Non Intentional Design describes the everyday redesign
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Written by Robert on September 20, 2008 – 6:34 am
Non Intentional Design describes the everyday redesign of designed objects by the user. It does not create a new design, but through use, creates something new or replaces the old.
Non Intentional Design (NID) is a phrase that originated at the end of the 1990s in design research. It describes the everyday, unprofessional redesign of professionally designed objects.
NID results when an object is used in a manner different from the prescribed (and therefore restricted) functional intention or when the prescribed application is not honored in the new use. NID is the conversion of norm into ab-norm everyday, everywhere, and by everyone.
NID examines the generation of function and the meaning of objects in and through use. It describes all the applications, processes, treatments, or interventions, great and small, that change people’s lives or work environments.
People have been using things in ways that were not originally envisaged since they began appropriating objects. This phenomenon goes far back in history back to the beginnings of object culture. At least as early as the Stone Age, people began using material found in nature with the strategic goal of improving their chances of survival.
Stones to make fire, to sharpen as knives to shave, split, cut, and stab, branches to use as spears, arrows, or skewers. In this respect, the impetus to solve problems joins the primordial human ability to make found or given objects serve the user’s purposes. However these phases of human history do not fall into the category of Non Intentional Design. NID can only exist within a product culture that has been progressing since industrialization saw the mass production of designed objects.
Non Intentional Design resists normalization, gives diversity to those things that appear to be most straightforward, and entails transformation combined with clever new functionality. NID is a reaction to temporary shortages, responds to convenience, or optimizes function. It can also be the result of play or instinct. It reduces costs and helps cut back on surplus in a world awash with products.
To better define this complex phenomenon, it is important to clarify what is not Non Intentional Design. The products of doit- yourself, self-promoting handymen or women are not in this category.
Because the do-it-yourselfers (most of whom are men) and others who creatively work and build, consciously make ingenious but often useless objects, where the psychological rewards outweigh the practical. Economies like those of postwar Germany, the GDR, or underdeveloped countries that are characterized by shortages also create clever, resourceful, useful things.
In these cases, material and social needs are the driving forces behind satisfying one’s personal needs or securing one’s survival through sales. In the case of the GDR, homemade objects or products assembled according to instruction booklets were the only way of replicating the inaccessible glamour of the West.
Non Intentional Design, however, is not a design process; nothing is designed, as such. The adjective, non intentional, is an indispensable reference to the self-acting subject, who proceeds actively and inventively in his or her reuse of an artifact, but the motivation does not amount to amateur design because there is no incentive to consciously create anything. Thus NID is neither influenced nor informed by the will to design. However non intentional should not be confused with coincidence, the lack of good sense, or being without a goal or strategy because the reuse is very much the result of a desire to solve a problem.
The desire to problem solve (Problem Solving) can spring from different motives and situations, more or less spontaneously, more or less consciously like on a design blog. In NID, the users’ motives lie more in wanting to use a thing differently from the professionally determined aim, in order to balance a deficit either momentary (emergency solution, provisional, improvisational: for instance saucers as ashtrays) or systematic (no product suited to the specific purpose: like beer coasters under a leg to steady a wobbling table).
And it always involves using a previously designed product. The chair is used as a place to hang clothes or as a shelf or a ladder, a refrigerator door becomes a notice board, paper clips are good for cleaning finger nails and for removing a CD from the computer, stairs serve as benches or ramps for skateboarders, stockings wait for December 25 to be filled by Santa Claus the list goes on and on. The most important principles of non intentional design can be summarized as follows:
- Reversible reuse: an object is temporarily or permanently used in a new context, without altering the original condition and function (a jam jar as a pencil holder).
- Irreversible use: the new use leaves permanent traces (bottles as candle holders) or the object has to be permanently changed to suit the new application (a jar with small holes jabbed in the lid to make it a sugar sprinkler).
- Change of location: things are removed from their original location (pallets as bed frames) or, the opposite, a location is given a new function (parties under bridges).
Reuse via NID is so natural with so many objects that the people who do this every day hardly notice their own actions. A web design blog can also bring some light. This shows, depending on how the basic forms are used, that not only is the object’s original application being evaluated, but also its potential for reuse, taking into account the product’s inherent features.
People become curious or interested only when objects are reused in an unusual or unfamiliar way. Products and places that are considered strange, misunderstood, or misused according to professional design criteria (and its prerequisite of functional and sensible use) possess great potential for innovation, imagination, and spontaneity. Analyzing use is so enlightening because, despite globalization, the way people use products displays cultural diversity and difference. It is high time to take NID’s everyday yet unique new inventions and added functions seriously.
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