OUR CREATIONS AFFECT THE WAY WE THINK, THE WAY WE THINK AFFECTS OUR CREATIONS

Mind, understanding and interpretation can not be lended to another, so, we truly believe that as open designers, the ideal way of modifying or creating real changes is by becoming conscious of a specific problem and aware of the space and time to intervene that problem with our actions. How do we become aware of a problem? Paradoxically, we consider that is the real problem: the awareness of the awareness. To begin with, we discussed several ways which we understood were important related with consciousness:

• • • • Seeing the problem or analyzing a problematic situation
      • Attaining knowledge related to the problem
      • Keeping the knowledge and comprehending it
      • Sharing the knowledge

We agreed that attaining knowledge is easy to perform in today’s world. Although finding literature and knowledge related to a specific problem seems easy, keeping that knowledge, internalizing it and becoming conscious about it is quite challenging. At that point, steps 5 and 6 appear:

• • • • Problems talk back to you
      • Listen! Maybe we need to modify our knowledge and start all over again.

 

 

We realized that the only way of attaining this was through a community, by understanding the movement of knowledge. Everything is related to interaction, to talking and listening. John Berger mentions in his book Ways of Seeing, the fact that we are never looking at just one thing, that everything is affected by the relation between things and ourselves. (Berger 1990). Therefore, this relationship between things and ourselves suddenly became clearer. We examine our surroundings in terms of shapes rather than functions, eventually we realize that we are surrounded by lines, flat surfaces and corners. So, we questioned how that is related to the way we think and interact in the world.

 

COMPARING LINEAR THINKING WITH CIRCULAR THINKING

Mind and matter correspond to each other. Matter does not occur in its purest form always, because, mind translates matter through thinking, understanding and interpreting. In this case, the thinking process can be reason oriented and linear, or can be process oriented and circular. If we build a metaphor here, awareness is like a bead on a rope. In linear thinking, this bead always moves further on this rope, therefore, one does not need to worry about the back, or previous actions since one is moving away from them. One does not need to take responsibilities, since there is only one forward of it. However, in circular thinking, actions bring responsibilities since the bead will probably pass by the point it was before on the rope. Everything reacts to the actions observably. However, this circular thinking idea should not be interpreted as history repeating itself, or a snake eating its own tail. It is more like a spiral, with each turn, one passes nearby a place quite familiar yet different, and one develops gradually with each turn.

 

According to Wolgang Schaffner, Simon Stevin considered that the image starts with a line, by holding tight a thread you can construct a line. This linear section has been a fundamental procedure for our western and eastern culture, since linearity could be understood as a process that can store on the graphic surface, the symbolic elements. However, Vilem Flusser critiques linearity in his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography since he refers to the cultural development that starts in a way as a mode of expression from imagination, directly represented through images. He considers two historical events to be the most important ones related to human culture: the invention of linear writing and the invention of technical photography. According to the author, in a second instance, we use an alpha numeric operation to criticize the image and transform it into a narrative and therefore rework the idea of image. “Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts means to discover the images signified by them. The intention of texts is to explain images, while that of concepts is to make ideas comprehensible. In this way, texts are the meatcode of images.” (Flusser and Flusser 2014, 16)

 

Sketching

When analyzing what some philosophers think about the mind, Siri Hustvedt mentions that according to Alfred North Whitehead, “there is an imaginative aspect to all thought: Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secretive imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.” (Hustvedt 2017, 31) She also analyzes the different definitions that philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes had about imagination related to mind. Hobbes believed that step by step reasoning was superior to the imagination and Descartes used imagination as a convenient intermediate area between direct sensation and the reasoning. However, Margaret Cavendish believed that imagination and emotion, along with reason, were crucial to knowledge, and Giambatistta Vico believed that memory, imagination, and metaphor “originated from the body and its senses and are necessary to the story of thought itself.” (idem, 37).

Vilem Flusser mentions another interesting definition for the understanding of imagination: “the specific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time and to project them back into space and time (…). It is the precondition for the production and decoding of images.” (Flusser and Flusser 2014). Following this idea, John Berger begins the book Ways of Seeing, mentioning that “the child looks and recognizes before it can speak, questioning the importance of images in our world. Although we explain our world with words, it is interesting to see that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled” (Berger 1990).

Imagination should be present in every instance of our life, especially when growing up. When we are young, people expect us to be creative and imaginative, however, as we grow up we begin to lose that characteristic and only those who decide to follow a creative path are able to maintain their creative and imaginative minds. However, if we consider imagination and creativity a fundamental tool for every kid, why do we lose that interest as we grow up? Why does the idea of being creative and imaginative lose value for grown ups?

The sketching strategy brightened the fact that if we introduce a new word in a sign system it is no longer an addition, it is a change of the whole system. The introduction of a sign changes a whole system about education. What if, by introducing a new tool in this world, we try to modify the whole system of education? What if a simple game becomes the breaking point to a new way of seeing? What if we modify the linearity that dominates us by combining linearity and circularity into something new?

 

Probleming

In order to create a shift in consciousness and manipulate the pillars that it has grown on, we need to start from the softest point. According to Anne-Marie Willis, “designing is fundamental to being human — we design, that is to say, we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings — in turn we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed.” (Willis 2006) How do we teach our children to design? What are the basic tools they use to create their first structures? If “Designing is a way of interpreting the world, and its interpretation is prerequisite for its re-shaping” as Wolfgang Schaffner states, (Doll et al. 2016) then, what does our children’s first interpretation of structures consist of?

 

 

We are designing our world and we are mirroring our surroundings. In order to make a difference, this circular process has to be intervened with actions. We cannot just clap our hands and change the whole structure of urban planning of the world in ten years, however, we can unfold new opportunities and perspectives for our children, regarding the future scenarios, which will be experienced by our children mostly. They are the real game changers and long term changes can be achieved by modifying the education styles and the way we teach our children.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), scholar, historian and professor at the University of Naples, was truly concerned about educating children. He was worried that if children were taught only reasoning skills and geometry, they would become “stunted beings” with poor language skills. As Siri Hustvedt mentions, this debate is still not over as she states that for example in the United States, mathematics and science are still considered to be more important than the humanities and the arts in education. The hard sciences seem to have an “aura of seriousness, a disciplined severity the humanities and the arts lack.” (Hustvedt 2021,24) It is interesting to notice that something Vico saw during the seventeenth century in Europe, that the increasing specialization in the universities was dividing knowledge into little pieces, in ways that made one field unintelligible to another (idem, 25), is still something to be analyzed in the twenty-first century, more than three hundred years later.

Along with this idea, it would be interesting to develop: “an architecture of structures in a dual sense: a discipline that is thus fundamentally able to materialize and architecturally implement the integration of a plurality of knowledge formes, but also to serve as an essential switchboard within an inter- and transdisciplinary structuralism that is able to embrace all disciplines.” Bruno Latour (Schäffner 2016, 27)

 

CONTROL THE INTERFACE, CONTROL THE SYSTEM

Interfacing

We have been constructing things since we were born. Well known childhood activities are, solving puzzles, playing with lego and all kinds of its derivatives, playdoughs and construction toys like buckets and shovels which are mostly used to create sandcastles in summertime. These activities are considered essential for a child’s development, however they also define the interface between a child’s consciousness and surrounding structures. All kinds of construction toys create perception of structures together with the pure childhood mind; and the interface between is experience of play.

A child’s creativity is damaged on the way a lot. For example, we all have an impression that structures are made of blocks stacked on each other. There are the same types of elements building on each other in an hierarchical order, giving the feeling of stability, support and stiffness alongside creating stable forms. However, structures are more than that. A structure can move, and can be flexible. One does not necessarily need walls to create a structure. It can be open. Afterall, a structure is the arrangement of materials in a balanced way to occupy some space.

An interface could be considered as a new structure entering the world, the moment when different structures start to communicate with each other, inform each other and react with each other. What if we try to create a new interface, a new structure, by creating a new idea of a game. As Cas Holman mentions, designing for children is designing for people. “These are the people that are going to make the world suck or not suck. Good toys make good people.” (Lange 2019) We believe that this idea of designing a new concept of game design should be embraced by other people and thus create different structures so that they are able to communicate, inform and interact with each other. The interface should be self-controlled in order to create different values, different perspectives. “Even if humans see themselves as actors and designers of structures, they are only a small part of the flow and their role is as limited as their importance.” The ideal would be that every structure created could play an interfacing role while still pursuing its own structural goal. “The truly disruptive cuts are not the development of new systems, but a different selection and design of interfaces.” (Stein, n.d.)

 

 

MATTER IN DESIGN IS THE WAY IN WHICH FORM APPEARS

Matterizing

We thought that, instead of using construction elements similar to each other, using completely different elements in terms of form and function, enables children a different experience of playing while creating structures. These two elements would be the dots and the lines. We are in an era where we have figured out solidity is only a perception. It has been proven that there is more antimatter than matter in the universe. There are vast spaces in an atom core, in a planetary system and similarly, in our toy. Building structures is quite different from building lego and the derivatives because it requires a new understanding of structures and perception of balance. Children will be weaving and shaping their creations rather than putting blocks on top of each other to create them.

 

Playing

The bead and wire same system can be simple and complex at the same time, which unfolds a great variety of opportunities to explore and have fun. This new kind of playing and constructing idea can be game changing, because the elements the project consists of is simple yet open to development. Besides, they are eco-friendly and easy to dispose. We are presenting below some opportunities for further development.

//toddlers

20 cm length of bendable rope consists of five different sized beads; two beads close both ends, three beads moves freely along the rope. It is used for creating different abstract structures. The toy cannot be separated into pieces, beads are made out of cork.

//children

It is designed for older children to create figures such as animals, bugs, people and plants. For instance to create a turtle;

Inside the box:

1 piece of 3 cm diameter sphere for the head

1 piece of 10X5X3 cm oval body

4 pieces of 5 cm rope for the legs both ends are tightly closed with 1 cm diameter beads.

2 pieces of 3 cm rope for neck and tail

There can also be other figure boxes as in the example. Since the pieces are interchangable, children are able to create even their imaginary figures by combining different box ingredients together. The toy can be separated into pieces, the beads are made out of pinewood.

//DIY edition

By using easily drying non-toxic doughs, beads can be easily produced at home which makes the product more appealing and customizable. It also enables kids to design freely without any blueprints.

Inside the box:

dough / ingredients to knead a dough

molds in different sizes and shapes

paints to color the beads

ropes in different lengths

//puzzles

Creating large scale 3d puzzles is also possible with this technique. We can think of an example of 3D World Model below;

Inside the box:

stands for stabilizing the puzzle.

puzzle pieces (ropes and beads)

A mobile application which shows all of the 3D models of desired objects to cheat, -in this case, a 3D model of the world- can also be designed for further development. Finished puzzle can be used as a decorative object. The beads can be made out of lightweight wood.

//education edition

We thought that letters and numbers can also be included in the process. The toy system can be used for creating words and writings in a different manner, chemical models or physical experiments.

Inside the box:

Beads in different sizes

Letter and number stickers

Ropes in different lengths

Ideally, beads can be made out of felt, letters and numbers can be attached with velcro.

 

Authors:

İlkin Taşdelen // Industrial Design // Industrial Design

Sofia Orti // Humanities, Latin American Theatre // Argentina

 

REFERENCES

Berger, John, ed. 1990. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. Repr. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

Doll, Nikola, Horst Bredekamp, Wolfgang Schäffner, and Exzellenzcluster “Bild Wissen Gestaltung” der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, eds. 2016. +ultra Knowledge & Gestaltung. Leipzig: E.A. Seemann.

Flusser, Vilém, and Vilém Flusser. 2014. Para una filosofía de la fotografía.

Hustvedt, Siri. 2017. The Delusions of Certainty. Hachette UK.

Lange, Alexandra. n.d. “Cas Holman’s Search for the Ideal Playground.” The New Yorker. Accessed June 10, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cas-holmans-search-for-theideal-playground.

McGonigal, Jane. 2012. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World ; [Includes Practical Advice for Gamers]. London: Vintage Books.

Schäffner, Wolfgang. 2016. “New Structuralism: A Field of Human and Materials Science.” In Structural Affairs, 10–30. GAM, 12 (2016). Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH.

Stein, Christian. n.d. “What Is an Interface,” 6.

Willis, Anne-Marie. n.d. “Ontological Designing.” Design Philosophy Papers. Accessed June 10, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/888457/Ontological_designing.