are made of marble.

Via The Atlantic

(more…)

Another interesting wooden object I’ve recently come across is this cigar drying box. After cigars were hand-rolled or removed from their mold, they were once placed in these primitive objects and left to dry.

The reason I call them “primitive” is because of their design; while they might make you think of the functionality of flat files, the resemblance between the two objects is visual only. At first I thought these would be perfect for storing hand tools, saw blades et cetera, but these are not pull-out drawers; there are no runners at all. The pull-outs are simply individual trays that rest on the ones below them, and the exterior is a mere four-sided box (no back) to keep dust off the cigars.

In other words, if you pull a tray out of the middle, the ones above come out with it or drop down to take the removed tray’s place. This is presumably because the cigarmaking workflow meant the piece was loaded and unloaded just once per batch, obviating the need (and added cost) of constructing proper drawers.

If you were to build one of these to hold hand tools, so that the trays served as proper drawers, how would you design it? My first thought was you could construct the drawer bottoms out of masonite, make them slightly wider than the drawers themselves, and have the overlap slide into kerfs cut into the interiors of either side. But I suspect drawers this wide would start to sag in the middle, depending on how heavy the tools were, so the things would need to be made narrower (killing some of their visual appeal). Any ideas?

(more…)

You could be forgiven for assuming this jewelry display rack was purpose-built. But look a little closer: It’s obviously an antique, and if you look at the channels cut into it, you can see that they antedate the invention of the router. Someone went to a lot of trouble to chisel those out, by hand, with a consistency that practically screams “manufacturing.” But what could this thing possibly have been used to make?

Hit the jump to find out.

(more…)