Taking Our Fingertips For Granted

Of all the senses, touch is the most valuable and is the only sense of the five senses which is directly within our control. Yet, we often take for granted how useful and unbelievable our fingertips are. Design artists Barry M. Katz and Branco Lukic have teamed up to pay homage to our fingertips – for being so loyal to us when we need them and for considering their importance in our lives. In Katz’s book called “Nonobject” he addressed this issue saying, “All we can do is point our fingers accusingly at myriad keys and buttons and touch screens, hoping that something will happen. They deserve greater respect than designers have given them.” As for nature, we have also lost touch, for nowadays, all things are created in identical designs, whereas nature has no regularity or congruity. For example, we create all technology to have straight lines, curved edges that are stable objects. Katz elaborates on this point, saying that it does not matter “which can of tennis balls, which pair of jeans, or which holiday cruise you buy off the shelf” – they’re all virtually the same! Designers have been following the dictum of 1896 American architect Louis Sullivan who said “form ever follows function.” Well, according to Katz and Lukic, it’s time to break this notion. The cellular microchip is one example of this, allowing tiny cellular devices, like the BlackBerry, to perform numerous functions from checking fantasy football stats to keeping an organized calendar. Some of Katz and Lukic’s “nonobjects” “evoke the inconsistencies of nature”, for instance, by creating a perfect, “ideal” cellphone that gradually collapses into a crumpled and dented piece of metal. Other “nonobjects” focus on the idea that we abuse our fingertips by jabbing them into things all day long and thus have created a cellphone where one pushes their fingers through holes on the keypads, rather than at them. These nonobjects will most likely never go on sale – rather they are more conceptual objects. However, Dutch designer Hella Jongerius succeeded in mass-maufacturing “humane” designs and is featured in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam through Feb. 13. Her work, titled “Misfit”, is all about humanizing industrial designs. One of her projects includes 300 colored vases, each one of them unique by using “different combinations of more than 200 historic mineral-based paints and modern chemical glazes”. The act of humanizing industrial designs in “Misfit”, along with the “Nonobjects”, helps to restore emotion into our routine ways of life.
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