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.