Tee-off your day with a spot of daydreaming…

Graphic designer Thibaud Cartigny's 'Dream Rider'

I sometimes have these moments in which I imagine that I am looking down on earth as an alien on a spaceship, or from a fluffy cloud in an azure sky – and I just keep having this reoccurring thought: ‘what are they doing?’. I don’t have these daydreams when I am performing some base requirement our functional lives demands of us, but rather when I observe something (or a process) that is so manmade or manufactured it is verging on bizarre upon reflection of it.

 

I was recently in a swish ‘golf bar’ – the technical name escapes me but I refer to the meeting place where the happy swingers break to wolf down a club sandwich and laboriously discuss the last nine holes. Studying these seemingly nice folk, clad in their practical waterproof gear, I couldn’t help consider the craziness of it all: they had trudged around a perfectly pruned, vividly green, artificially trimmed terrain (luminescent among the rugged dusty landscape), dodging infrequent little blobs of sand and water scattered about, wielding a long thin stick, clobbering a titchy dimpled ball about. At the time this seemed absolutely insane to me, a virtual, pretend world.

   

I really have nothing against golf; in fact it is a sport (on rare occasions) that I enjoy. This world we have designed for ourselves on planet earth is simply weird – especially in the Western world where there is money to fund the latest crazes. It is a long old winding road to lucubrate the path from cavemen in loincloths wielding batons to race-car driving (going round and round extremely fast in a noisy slither of metal).  

In determining the omnipresence of design in contemporary life a wide range of doors are opened into a world of uncertainties, attractions and questions. Design consciousness operates at a low-level, what we experience is ultimately a fleeting sense of pleasure. For me the consciousness of design is a critical activity of the value of design. In the words of one of my favourite writers Alain de Botton, design ’can arrest transient and timid inclinations, amplify and solidify them, and thereby grant us more permanent access to a range of emotional textures which we might otherwise have experienced accidentally and occasionally’. (The Architecture of Happiness) 

Functionality and happiness are bound together in a strangely antagonistic way. More often than not however design goes completely unnoticed; perhaps because you are committing yourself to a lifetime of choices if it becomes something you begin to entertain. To be permanently aware of design would be paralysing; we are limited most of the time to our design consciousness simply kicking in as a critique of functionality - which is most often suppressed. Normally functionality sidelines design.   

It seems that when it comes to design, it is a case of a choice between or, in rarer cases a perfect balance of functionality and form.  To experience a design consciousness of form, functionality has must be switched off. On the upside, and I am not verging on design conscious paralysis here, but if this is achieved an amusing new perspective on things can be ascertained after a little daydreaming.

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