My project is reflection on the traditional production, a one way directed process from designer to industry to consumer: design based on economy and functionality. I question that in this way of the bombardment of objects, do the narratives of these objects drift. I want to use these existing objects as an alphabet, which can be used or misused in different direction regardless their original functions. The purpose in this system is use, connect, assemble and redesign objects not towards to specific functional goal. In my project, I am more interested in the unexpected visual possibilities of the misuse of the combinations.
As such, in my midterm, I took the mess feature mixed in productions on online shopping website aspect of my thesis and apply this into my design methodology and to create a system. The possibility to merge objects without logic or functional necessity creates objects that carry the echo of design but seem to have the structure of proliferation or a tumor. They show in a decorative and grotesque way the possible downsides of contemporary industrial production: a hidden identity that we tend to keep hidden and the vulnerable position of being a human being.
In this design, I took particular features from Chinese locks and mixed them together with changed materials in decorative and grotesque way. I developed, repeated, and industrialized. With its endless uncontrollable proliferation process and its endless accumulation of simulacrum. These “soft locks” function by dint of connections and material leaps. Through locking and linking they blur the inside and outside. I discover the shift from a lock to ever-increasing displays of accumulations of locks. After this, it becomes something else. An another dimension appeared ---- not a dimension that I had created, but a dimension that created by unexpected visual possibilities of the combinations.
To me design is not a tool to make something functional but a medium to tell stories. I use a vocabulary of things that we recognize and that are closed by. By the mixtures of objects we encountered in our daily life and accumulation of its features in a proliferation way, the narratives of these features drift slowly away from their stance in the domestic settings and start to reveal their own context and identities. I communicate through simple daily life objects that don’t have the burden of art as these objects don’t have the heaviness, the apparent inaccessibility, nor the symbolic loading of sculptures.
