experience

i was talking to a colleague last night about furniture as objects. We take a lot of care, as makers, to refine these objects aesthetically. We spend a lot of time and energy getting drawing and redrawing the lines and curves, choosing perfect materials, getting the proportions just right. These are all important to being a designer, I think. I would never say differently. And I myself have been known to build model after little model, changing just one detail, or try finish sample after finish sample, looking for just the right mix of oil and varnish, or debating the relative merits of boiled linseed oil versus tung oil.

But then, maybe, at the end experience trumps all of this. That is to say, would the user enjoy the table more if it was finished with oil instead of varnish? if the legs were steel instead of wood? I am not sure they would. I might enjoy an object more one way or the other from an aesthetic standpoint, but then I am not sure how much of the experience of a furniture object is aesthetic. Maybe this is what separates furniture from sculpture (and I emphatically do not think of myself as a sculptor): that sculpture has a primarily aesthetic impetus, and that furniture has a primarily functional impetus. The one is experienced by viewing, the other by direct interaction. That direct interaction is what is so compelling and important to me, and is why, in fact, I don't think of myself as a sculptor. As I have said before, I want to touch the user, to have a direct physical contact with them, so I make furniture.

Clearly this is an oversimplification. And clearly I am not the first person ever to posit this. But it sort of crystallised for me last night, which is one of the things that I love about being in a gallery, at an opening, is that everyone is kind of primed to think about these things. And as fervently as I believe that furniture does not belong in a gallery, that it belongs in an environment where it will be used, it can be useful to look at it in a gallery setting occasionally, if only to get a different perspective.

And a different perspective is always so useful.