Design Anchors and Time

Big Basics and Small Radicals

‘La Tulipe’ brutalist building by Jack Vicajee Bertoli, photo by Daniel Holfeld

This week’s newsletter is from Henry Lee. Henry is an innovative interdisciplinary designer and researcher with a passion for creating human-centered experiences through a blend of research and design intelligence.

Intro

Objects self-situate within time periods. Self-situating means that objects reside within a time period based on their properties. By observing, with only a quick glance, most of us may discern the material, the form, and the condition of a human-made object — both physical and digital objects. We can then determine what time period the object is from. In design terms, we can identify basic design trends, styles, decades, and even centuries based on when the object existed.

But what happens when a human-made object exists for such short periods of time that it is nearly nonexistent to our minds? What happens to a product when it isn’t around long enough to be placed within a time period?

Think about time in nature.

Scales can be massive, such as the geological time scale which can be millions of years, or relatively small, such as the life of a single-celled organism. Now, think about time scales in relation to human-made objects. Think of art, design, engineering, and architecture. Many old cities and their buildings have…