trendmatter.com | mac oosthuizen

“What does it do?” she said, lifting her eyes off the thick wad of dog-eared sketches in front of her.
“Umm, well you put the toy in here and it shoots it out of it……I tried to get the feeling of the environment the toy is set in accurate enough so that it looks nice and the kid can feel emersed in the experience” I said pointing out pieces of the design I like the most, scribbles of bright colour, some good shading, nice forms.
“Is that all it does?” she was looking straight in the face of the sketch, analysing it, sneering at it’s pretention. I slowly realise that I’d missed her intention and ashamedly explain it’s limited play value for a kid.
She lifts her head slowly and looks me straight in the eyes.
“The kid doesn’t care if it looks like the correct environment, if it doesn’t have a story you can forget it”.

Form exploration is great but at the end of the day can only achieve so much in making an emotional connection with someone. An object with no story (experience may be a better word) is a static artifact that may please the eye but can never go further to becoming part of our lives. Now don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean story is all ‘Once upon a time….’ and “Beginning, Middle and End’. Story is, like a mentioned, more akin to experience, just with the added bonus of a direction. Instead of looking at experience as an abstract effect, washing over us all at once, I prefer to think of a story, encompassing multiple experiences in a linear direction ending with an overall experience. The example I’ll give you is a film. As a teenager I watched Blade Runner and fell in love with an experience. Of course I fell in love with the film, but that’s not what I mean when I say experience. I fell in love with light, more specifically artificial light, light in the night if you will. A street lamp washing a dark alley way in yellow light, the glow of the neon street lights, a rainy night in the red light district of any city. This is an experience I fell in love with because of a series of linear experiences (a story of experiences?) from the film Blade Runner.

What the hell has this got to do with design, I hear you cry. Well for a start it was design that created these experiences and their effect on me in the first place. Take a look at Syd Mead’s work and more work on the Blade Runner film. The same example of story can be seen in design, just look at the iPod (and now the iPhone). It’s a story that you go through to get your music on and playing in your ears. A series of experiences from the moment you lay eyes on the that advert, read a product review, listen to a friends suggestion or whatever. Don’t get me wrong, adding features and loads of steps to using something isn’t going to increase story or experience. With a simple well constructed and considered story, and if that story plays out well (and yes you get good and bad stories, but I’ll leave that for a different post), you’ll come away with an emotional attachment to that product, service, public space, building or whatever.

Is anyone else imagining an iPod as the main character in a Pixar movie?