by costanza » Fri Dec 02, 2016 7:28 pm
I've come to what I believe is a nice realization over the last couple of days. It's probably something some of you have thought about before but the ideas connecting it got me to worked up not to share it.
I assembled this belt a couple of weeks back that can be found in the . And then a few weeks later I made a cross body strap which I've been using as a belt since. They both share the attribute of not securing the belt in the orthodox hole meets pin fashion, and these 'new' ways were pretty nice in my mind. Then a few days ago I remembered a bunch of stuff Don Norman speaks on in his 'The Design of Everyday Things', at least I think it's from there but I can't find the passage right now. He talks about how when something is designed really well it becomes so natural that it's solution becomes the standard execution of that type of object.
A good example is a spoon, it has a handle and a small bowl. All spoons look like this, it's what makes a spoon a spoon. But the same goal could be achieved with a very small bowl, but this is impractical and a spoon is very practical so that's why it looks the way it looks (actually now that I think about it this might come from Louis Kahn).
Anyway getting to my point is that a belt is also a good example of this.A belt will generally be a punch holed strap and a buckle with the classical pin in it. But this is not the only way to make a belt. And when I say make a belt I mean the essence of the belt, the tightening-and-securing-of-pants-function of the belt. Most belts look like this because it's a very practical way to secure a belt. But you can secure belts in as many ways as we can collectively conceive of. Some of them are bound to be extremly bad but I refuse to believe that he only good belt has a hole and a pin. This limits what a belt can be.
This is starting to sound like a belt is the best thing in the world, but the point I want to make is that this goes for all garments. If we identify the essences of a garment or whatever really and think about how it can be executed differently there are bound to exist interesting solutions. I believe some good design challenges those automated concepts we have of how something should function and look. There is a Swiss contemporary architect named Pascal Flammer whose lecture I attended when he was in Sweden. In his lecture he explained how he wants to avoid the automatisms that we have in the building industry. He wants to question every decision he makes and see if the conclusion he comes to is interesting due to approaching the problem in a previously glossed over way.
This goes for clothes too, be it how a belt is secured, how a dress is cut or even how something is worn we should think about how it can be done in new ways to push ourselves forward culturally, functionally, whateverly. I don't believe the belts I've made are revolutionary, the one in the DIY thread isn't even working properly, but I think this idea of actively questioning our own automatisms about clothes is something really essential to get forward.
Thoughts?