Design Integration

I know I am overdue in posting our next assignment but as the semester draws to a close everything is just getting more and more intense. I think 75% of the work I will do this semester is falling into these last few weeks! But it is worth the wait, the assignment is one of my favorites so far.

Called Design Integration, the challenge is to design a piece of furniture that can be mass-produced and mass-marketed for a segment of the population different than our own. By December 13 we have to make a finished prototype - meaning it doesn't have to be the "exact" product that would be manufactured, but it needs to be as close as possible with the resources at our disposal.

After compiling a long list of various population segments, ranging from hermits to musicians, I settled on people with tattoos. I have always found tattoos (and the reasons people get them) intriguing and thought I might be able to derive some interesting forms and ideas with body art enthusiasts as my subject. In the end it turned out to be really difficult. I spent a good two weeks trying to find some unifying theme that would unite people as diverse as tribal cultures and suburban moms. I think I came close but didn't want to design a piece that represented what tattoos meant as a cultural practice. I then thought about just making something that would deal with the physical aspects of the skin - maybe something that played with the ideas of public and private, being "seen". But that plan seemed a little too obvious and I didn't want to make a chair (which seemed the logical formal choice). After many conversations with Graham, walking through the details of all of this, he gave me a copy of a case he had studied in business school about product development and meeting user needs. The article asked the question, "What job are you hiring this product to do?" I discovered there were a number of jobs that tattoos were hired to do so I decided I would build something that would be a substitution for the tattoo, something people would "hire" instead. I settled on the job of "I want to memorialize or remember this person/place/moment/thing forever."

The plan as it now stands is to build a set of small drawers that will act as memorials for whatever people feel a desire to remember or keep close to them. The drawers will be made of unglazed porcelain and will sit inside a metal skin lined in felt. The drawers can be ordered individually so people can buy any number they wish from 1 to 1,000,000. The stackable drawers will all be contained within a larger enclosed table that will hold approximately 50 of the boxes. You may be wondering, "Has Micaelan ever worked with porcelain before?" The answer is no and that may well prove to be the downfall of the project. It is an easily mass-produceable material but it will be difficult for me to create a prototype. I am hoping to pay a student in the ceramics department to complete the project for me but they are all quite busy as well.