In groping for a possible point of departure for this year's even, I went back to my initial attraction to industrial design to try to analyze what in particular had pulled me into this field. It then occurred to me that two constants hovered around my interest in design: surrealism and psychoanalysis.

I find psychoanalytic theory compelling for two reasons that are pertinent to design. The first is that it affords one way to think about how language is capable of creating concrete, physical symptoms or effects on the human body. Second, it is a useful analytical tool for considering why some ordinary physical objects can either terrify us (phobias) or entrance us (fetishes).

Surrealism sheds an interesting light on industrial design and material culture because the surrealists aimed at investing the objects of daily life with strange and uncanny meanings. This often took the form of a kind of diabolical play with context, scale, and juxtaposition. For example, a bottle rack in a gallery is suddenly suffused with new meaning and value (or are we just being messed with?).

Given these predilections, I thought that I would look more closely in this presentation at the innervated relationships of subject to the objects that populate their lives. What is the pull that makes some banal objects take on special meanings while others simply sit, transparent, in the field of vision?

And so a quote comes to mind that addresses some of these same effects while upping the ante in sly ways. Georges Bataille-- a dissident surrealist philosopher and writer-- expressed it this way in the journal Documents that he helped found: "I challenge any lover of painting to adore a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe." What I find so useful about this sentiment is that it illustrates the profound physical connection-- almost tangible-- that a spectator can have to banal, absolutely asexual object. Bataille further complicates this picture, however, in the analysis he makes of the knot of attraction and repulsion that is always at the heart of that impulsive desire. By opening up the channels of connection between the hideous and the beautiful, Bataille enabled us to understand that attraction and repulsion are simply two sides of the same drive, and that it is as illustrative to consider what horrifies us as it is to contemplate the ideal.

So it is the entrancement by the object that occupies me here. It is that charged relationship to objects, ideas, and things that is always a mixture of repugnance and enjoyment that I want to try to connect to the products of industrial design. Freud's term for it, the uncanny, neatly captures that bivalent nature of the relationship. The uncanny is, for Freud, that haunting a subject feels when confronted by something indeterminate. It is that wobbly state between familiarity and strangeness that one can never easily produce consciously but which perfuses the simple moments of everyday life.

Some examples:
-- Winnebagos. It is my contention that many people's first exposure to the possibility of design comes when they set foot into an RV at a young, hopeful age. It is in that moment when their entire universe is now discovered in a slightly modified, shrunken state that the normal is forever changed. It is connected, I would suggest, to a nearly imperceptible shift in scale that totally reconfigures the familiar. Two other scalar changes then come to mind: the powerful effect that baby items have on people (I recently received a pair of New Balance sneakers for babies that were impossibly small and utterly, mysteriously captivating); the sneaky monstrosity of 'super sized' drinks at convenience stores (they look like human artifacts and yet their monumental size seems to put them into a category of the "beyond human").
-- Is this not the same kind of feeling that people have when they are beset with the common problem of their peas which have mixed with their mashed potatoes which has been defiled by the gravy and they are unwilling eat it, or even repulsed by it? What happens in the cross-contamination of categories that makes things so unappealing?
-- The work of the artist Robert Gober is relevant here, too. His ability to stage normal tableaus that are both perfectly common and powerfully unnerving comes from his ability to play with the context of the staging and the expectations that "normal" scenes provoke.

But what is the connection to product design? My point here is that I think that there is something of the uncanny in industrial design, but I am not sure where or when it is. That is to say, that as objects vacillate between being simply objects of daily consumption and objects of rare beauty or hideousness they partake, sometimes, of this aspect of the uncanny. I have therefore attempted to come up with some moments in the commodity cycle when the affective charge of the object itself, for a wide variety of reasons, becomes innervating. To do this I have tried (provisionally) to articulate the stages of a commodity's life as it drifts through our material environment.

First, the Stages of the Commodity:
-- the Unimaginable (before an idea begins to coalesce it hovers in this nether region)
-- the Genius/Shocking (the very first manifestation of a new idea in material form)
-- the Cool (when a few cognoscenti discover its potential)
-- the Status Object (when enough buyers recognize it as culturally significant)
-- the Mass Produces (it is suitable for the public at large)
-- the Object without Qualities (it is no longer significant in its uniqueness, it simply is)
-- the Ugly/Just-out-of-date (it no longer fits in the world)
-- the Disposed/Recycled (it is irritating to own any longer)
-- the Thrift Store (it regains value via an other's estimation)
-- the Retro (it suddenly reappears on the taste-makers' list)
-- the Classic (it is enshrined for its lasting, universal, and timeless appeal)

I am suggesting, then, that within this cycle there are privileged moments when the object provokes reactions that are connected, in a way that I am incapable of fully explaining, to the entrancing aspects that I have described above.

The reason why I am even bothering with this taxonomy is that it seems to afford some obvious instances where objects of daily life do transcend their own banality. And it is simplest to grasp that effect in those moments of ambivalence, I would argue, than in the subtler instances of attraction. For example:
-- the Unimaginable. Here, as the designer/inventor only faintly grasps the contours of possibility, there is an almost feverish period of imagination and panic when all potential is both open and evanescent.
-- the Ugly/Just-out-of-date. This I find to be the most interesting category. Something that may have been once dearly adored is now incomprehensibly wrong. This sentiment is certainly tightly wound up with, even produced by, the cycles of fashion and obsolescence, but the effect is still relevant. What creates the charge that turns the beloved into the repulsive?
-- One other state, that I cannot seem to fit into the cycles of the commodity, but does still seem appropriate, is that of the Uninterpretable. Objects that seem to have no visible purpose, reason, or even formal unity can simply defy understanding. This is related to what Bataille calls the "formless" (l'informe). It slips through the categories of its own classification.

So, why does this interest me?

I feel that the objects of everyday life are at their most compelling when they capture something of this affective, physical/psychical charge. While it may be wholly idiosyncratic and personal when and where this happens, I still believe that designers must work to create these kinds of effects where possible. This may mean occasionally flying the face of the conventional measures of utility and beauty, but there is certainly plenty of room for a few odd products in our world.

Or perhaps that is the wrong way to think about it. Perhaps it is always impossible to consciously produce it, and so then it may be the role of the design critic to make compelling, strange, and difficult objects relevant; to see them where others might see nothing much That may be the final, and most important point that I have to make. Just as the abstract impressionists needed Clement Greenberg to raise the public's awareness of their import, perhaps design needs criticism that can make it relevant and profound to people who might actually care.

So somewhere between design production and design criticism there must be space for those moments when objects and ideas physically shake the human subject with panic, terror, hope, pleasure, or curiosity.

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© 1998 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com