M3 Design | lrichardson@m3design.com
“We wants it. We needs it.
Must have the Precious.”
—Gollum, Lord of the Rings
As a designer I walk a fine line. On the one hand, I must listen to and positively respond to clients’ demands for the allegorical “Precious.” But on the other hand, I long to create meaningful products with which the consumer connects on a level beyond that of the bright facade of today’s corporate packaging. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve fallen into the feverish thrall of consumerism, trying to find the Precious amongst all the wrappings and trappings at Target. And I say “trappings” with all the heartfelt enthusiasm of a mother whose three-year-old daughter recently proclaimed that “the Disney princesses” were “[her] life.”
The Precious, in this form, is powerful. As consumers we are anesthetized to a product’s real true identity–often one-dimen-sional in its application, mass-produced, and woefully unimaginative. The products have been reduced to literal shells— designed for shelf appeal and visual interest, but little else. Since when did design become about packaging the Precious rather than truly experiencing the Precious? By applying form to this outside perception, we may be missing the deeper connections to consumers that we all desire as designers— connections that are born from a philosophy known as inside/out
design and are forged from the interactions themselves.
At a recent workshop the M3 design team shared a PBS documentary on Leonardo da Vinci to help our clients reframe their approach to innovation. Perhaps one of da Vinci’s greatest gifts was to create physical manifestations of mechanical purity. In other words, form most certainly followed function, but the function was a mechanical genius that didn’t hide behind the form. Rather, the function was an exaltation of the form. Da Vinci didn’t know it, but he was one of the first “inside/out” designers.
May + June 2008
interactions
Traditionally, inside/out design has been applied to architecture and automobiles. The interior design may have affected the outside form, although the relationship, if there was one at all, wasn’t immediately apparent. As Kipling once said, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” If form followed function, it was in the most basic sense and there was little interaction between the inside of the object or space and the outside form.
The 1977 Pompidou Museum comes to mind as a literal translation of early inside/out design. By placing all the inner workings of the museum—escalators, ventilation ducts, and structural framework—on the outside, large uninterrupted gallery spaces were created within. The
Pompidou Center was motivated b y a desire to optimize interior space for functional benefit.
The rise of semantic design in the ’80s sought to use inside/ out design for a communicative benefit by suggesting the internal use through external form. The Tsui House in Berkeley, Calif., by architect Eugene Tsui could be described as using this type of inside/out design. With its oval plan and parabolic top, the structure is based upon the world’s most indestructible living creature: the tardigrade, a tiny animal that can withstand extremes of temperature and pressure. Tsui’s resulting exterior, visible to most passersby, was derived from the interior requirements borrowed from the tardigrade.
Nearly 25 years later, there has been a resurgence of inside/ out design and a more carefully considered response to what designing from the inside means. Not only is inside/out design reappearing in architecture but it is also extending into consumer goods, software and hardware design, and design-agency thinking.
What, then, is inside/out design today?
The literal interpretation seeks to sensitize the designer to the series of interactions between the inside and the outside and makes an intentional commitment to the relationship between the two,
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