Customized, Aesthetics

                Customization is a major component of first-world consumption and modern marketing approaches. We seek to align our internal vision of ourselves with an external set of symbols and objects in order to tell the world our (idealized) story. This is nothing new- many a major archeological or anthropological revelation reveals adornment and enhancement of the body. What has changed is just how truly personal or "custom" those adornments and enhancements are. For one, in contemporary life, the need for adornment and personalization extends well beyond the body. It occupies square feet in the hundreds or thousands, in acres and estates. We wish to have ourselves reflected out into vehicles, properties and lifestyles. While designers and product development teams compile focus groups and paint philosophies upon consumer objects, their attempts to feed the public exactly the flavor it wants remains evasive and uncommon.

                The popularity and ubiquity of iPhone cases underscores the reality that even among the most sophisticated and hermetically sealed objects there remains the urge to customize. When objects are mass produced the familiarity of the object can become loathesome, the act of selecting a singular good from a crowd of others being insufficient to distinguish oneself. From this springs up the marketplace of adornment for products, jewelry for technology. We extend our projected self through the wall of the laptop screen, offering up the gaze of our personality via stickers or brand to the strangers we are partitioned from.

Google Image results for iPhone case

                Much of the customization in the United States remains an act of consumption, merely layering one bought and sold bit of plastic on top of another. As the number of variables in the layered consumption goes up, the likelihood of confronting a perfect clone out in the world goes down. We can preserve the sense of ourselves as truly unique without parallel peers while still existing within the scope of common aesthetic standards.  Creative rather than consumptive customization does not mesh so neatly with the surface finishes of mass produced goods. It isn't always a piece of plastic mated perfectly to another. It often sticks out, being made in another way with alternative intent. This often elicits a negative reaction to something jarringly  'out of place' but is simply at peace with existing on its own terms  as a specific object unblended with the expectations of its surroundings. 

Custom built pheasant coop

The idiosyncratic self reflected publicly is met as a step too far, an uncomfortable intrusion of sincerity, a vulgarity of the individual self confronting the collective public. It is the sore thumb sticking in a sore eye that infringes the aesthetic standards of neighbors and stimulates gossip. The truly bespoke is not embraced by the customary, but instead exists as a small but meaningful violation of standards. 

Promise of 3D Printing

                 Many technology writers have emphasized the potential of 3D printing to democratize the design and fabrication process, enabling mass customization or rapid production of sculpture for anyone. From what I have seen, the great opportunity of 3D printing is not custom shoes or as fodder for contemporary art, but rather as a new method for engaging with the physical world. As a tool the 3D printer bridges the significant gap between the digital and the physical.

A 3D printed part made of Ultem 

                Objects can be harmlessly scanned, cleaned up tuned up or tweaked and then printed back into existence anywhere. Suddenly the hands off object can be engaged with up close, the eye coordinated with the hand, the tactile informing the intellectual. This is the huge conceptual step of 3D printing:  allowing the average person to engage with forms otherwise impossible to access. A patient can feel an internal structure captured by a CT scan while talking with their surgeon or a student can study a monument on a small scale across the sea from the museum itself.

                Collections could be archived digitally and printed, then reprinted and remixed, allowing cultural cross-pollination to occur with greater speed and depth. The Makerbot company recently led a Hackathon working with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which seems a positive indicator for established cultural institutions embracing disruptive technologies like 3D printing rather than trying to shut them out. What remains to be seen is exactly how much friction will occur as private companies try to maintain a tight grip on intellectual property while the bootlegging of physical products can be as simple as cut, paste, and print. 

No Design

                Access to physical goods, to furniture, fashion and technology has always been leashed tightly to one's access to capital. With enough money, one can buy or commission almost any object, crafted from exotic materials or with laborious methods. Faced with a shortage of money, time, or both the consumer must become the maker and improvise.

Store owner has cleverly redirected AC condensation to a crack in the sidewalk. 

                Growing up in rural anywhere improvised forms are easy to observe. Hard working people short on everything cobble together structures that defy architectural norms or modify tools and machinery to perform highly specialized tasks. Such objects can't be called designed; they move too briskly from thought to action. Built on site or in a spare hour the concept is hacked out with great urgency, no potential pitfalls worked out on paper or in CAD models. While this philosophy of building has its failures, its overbuilt solutions and underperforming efficiencies, very few store bought goods truly fit our needs as well as the quick and dirty hack does.

Improvised prison weapons at the Davistown Tool Museum in Maine.

                In this sense they are very pure forms, explicitly made for and with a purpose. Like the labor of its maker, the essential object possesses no indulgent ornamentation, no style for style's sake, just the vital force to get the work done by any means necessary. 

The Color of Culture

                If you grew up in the United States, or in any spot on earth where traditional Western culture has leaned hard against local custom, there's a good chance that the Spartan, the smooth and white have come to define the aesthetics of sophistication.

                Any student of art history knows this trend reaches back to the classic era, the sort of supposed heyday of clear-thinking and pure reason. It was supposed to be a time of perfecting form across the realms of art, architecture and philosophy. Dredged up centuries later by expeditions and pseudo-archaeologists, Western powers viewed the smooth white marble forms of antiquity as spectral saints, that transcended their low heathen roots through a sharpness of structure.  

Roman Statue of Apollo
(photo: Stuart Yeates)

                What they missed either through choice or ignorance is that the plain, white surfaces of the temples and statues were rarely plain and seldom white. Rather, the artisans and civic planners of Mediterranean antiquity favored the polychromatic, with bold colors and metallic embellishments clinging to columns and corbels.  When it comes to aesthetic and political history, Western powers have tended to prefer the fantasy to the facts, with neoclassical architecture displaying gleaming whiteness, untouched by the 'low' primitive use of bright colors.  Systems of government that offer an aura of self-evident perfection rooted in the classical past, turn out to be far from it, requiring revision after revision to approach arriving at a society that is truly democratic.

                This retroactive editing of history allowed architects, governments the opportunity to privilege their methods and mandates, linking them to some partly imagined epic past which validated their ideology.

                The attraction to this strict, dogmatic ordering of forms and colorless geometries has had uncomfortable and unfortunate results throughout history as it was picked up and remixed to suit by various authoritarian figures in the West and East. From the formal systems of Fascist Architecture that borrowed heavily (and falsely) from antiquity, to the over-reaching community policing that forbids certain paint colors or embellishments, too often the aesthetic 'lessons' of ancient Greece and Rome were thin disguises for restrictive and fiercely hierarchical standards.

                 The elite self-selecting powers sought to dictate aesthetics (among other things) to the masses, lest they be tempted into bold colors, embellished surfaces, and other base impulses visual or otherwise. Thankfully the disruptive philosophies of post-modernism, greater cross-pollination in a truly global world, coupled with the decline or downfall of certain Western powers has chipped away at these false tropes of design and restored some of the incredible and intense color that was really there all along. 

Detritus of Industry

                 In Liberty Maine, two unusual establishments flank Main Street. One is a hardware store with every shelf and surface covered in a comprehensive assortment of tools, fasteners, jigs and fixtures. The other is a small museum, dedicated to the tools themselves. The store is unusual for the depth and breadth of the collection, with literally thousands of items with their origins in New England machine shops. The industrial revolution along with the machine shop knowledge and technology that accompanied the movement meant that the roots of management and manufacturing theory were laid down firmly in New England soil. Many of the developments that set the stage for the economic boom of the 20th century through mass production in America were born here, so it is fitting that they be well remembered here as well. Both the store and the museum in Liberty Maine do that quite well.

Browsing at Liberty Tool
(photo: Elisa Hamilton)

                Many of the machine shop items, like fixtures and modified cutting tools, rarely left the shop for anything other than recycling or the landfill. Once a job had run to completion, the specialized and often improvised tooling was no longer needed and so began a downward trajectory. With more and more shops reducing manual machining in part or completely, these objects take on a greater presence as artifacts, both of technological history but also the human history. In a computer controlled machining operation, the rate of travel can be nearly perfectly controlled, resulting in an excellent, even finish.

Machine shop odds and ends purchased at Liberty Tool

                The manually machined part, in comparison, has tell-tale tooling marks where the cutting tool moved along the work piece at anything approaching an uneven rate. These tiny variations impart a (translated) imprint of the human hand, working through a mechanical medium, rather than directly. From these marks we can read into the skill of the machinist, the priorities demanded of the part (whether surface finish was important for its function), and the era of its making. In the quiet corners of these buildings in Liberty, one can get a true sense of the presence and importance of machine shops to New England, rather than relegating the collective memories and bits of metal to the scrap bin of history.

Plastic Fantastic - Part 3

"I just want to say one word to you. Just. One word."

"Yes sir?"

"Are you listening?"

"Yes I am."

"Plastics."

"Exactly how do you mean?"

"There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?"

                This clipped string of dialogue plays out within the first 10 minutes of the film "The Graduate", just after the protagonist speaks of his uncertain future. Mr. Maguire's advice was written to represent the aloof, materialistic qualities of an older generation which seemed captivated by the dull, cold world of corporate capitalism.  While it rang true for its time, with confused youth grappling with the horrors of the Vietnam War and shifting values, plastics today are being embraced in an alternative fashion by DIY makers and artists.

                Plastics are perhaps the most perfectly tailored, malleable materials available to today's small fabricator. With small investments in equipment and a few faltering attempts under one's belt, there are great possibilities in plastic. From entry level 3D printers like MakerBot to cobbled together vacuum forming machines and 2-part liquid resins, few classes of materials offer more while requiring so little capital to be productive. This is a huge inversion of the standards in place when "The Graduate" was released in 1967. Plastics then were still an emerging market, dominated by the hegemony of a few massively successful corporate firms like DuPont and Dow. The amateur was far from being aware of the potential uses of plastics for fabrication, much less having the means to work with them effectively.

MakerBot 3D Printer in operation.
(photo: Andy Dingley)

                While a few early adopters (ambitious architecture students, forward looking artists and inventors) delved into synthetic materials early on, it was decades before plastics as a sculptural or design material became accessible to the average maker. While the plastics most frequently used by DIYers today are far from chemically new, (Delrin in 1960, HDPE in 1953, ABS in the 1950s ) they are only beginning to be viewed as materials native to personalized design and art making; to some degree displacing wood, metal, and gypsum as go-to substances.

                For Ben Braddock, plastics represent the stiff conformity of the older generation he wants no part of, a quietly ominous closing of doors. Walk through a hackerspace, architecture firm or sculptor's studio in 2012 and ask about plastics and you'll likely get a very different  take- one heavy on opportunities while aware of potential consequences, engaged with the pros and cons of the material world, rather than indifferently adrift within it. 

Plastic Fantastic - Part 2

                In the previous post, I presented some of the issues I have with plastic as a material and its role in consumer culture more broadly. Rather than passively, if begrudgingly accepting the shortcomings, I believe we ought to examine the alternative possibilities. As I see it, it is the role of the designer, fabricator, or artist  to optimize the benefits of a given material or circumstance, and minimize the negatives.  It is the responsibility of the consumer to choose more carefully, that is, to be truly selective. After all, the engine of production is an engine based on feedback, from consumer to producer, producer to consumer, and so on and so on. There are examples of great plastic products, objects that are designed with the limitations (and strengths) of plastic in mind.

Plastic Eames Chair from the 1950s
(photo by: Sandstein  ) 

                Plastics fail on the most basic level when they attempt to simulate or rather, impersonate another vastly different material (e.g. wood, stone, leather). From this misguided practice we get the concept of plastic as a phony, or stilted product. Of course, the counterpoint to this is that the imitation of natural materials with synthetics can be an effective and even powerful device in fine art and high design, where the limitations are intentionally underscored for their conceptual richness.

                A real design challenge of plastics is how to create an object which ages well, which becomes richer and storied by its use, rather than diminished by it. This starts with selecting the best materials. We should demand the most stable, durable plastics to use in manufacturing, rather than the quick, cheap and dirty disposable materials we have come to associate with plastics. We make furniture with walnut rather than basswood, for sculpture we specify bronze over pewter,  it should be the same with plastics. "Engineering" plastics (acetal, polycarbonate, HDPE) already exist in fairly common use, for more critical and demanding applications. We should not be content with the existing options however- there are surely more ideal configurations of polymers yet to be made, ones that privilege longevity and resiliency over basic cost . I believe these simple choices start the ball rolling in the right direction: creating plastics which overcome the problems of their material origins, and become objects worthy of heirloom status. 

Plastic Fantastic - Part 1

                Increasingly, plastic makes up the material world we live in and the objects we interact with on a daily basis. Injection molding is responsible for the bulk of these objects, where the plastic compound is heated to a liquid state and forced into a cavity, typically a rigid mold made of a durable metal like steel or aluminum. The thermoformed plastics that make up these injection molded parts are carefully engineered to have the kind of traits that make them perfect for mass production. They are widely available, generally cheap, and re-usable- compared to thermoset plastics (relatively expensive, less variety in formulations, no possibility of reuse), they are a natural fit for consumer goods.

                The consumer object emerges from this process and with every fresh casting, the cost per unit drops; the high water line of market saturation is redrawn. This curve of cheapness can encourage overproduction, where units are cranked out en masse and the mold retired. The delays created by a production run below market demand (re-instating the mold, shifting other projects to other machines or off the schedule, shipping, etc.) frequently leads to a higher overall cost. Put plainly, the cost of producing too few units is potentially greater than the cost of producing too many. The sometimes counterintuitive arithmetic of mass production is partially to blame for the constant glut of consumable products. The real, literal cheapness of these objects, the ease of replacement (low cost, high availability) along with the seamless duplicity- (each copy is an exact copy) means an increasing comfort in discarding  the objects  derived from these mass production methods, reducing an already slim likelihood of any emerging sentimental value. 

A potential consumer browsing a plastic menagerie at a flea market.
(photo: Lionel Allorge)

                There is little appreciable human "wear" factor on plastics, the object is not imbued with any human presence through its use. It has little past, less history, and no maker's mark spare the odd ejection dent or parting line. It could be made anywhere in the world, by any number of interchangeable factories. It belongs to no region, no culture, no land.  Our end experience as a consumer is as uniform as the process that created it.