an impossible task: designing wabi-sabi

Here is the definition of Wabi- Sabi from wikipedia :

Wabi-sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent and incomplete". It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching.
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.

Here are three wabi-sabi inspired projects:

'Facets' by Vincent Ow

Wabi-Sabi table calendar by Angela Cho

Those three projects are quite randomly selected from Behance, under the search of the word wabi-sabi. Now, do you feel a discomfort in all of them; irrelevant of their independent styles? What I mean, when you look for the imperfection and beauty in incompleteness, could you achieve this idea with a careful design and planning process? To put it differently,
can you plan the unplanned?

I think this question is the reason of my discomfort in all three projects since relating wabi-sabi to a careful design project is a very assertive task. Another point, design (in my understanding) tends to achieve many products. For instance a chair design can be send to mass production to produce 1000 identically same chair. If you repeat the so called 'unplanned' element in the design for 1000 times, apart from its very unplanned nature, the result chair would not be unique anymore. However in crafts, it is very different in method. Hand-made ceramic bowls for instance are created one by one, each carrying a randomness or lets say chance factor in it. There, wabi-sabi works perfectly.

Shortly, design is not the right place for wabi-sabi, I believe.

Paper lunch bag + deli gömleği(straitjacket)

1-Okey, irony disappears when it is referred to. (lately I realised this) But in order to explain following ideas, certain reference has to be made.

2-Can the structure of straitjacket or any sort of association of the jacket be implied on paper lunch bag?

3- Would this association be legible since in Turkey a very small minority use paper bags and except the ones who once lived abroad and the ones who watch American sitcoms, do we know the common usage of 'paper lunch bag'?

4-If yes, then an association between paper lunch bag and certain implication about straitjacket could be ironic.

5-Is it fair to say ironic or is it perhaps a very rude association?

6-If it is rude; this is a fictional company and the possible patients are also fictional as a result. So, I design my patients/ clients to be humorist !

PROBLEM SOLVED

Also, here are some very very (very) cool straitjacket inspired clothing designs. Clothes have a sense of constraint. Material is very interesting: walnut wood on a wool base. So beautiful.

packages for invisible products

This week we supposed to find an idea for package design for our fictional company. My company does not produce any tangible products but it sells services which can be called as psychological support or consultancy. We had couple of ideas for related products however I can not distinguish this project from our gift project since the packages we would design, may not have a direct relevance to what the company sells.

What I have in mind is an invisible service package. For instance a package for anger managment that doesn't contain anything in the package actually but the package itself would be so tricky that opening it would require certain calmness. (a very difficult task for angry people) Once you opened it, it would show that you are on the right track in anger management since you didn't (hopefully) torn the package apart.

Ofcourse, developing a tricky package structure may be way too difficult to complete in two weeks plus it resembles to newyear/ bayram gift designs in principle.

However it would be nice to work on packages for invisible products.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrap_rage

head-body match : funny or scary?

These days, images with animal heads attached to regular size human bodies capture my attention, somehow (!). I think, I began to realize them with the video clip of 'What does the fox say?' by Ylvis. There you see young people wearing costumes and also animal masks with a regular human outfit. Until this point there seems to be no strangeness. However when I saw the following CD cover designs for Danny Sanderson, I thought, "enough with humans carrying animal heads!" although I really liked the designs with the illustration quality, color contrast between the characters in front and the pale natural backgrounds. The typography of the Hebrew alphabet also matches the overall design I guess, although I am not at all familiar with the Hebrew-alphabet typography. Apart from that all, penguin-headed humans in old fashioned swimming suits are so funny! They create a similar feeling to the video clip of Ylvis, 'What does the fox say?' But why?

The idea of humans with animal heads, gives the feeling of nonsensicalness.(thanks Tureng) Humans differentiate from other creatures mostly because of the consciousness and maybe self-awareness they have. Okey, maybe animals also have self awareness but what I mean by that is the issue of being the thinking thing. The representative of this character of human beings is basically the head in our body. So, when you cut off the head from the human body and replace it with penguin or any sort of animal head, you lose the center of mind and sense and gain the feeling of nonsense. I believe that is why it is so funny; let's rip off the center of reason and be funny.

Of course maybe those CD designs or video clips are funny just because the animals are cute. (One does not have to make a further analysis.) We don't see a penguin everyday and putting a penguin head to human body is an unusual match for us. But why the mythological character Centaur is not funny at all then? It is also an unusual match; a horse body with a human head. Centaur is very frightening for me I mean, who would laugh at this very serious and aggressive creature? So, back to the second paragraph, there must be a relation with this idea, the head as a source of seriousness and boredom (reason). Centaur has an animal body and human head; the presence of the human head as the source of sense, avoids Centaur to be funny.

Humans with animal heads: A CD cover design

Humans with animal masks from the video clip of 'What Does The Fox Say?'

mythological creature Centaur, not funny at all.

Negativity burst: poetic interrupted with tree man disease

Having a dining table with a section for plants must be nice. Nice like haiku poems. But I find this table design more disturbing than it is nice for one reason: rough trunks/branches of the tree used as table legs remind me of tree-man disease.

Even if I didn't know about the tree-man disease, I would still think that the table is over-designed. Sharing a meal time with plants is a good idea but this design screams artificial green. Those table legs are results of a taste which is very similar to the taste that puts artificial flowers in living room. Artificial flowers are very attractive, clean but very depressing.
I think the problem with this design could be solved if the table could decide what it is. Is it a non-living object or a creepy alien which sadly has tree-man disease?

O Tannenbaum!

Surprisingly, this post is not about glasses; it is the story of a wooden box.

For Marko Paşa gift package, my mission was to find a very simple wooden box... So on internet there were very promising offers but for wholesale. No one wanted to make only 3 boxes of course and they suggested mdf (Medium Density Fiberboard;enlightenment) boxes that wood painters use for non-wholesale. Mdf boxes are good in size, variety however they have this dishonest color and character. They are basically used for painting over, actually now I feel kind of sympathy for mdf since they remind me of goalkeepers waiting for an attack made by them. It would be nice to show a mdf without hiding it with paint but I am off the topic right now, mdf boxes are not alive and although it is sad that they will never be exhibited without painting over, it is a school project and I need actual wood,not the medium density.

In search of a simple wooden box which is not mdf, I went to Çemberlitaş to see a carpenter. I said to the guy there that my uncle suggested this place as it was the case. The owner of the carpenter's shop did not remember my uncle and this caused a discomfort in him I guess. (why am I having this Jane Austen language?!) So he offered me a cup of fine tea with milk while the clocks were showing 5, kidding, but he actually ordered regular tea in incebelli and said the price. I immediately left the place while the clocks were showing 5.05...It was expensive. So I called my mom (I'm 22) and a friend to see what can be done. Mom said come back home and the friend gave his father's number. Coşkun Amca was ready to make the simple wooden box. It was good luck but I wanted to step by to Tahtakale since it was on my way. However sad mdf's were all over the place.A guy suggested Şarkhan. Şarkhan had everything except my simple wooden box. This place was like a center for Derya Baykals and they had overdecorated overcoloured over everything. So on my way back home which was including a second pass from Tahtakale to the port, something super happened. The answer was right in front of my face and it was already on my blog.

This place was called as the gate for time-travel in my previous post about Tahtakale. A carpenter with a very narrow entrance made my wish come true. They had the very simple wooden box which is not mdf and for good price I guess. We shook hands while my warm tears were wetting the narrow entrance of this magical carpenter.

Although the final of the story is that I found the box, what one can infer from the story is countless. (ibretlik bir hikaye)

First, being VACD student is like living in the huge gap between Derya Baykalling and mass production. Simple wooden boxes are available for the ones who can order 100 and for the hobby establishers, mdf's are waiting to be painted over with sailboats. (sorry hobby owners, it was an over-generalisation)

Second, as a Sabanci University student, I learned that Tannenbaum (pinetree) is not only a Christmas Carroll lyric but it is the material of my box. What this means, we live in such a theoretic and spurious environment in campus that Tahtakale again showed the realities of needs and production. As a design student I decided to have more teas with carpenters in incebelli rather than only admiring scandinavian behance parades.

typographic glasses

I think designers like accessories very much. I see an increasing number in retro-glasses, cool and simple watches, beautiful leather bags and such things around me. I even have a cousin who is studying arts and wearing glasses without the actual glass. What is the thing that enables us to those little ornaments nowadays more and more? Is it our need for solidity in a very digital field? I call them ornaments because glasses are used more for decorative purposes than their function or wristwatches are somewhat like table calendars(hello teacher!) for many of us; more for beauty, less for function.

Following products are brilliant for many reasons. They are very elegant, they fill a very obvious gap in design field because typography lovers were out of typographic T-Shirts. (Ok we get it, you love typography) And my cousin may take the glass out of windows, I believe.

And I reveal the real reason why I made this post. Sorry but it was my idea; Marko Pasa logo contains glasses which is made of letters for a Freudian look... (or a Jungian; you'll not be forgotten) My glasses' font is Collaborate Thin. And I will try to make the actual glasses too for company's gift package which is getting more and more suicidal by the end of the break.

http://type.gs/