A Very Wrong Chair

How to talk about a “bad chair.”

There is so much good design in the world, that I very rarely encounter bad design in new things anymore.

If a thing is new, it’s likely worked out most of the issues that held back previous things from being ‘good'.’

I’m not one to advocate that there is a specific “good design” aesthetic, certainly not in any sort of absolute or objective sense; there’s just no point in speaking from that position anymore, as if one is an authority on design.

I think terms like “good” and “bad” actually become more cumbersome, because they are too general.

Getting into a “good or bad” debate is like the phrase “toss me the scissors!”

There are a handful of people on the planet I would say that to - I trust their ability to toss the scissors in a way that makes them more catchable. Otherwise it’s too risky, someone is going to get hurt. It’s slicey and dicey.

So we have to use our words, our language, to walk the scissors over, as it were.

I submit that starting from appropriateness is a great place to start.

Appropriateness widens our gaze to consider the context and event for which the object finds itself in.

Appropriateness also can focus our gaze - as we become aware of our subjective approach to the objective world around us.

And when we talk about chairs - we need to consider where the chair is seated/placed as well.

A chair is an object that signals rest for the human body.

The bulk of architectural output is the appropriate application of materials towards human rest.

The chairness of the chair signals rest.

We know what chairs are for. We know how to sit in chairs. This isn’t art.

When we see a chair in a public space - all the cues, the site, the chair itself, they signal an opportunity for rest.

And this is where it is helpful to move from good and bad to right and wrong.

Because there is nothing inherently good or bad about any object. It’s an object.

It may have some rich interior life, but we can’t access it, we can’t know - we only have our senses, our tastes, our preferences, our subjective way of feeling the world, and our reactions and responses.

So we can’t evaluate the object itself, but we can evaluate it’s appropriateness, in relationship to the time and place we encounter it.

It is what we subject the object to.

Or as I’ve said in other places, “what’s the chair for there for?”

That’s about appropriateness.

I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to tell if you if I THINK the chair is good or bad.

I can actually just give a report on my FEELINGS. A response to the sensorial qualities.

In many ways, it is no different than finding a good rock for skipping.

In many more ways, it is so different than looking for a good rock for skipping.

In both ways, I am looking for a shape to do what I need it to do.

If I find a rock that is right for skipping, I am not saying that in your hand you will have the same results.

I am saying that in my hand, this rock is the most appropriate for the goals I am looking to achieve.

The same sort of mechanism is at work when I see Ia chair. I can see if it’s going to work or not.

I can see if it’s right for my body.

That’s key.

I can tell you about how I felt in this chair, in my body.

And then you, with the same amount of sensorial resources, can look at me and my body, and look at the chair I am writing about, and you can make an inference for yourself.

I wonder if this chair is right for me too? Will I feel similar - in my body?

Is that what I want from a chair?

When I saw these chairs, my first thought was, '“whoops, those are wrong.“

The longer thought being something closer to: there is no way I am going to sit in that chair and feel good - it’s not right for my body.

I infer it’s not going to work for me/my body based on past experience.

This particular chair is not right for me.

My body feels horrible in this chair. My body actually hurts in this chair.

I could not find a way to sit in this chair that in any way relieved pressure from either my bottom or back.

They were in conflict, the seat and the back.

And for those of you who make chairs, you can see that just by looking at it.

The friend I was with said, “yikes, what’s wrong with those chairs.”

It’s so wrong, that as I surveyed the park, I noticed only 2 other people sitting in the chairs.

Happenstance. For sure.

But the observation is telling as well: they were sitting in the chairs sideways, not using the backrest as a backrest.

They were using chair as a stool. As a raised platform.

No different than a flat rock at 18.5” tall.

It’s not a bad chair.

It’s just wrongly suited for who chairs are for - humans.

It’s a wrong chair.

In this case, I would say very wrong.

A note on hostile architecture.

This could be a case of hostile architecture - that is, designed intentionally to discourage people from sitting for a long time. These same chairs are used in Grand Park in LA, which is where I first encountered them. When I saw these green chairs in the park in Palm Springs, I made the connection.

I posted the Grand Park chairs on IG in 2019 saying, “When you can just look at a chair and know it’s wrong, how does stuff like this get made?”

A few commenters mentioned - “hostile architecture” - and that the silhouettes were there to discourage long term lingering. And then they tagged the architecture firm that designed the chairs - and all of it seemed a lot more plausible.

Which begs the question - if the chair is designed to discourage long term sitting, then the design is actually a success, right? In the sense that it fulfills the assignment for the developers who hired the firm.

Hostile architecture sucks for humans because it is intentionally designed to suck for humans.

I understand this to a certain extent, in the projects i’ve done for coffee shops and bars. That is where a lot of my furniture work goes. And we’ve had very frank discussions about how long a chair needs to be comfortable for in order to both serve the needs of the customer, and to maintain a level of turnover within the space.

A bar owner told me once to make the seat back MORE uncomfortable.

I don’t like designing this way, but I understand how design needs to work within the larger context of the business it is serving. Design arose as a discipline to serve the business needs, not utility, per say.

Or that is, the utility of the chair/stool is in service of the business goals of the cafe, bar, or park plaza.

On a podcast the other day, I heard a guest say “there’s so much bad design in the world.”

I always think this is a weird statement - um, thanks for your opinion?

WHY is there so much “bad design” in the world?

My friends, BECAUSE IT IS DESIGNED THAT WAY.

It was designed that way by award winning architects and designers.

I submit that this chair is intentionally designed to be uncomfortable to the human body.

It’s function is largely symbolic, and reads more as decor and ornamentation for the public space.

They are accessorial to the overall goals of the space - they are like chunky fuscia eearingg, or stilleto heels.

They grab attention, look good in photos, but you cannot wait to take them off.

So if you see chairs like this in a public space, I suggest bringing a blanket, taking your shoes off, and finding some rest on the ground.

It’s free, it’s already there.

Your body will thank you.

Peace, Love, Cactus

-E

Substacks are Migrating

I started publishing some bloggy blog writing on Substack.

I will be migrating those posts over here.

But in the meantime, you can go read those, if you’re interested!

https://thephysicalsurvey.substack.com/

-E

Get That Shot - Event and Narrative

Earlier this year I began an art project at the San Gabriel River.

Earlier this year, I, Eric Trine, who can’t help but turn everything into an art project, went on a walk - and this is why - to see how much weird stuff floated down the river after the rain.

Following your curiosity has more to do with timing, than anything else.

One needs to grant, give, or allow time for following one’s curiosity - the white rabbit, as it were.

Following is just saying yes forever.

Following better, brings your awareness to all the millions of yes’s you say all the time.

Following better brings your awareness to the “no’s” as well.

Like Sister Corita Says in Rule #5 - To be disciplined tis to follow in a good way, to be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Artists do this by establishing a work space/place - studio. The studio is the discipline. It is architecture.

It is a “good way” to have a studio space/place.

The placeness of the studio kicks our brains into gear - now is the time to make stuff because you are in the place to make stuff.

This is a long pre-amble to say, that the river project flipped my practice - centering the place as myself, my body. So that I was the walking studio. I was the space in the place. When am I not?

I always have my phone with me to take photos and videos of everything, all the time.

But this morning I’ve been going through all my photos that I shot on my “real camera.”

Everything is different when shooting with my real camera. It’s a Canon 7D, digital SLR. It’s not fancy at all. It’s weighty, with just an EF lens 17-55mm. I shoot everything on this. All the photos on this site, etc…I’ve had it for 15 years. I know the crop and zoom - and how much I can get in the frame with or without moving my body.

For this project, I picked up a zoom lens 75mm-300mm. And after shooting the same way for years, the long lens became a way of getting curious with a tool I know so well.

Cropping.

I know the crop of my iphone 12mini (my daily carry).

I know the crop of my Canon7D with 17-55mm lens.

I did not know the crop of the 75-300mm lens and all of sudden play-full-ness rushed back into the view finder!

The lens extended my vision but also extended my crop.

I could see further in the distance with greater detail - but that detail cannot be transmitted beyond the camera’s sensor.

The sensor has capacity.

So regardless of the content that the lens brings into focus, the sensor cannot sense more visual data than it can operationally process.

The sensor has capacity.

Other than that, you are free to crop however you would like.

Only a certain amount of visual information is going to get through.

What does my crop say?

I went on a walk down by the river.

I am the capacity. I am the walking sensor.

I am the manager of the crop.

This is the image that prompted this morning’s reflection.

I chuckled to myself as I went through all the photos. This is funny. I clearly wanted to get a shot of the birds in the foreground and dog in the back, lining it all up. But in the moment I had no idea how to get that shot on the lens I was shooting.

I wanted “that crop” - but couldn’t get the other stuff in focus in time.

I wanted to capture the event in an image.

I wanted to get an art moment.

And, and, and…

I did.

If you look at the image, what is in focus?

In the earnestness to capture the moment, the event, a snap shot in time - the only thing that is in focus is the little bit of rippled water in the middle of the crop.

The figures are blurred in movement, even though it isn’t a motion blur, it’s the gesture of their forms, which we know.

The dog isn’t hunting - it’s curiusly exploring.

The Stilt Walkers aren’t running away as if they are about to be eaten.

They look like they just poured out of Sunday brunch and are headed to the subway stop.

There is so much information here - in the event!

Or maybe!

It’s just a bad photo.

Peace, Love, Cactus.

Think Make Think (and write)

I came across this image on Tumblr, maybe around 2010?

I love it.

It is like a mantra.

In 2011 I moved up to Portland, OR, beginning a Master’s program in Applied Craft and Design, and as fate would have it, the author of this image became my second semester mentor.

Here’s the origin story of the image, pulled from the Portland State Graphic Design 2009

Tumblr;/psugd290.tumblr.com/post/68825658934/think-make-think-by-clifton-burt-2009

“…inspired by a haiku graphic designer John Maeda “quietly posted on his blog…Over the next few months, that haiku often found its way to the forefront of my mind. When our studio acquired the remnants of a discarded arrow sign, it was clear to me that think-make-think was a perfect fit, both in form and function.

I have fond memories of my wife, Kate, Will Bryant and I digging through a Mississippi junk store in an old railroad warehouse on the rumor that there were arrow-sign letters in there… somewhere, if we could find them.” —Clifton Burt

15 years ago, a few like minded artists made an image in their studio in Mississippi, it went out on the internet and pinged me. That’s normal. We come across things all the time that we save and screenshot.

What I find more amazing still, is that Clifton became a formal mentor of mine through my MFA program, and was also on my thesis committee.

His wife, Kate, became an art big sister friendtor person, as well.

And the final piece of the puzzle, is that Will Bryant and I did a serious collaboration that was a key unlock for both of us in grad school.

Wait, let me back up.

Will Bryant also moved to Portland the same year as I did - for a different grad program.

We both were working through our stuff, in our own disciplines, but we both struggled to find traction within the programs. Part of this is regular grad school stuff.

Part of it was the emergence of our digital presences outside of academia - and outside of our physical work.

Perhaps around our physical work?

What is the prepositional relationship of the digital image of the work, to the work itself?

It was the digital documentation and distribution of the work that was making the rounds, over and above/around the physical stuff we were making.

For one critique, I just showed images of how many times my images were reposted on Tumblr. I’m not exactly sure what I was getting at. Perhaps, that this image becomes it’s own object that moves through digital spaces - it has a life of it’s own? I like that. Something like that.

The digital image/object.

Will, also, had a famous critique session, where he hired an improv actor to play him in the critique. He briefed the actor for about 30 minutes prior, the work was already hung up on the wall, and the actor went in and acted as Will.

Art school. Gotta love it.

I see this as a twin impulse.

I was removing myself from the equation, so was Will.

The question may have been at the time - Does authorship exist even if the author is not present or known?

Before our final semester of grad school, Will and I did a collaboration that, for me, was transformational.

We made a bunch of fun objects together - maybe about 50. (I will talk about this project more thoroughly at another time).

And those pieces are out there in the world, some of them in our own homes, in our kids’ rooms.

I’ve seen these objects pop up on Instagram, and when I visit the homes of my friends.

But the digital distribution of images of our work has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

This reminds me of one of my other favorite mantras from Charles Eames - that is, “Eventually everything connects, it is the quality of the connections that is the key to quality…”

So much of my work goes out into the world via internet - and I’m so happy that it can connect with folks over time and space.

That I can, essentially, pull a record album off the shelf, and play something for you.

That’s a good segway. (wow, I can’t use that word without thinking about segway scooters. Now you can’t either.)

A final word on blogging for today.

I think about it like I’m DJing. There is so much good stuff out there to listen to.

Come on in, sit in a comfy chair.

Listen to this. Consider this.

Here’s a few extra comments on that. Etc…

You’re gonna like what you like and not like what you do not like.

Thank you for being here and now.

Peace, Love, Cactus.

10 New Things - Part 3 - Wall Mounted Table - That's it.

“Wall Mounted Table” - that’s it. That’s all the paper said.

Early into my ideating for this piece I found myself getting stuck in the world of novelty. I was trying to figure out how to make a wall mounted dining table for two, with a nifty hinge system and counterweight.

Stop. Pause.

Who said it needed to be dining table size?

Who said it needed to fold up ?

Who said it needed to fold up in cool way?

I realized that from the start I had already thrown a lot of extra adjectives onto the clue. But all that was written was “wall mounted table”. That’s it.

This happens with me fairly often. It’s not necessarily “overthinking” the problem - it’s that I added a bunch of extra stuff to the problem.

Wall mounted table. That’s it.

Let’s start over.

Questions that helped me reach a solution:

1. What is a table? A table is a surface that resides at a certain height.

2. What size is a table? A table can be any size.

3. What height is a table? A table can be just about any height.

4. Does use inform size and height? Typically.

5. Do I need to decide what it will be used for to start making? That would be helpful.

6. Am I using only materials found in my studio right now? Yes

Cool. Start with the material. Material will inform size, which will inform use, which will come back around to inform final dimensions. Now go make.

I’ve noticed that I achieve the best results when I can strip everything away and just start making. That is where things feel like fun - it feels like play. It feels like art making - which, I mean, I feel like I’m making something that I have overdetermined or predetermined before I even started.

I have a clean starting line.

That’s a great place to start.

I picked up a few sheet metal discs that I had lying around and started figuring out different ways to combine, intersecting planes, etc…

The sizes of the discs very quickly informed the size of the table. I didn’t want to go much bigger, I feared complication with wall mounting.

So I decided it was a small table - like a night stand, or micro side table. You might even call it shelf. But isn’t a shelf just a table used for some things and not others?

Wall mounted (side) table.

Done.

10 New Things - Part 2 - Making Things I don't Want to Make

One of the things about being a small independent physical product based company (mouthful) is that I’ve come to find I don’t need to make that much new stuff. As I mentioned in the previous post, I can talk myself out of making just about anything, because just about everything already exists.

Friends often ask me why I never got into lighting, and my answer is typically - “I don’t have anything I want to say with lighting that isn’t already being said”. So when I look at this particular list of “10 New Things”, there is a reason I haven’t made some of things before. Either I don’t want or I don’t have to. And perhaps somewhere in between those two.

The above serving tray is the last thing I made in the group. I didn’t have any good ideas for it - and I thought something might come up by making the other things first.

Here’s how my thought process flowed:

Is there anything I have to say with a serving tray? No.

Is there anything I can do to make it cooler? Not that I can think of.

And then I thought of this scene from the movie Gentleman Broncos:

”The Suffix Principle” - Add a suffix to any old word and it becomes magical. This is basically how I see most product design working today. Take everyday items and add a suffix. The thing is fine. It works fine. And yet we add some bling to it - literally, we are just bedazzling stuff. And a lot of the times, it takes a thing that works and makes it more complicated.

Back to the serving tray - I figured I didn’t have any good ideas for how to make it more useful, beautiful, functional, etc… I couldn’t figure out anything that would make it better.

So I did what a lot of people do today - if you can’t make it better, just make it weird.

Getting weird right is hard to do. There is a lot of bad weird. Good weird is really hard to do too.

It’s like being effortlessly cool - there are like 17 people on the planet that can do that.

So I pointed my boat towards weird harbor, it seemed like good place to dock for this item.

10 New Things - Part 1 - Avoiding Work with Other Work.

Recently, I asked folks on instagram to give me suggestions for 10 New Things I could make.

My plan was to make 10 new things within a work week - 5 days.

I received over 75 suggestions, typed them up, printed them out, cut them up, and threw them in a bowl, then picked 10 at random.

What started out as playful exercise/experiment that didn’t require much forethought - because I literally had the idea, and then posted it on Instagram 5 minutes later - became an interesting case study for how I approach my work.

Here are the things I noticed that I noticed:

1. The experiment was a way for me to avoid doing regular work that I needed to get done. I realized I had a pile of invoices I needed to send out. A small pile, but work that I needed to do to get paid to do more of the work.

2. The other thing I noticed is that I’m currently in creative limbo - a creative purgatory. I know I have a vision for where I want my work to be, and I’m living in the tension that my work isn’t there right now. I don’t like this feeling. So rather than dig into that feeling and find a way to push my work through to that next level, I created a distraction. We all do this. I noticed that I do this by creating more stuff. Sometimes folks do this by consuming unnecessary things. I often do it by producing unnecessary things. Producing unnecessary things is a great impulse to have - it’s basically the impulse to make art (unnecessary things).

3. I can talk myself out of making anything new. I went through the list and thought - why do I need to make any of this stuff? All this stuff already exists. Why should I waste my valuable time and resources to make new things, when I could just go shop for those things. Again, not the point of the exercise, but it revealed where my head goes.

How to do we reconcile our desire to create and make new things, with the full knowledge that we are killing our planet?

I tried to answer this question in graduate school with my studies. Though my answers didn’t satiate the thirst of my questions, I concluded that the work we do as designers is really about identity. We make stuff and things. And stuff and things are a necessary part of meaning making in our life.

I still think that is true, but I don’t think it helps the landfill problem.

In Design and Crime, Hal Foster aptly describes this moment (even though he wrote it 20 years ago):

“Our own time is a witness to a qualitative leap in this history: with the “flexible specialization” of post-Fordist production, commodities can be continually tweaked and markets constantly niched, so that a product can be mass in quantity yet appear up-to-date, personal, and precise in address. Desire in not only registered in products today, it is specified there: a self-interpellation of “hey, that’s me” greets the consumer in catalogues and on-line. This perpetual profiling of the commodity, of the mini-me, is one factor that drives the inflation of design. Yet what happens when this commodity-machine - now conveniently located out of view of most us us - breaks down, as environments give out, markets crash, and/or sweat-shop workers scattered across the globe somehow refuse to go on?”

Fortunately, start ups today are building more sustainable products on the production side of things. But it’s the mechanism of distribution, the deeper cultural system at work - “desire is not only registered in products, it is specified there.” Nowadays, the desire isn’t only registered in the product, it’s registered through the marketing mechanism. Digital marketing tools are able to swiftly and accurately deliver those goods to our devices, so that we practice, daily, even hourly - “hey, that’s me” or “that’s not me”. It is the continued tweaking of the commodity matched with the continued tweaking of consumer profiling.

In the recent article, “Why Startups Are The Driving Force Behind Design Right Now”, almost all of the brands in the article speak to cultivating a direct feedback loop with customers. Whether or not that is actually true is up for debate. I remember when Floyd started asking customers what they wanted in a sofa on Instagram 3 months before it came to market. But Floyd also says the sofa took 2 years to develop. Either way, the net result is the same - consumers get to fee like they are part of the process, and that is meaningful. And meaning making is about identity.

But hey, what are we going to do about those landfills?

The Jugness of the Jug

Love these riffs by Heidegger in Poetry, Language Thought, from the chapter entitled The Thing.

“But the gift of the outpouring is what makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell.”

“To pour from the jug is to give. The holding of the vessel occurs in the giving of the outpouring. Holding needs the void as that which holds.”

“The jug’s jug-character consists in the poured gift of the pouring out.”

“The jug presences as a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things….. The jug’s essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing.”

The Thingness of the Thing

Howard Risatti writes in an essay titled the The Thingness of the Thing -

“This is not to say crafts are without social life, a life in society beyond pure function; rather, it is to say that in their essential nature as physical objects they are presentations rather than representations, things rather than images. That is so regardless of the cultures, geographic locations, or eras from which they come is one of the trans-cultural, trans-spatial, and trans-temporal truths of craft.”

Now back to Ariel and the fork. What Scuttle was getting at was the presentation of the object. Essentially, taking the object information presented to him, and wrapping a story/use around it. The thingness of the thing is trans-cultural, not matter if you live under the sea, or among the human stuff.

Scuttle Wasn't Wrong

“It’s a dinglehopper!”

One of my favorite scenes from Disney’s The Little Mermaid - when princess Ariel collects a bunch of “human stuff” and takes it to the wise sage Scuttle for interpretation.

She hands him a fork, he calls it a dinglehopper, and he explains how it’s used for combing your hair.

The thing is, he wasn’t wrong. He made up a story informed by the thing he’s holding. You can comb your hair with a fork, it makes sense.

The big upset comes later in the movie, when Ariel is sitting at dinner and uses the fork to comb her hair.

This is one of my favorite things about functional objects - that if you change the context around the object, you change the meaning. And in the case of Ariel and the fork, not only did the meaning change, but the function changed.

Objects are not inherently meaningful.

We subject them to meaning.

Interview Excerpt

“The arts, in general, are supposed to be a resource for us to do the things that language can’t do, and I feel weird if people feel like they have to pass a certain test to participate or to benefit from that resource. I’m not diminishing difficult or complex art. There’s definitely a role for that. But I think there’s an attitude that happens sometimes and that’s not the thing I want to do. I’m already, like, a recovering asshole, I just want to do things that more people can be a part of and get on board with. That nurtures me and where I want to go.”

Excerpt from 2016 Interview with Sight Unseen - See full interview “ERIC TRINE WANTS TO BRING POWDER COATED JOY TO THE MASSES”

A return to a longer form.

I wrote the above as my “abstract” for my grad school thesis in 2013. What I’ve come to realize is that this “project” is actually my life. What isn’t about connection? When I decided to go back to grad school, it was largely to study, research, and figure out for myself why I love stuff and things as much as I do. I love stuff. And I love things. I love thinking about things and talking about thinking about things. So here’s the space I write about thinking about things.