by Nicole Prasetia
Innovation: How can innovation shape the future and overcome obstacles, leaving a lasting impact on various levels and audiences?
Within the literature Speculative Everything, there is a story of a practice so familiar with the dreams of industry, that it became impossible for it to dream its own dreams. Within this story, the dreams of you, the reader have always defined the effort of design but somehow, someway, as we continue to live in the current society with its current industry practices and its current breakable rules, we start to forget our dreams. We become so rooted in industry practices that we forget the basis of design, the root of it which is a collective of people capable of dreaming up innovative ideas for the future, driving changes, and enhancing the human experience by exploring possibilities that others have overlooked. We are scared to think like designers and I admit, I myself, am also a victim of this.
Hold on though, somethings not right.
It’s not like everyone just suddenly forgot how to dream right? We were all born with dreams and fantasies and hope and love so what exactly took that away? Well, I believe that the world has a certain way of beating a person to their bare bones and stripping them of hope. Which I’m sure, as humans, we all have experienced in one way or another. The world's breakable rules don’t allow us to look or dream toward a future. It fills our thoughts with survival and leaves dreams on the back burner and honestly why shouldn’t we think this way when this is the way to survive?
Well, let me try to convince you to dream. My observations on the skepticism of dreaming are along the lines of ‘what can happen anyway?’ What’s the point of dreaming of a future if it would never happen? It’s pointless. Speculating the future is quite absurd don't you think? It’s crazy to dream of robots and spaceships when we are here to design for reality and it’s absurd to think otherwise. Really, how absurd can reality truly get?
Introducing to you the absurdity of a toaster. Yes, a common commercial appliance that can be found naturally in today's households is completely absurd.
A drawing of The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites, 2009 illustrated by Nicole Prasetia.
The work illustrated above is a project by Thomas Thwaites that highlights how dependent we have become on technology and how far removed we are from the processes and systems behind technologies and devices our everyday lives depend on. To do this he decided to rebuild a toaster from scratch and in his efforts, he discovered that even the simplest toasters were made up of 404 different complex parts. Furthermore, we must think about the sheer absurdity of the concept itself. Who would have thought that in the future we would need a machine that required 404 different parts to function perfectly together to put fully cooked bread in a machine to just then slightly overcook it so that it can be crunchy. Don’t you all think it’s a little absurd how the future has become? Look at this toaster and look at the other absurd things that was dreamed in this world. I mean who would think of making such a thing, and why? An electric kettle, for example, a machine powered by invisible waves of energy that can somehow draw up so much heat in a shorter amount of time than literally placing it on a stove would? isn’t it absurd? The world is absurd? and the future is also absurd? So please feel free to think of the most extreme and weirdest concepts or ideas because the world is absurd. Be brave, explore, and don’t let breakable rules shut down your desire to dream.
Dunne, A. and Raby, F 2013. Speculative Everything. The MIT Press, pp.80-82
Comments