Designing Dearness
Human, like many other species on earth, has a survival instinct. We hunt and farm for survival and require tools to do so. Our species' development has always been tied to the development of tools. The better the tools, the better our chance of survival.
As modern days dawn on us, our life has become more complex with increased intelligence. Because it also brings a new meaning to survival driven by new or developed social, cognitive, and physical standards. Automatically, the tools we require also grow more complex and more significant in quantity, while the physical space we have to keep these tools remains the same. Moreover, we also tend to have limited space in our minds and hearts, making these tools easily replaceable by ourselves. That makes things dear to us for an extended period surprisingly small in numbers.
Since our space is limited, we must curate things we use and keep. We curate it with several standards, physical usefulness or functionality, social values, and preferences. By curating, we leave what matters the most to us in proximity for a while. The length of the period varies for each object, and it may last for days.
AlvinT furniture collection
The house tidying star, Marie Kondo, took curating of things in a pretty extreme way. Her examples show that most of the things we keep, which we think we will use, will only be idle in our homes. If we haven’t used them for a while, we won’t use them anymore, and we should give them away. She also told clients that have doubts about touching their belongings and feel whether it sparks joy or not. Whether they still have a connection to their belongings or not. If not, they should say goodbye immediately. Although done in almost an unforgiving manner, her cleaning purpose is the same as our unconscious way of curating objects around us, to leave only the dearest and valuable with us.
As the makers of these tools or belongings, we can question ourselves, how to make things that meet the users’ standards? How to design something dear to the user so their life will be long and meaningful? What does designing dearness entail?
Angan Shelf by AlvinT
As makers, we should understand that there is no such thing as one size fits all when designing tools for people. Designing for nature is different because nature is more exact and predictable if we find the pattern, but people are changing often and more unpredictably. The best thing we can do, first, is to truly understand the potential users' behavior and motives and keep iterating our creation as we go.
We have discussed ways of understanding people in several of our past articles, which you can read on our website. It’s worth remembering, though, as we’re creating those tools, that objects under the diminishing law will have a reduction of value each time it is used. We are making its use highly dependable on the physical quality of the thing. But the study and development and design have found that when objects are considered and developed as services, their value, on the contrary, will increase every time it is used.
Petal Lounge Chair by AlvinT
What differentiates an object from a service? An object is focused on a single physical thing produced for a solitary purpose without before and after use consideration. Meanwhile, a service is created by considering its holistic ecosystem of use and production and includes before and after use of the service.
The next thing we can do after we have developed the tools and distributed them to the public is to communicate them. Not once, but continuously. We need to communicate consistently because we all know how we tend to forget things. Forgetting means the end of use for the things we created. Communication in designing services or objects as services is mapped as touchpoints. These are tangible points where users can interact with the services or the value. These touchpoints can be close to their main object, or they can be far placed to reach users in their most remote situations.
Touchpoints can take the form of many things—it can be a barista wearing a distinct uniform and greeting customers in a specific tonality. It can be an SMS popping up at a particular hour on your phone. It can be a field agent in villages, socializing the values of the services. Designing services include creating coherent communication across these touchpoints that will improve the services' value. If it’s not coherent, it will tend to confuse users, cause frustration, and eventually, they will leave behind the services.
Consideration of the user and the communication of a service has a lot to do with the now and the near future. However, we feel that every creator should always consider the far future of their creation. Plus, the philosophical view of it. Looking far into the future means trying to make our creation can be of value even though its lifetime has ended. We are trying to make it applicable across generations even though its function and value have changed. This can be seen in highly reusable, recyclable, and culturally significant objects. It can possibly grace the museum and function as a reminder and learning for the next generation.
While the philosophical view of an object or service sometimes doesn’t have much to do with its practical use. It focuses on ideas instead. Ideas, as long as they’re transferred, live on out of their original vessel.
By considering the philosophical view, our relationship with objects or services is not limited to transactional. It can have a more profound meaning and be ingrained into our human memories.