Unit 1- The Surrealist Object Ideas

Design Method exploration

ROSE SQUEEZING- Idea 

1. Approach – Emotional
2. Take- Desire
3. Senses- Touch
4. Materiality- Metals
5. Multi-function- Possibly therapy?
6. Transgression- Temptation/religion

I am interested in exploring my own irrational desires to squeeze a really fresh and luxurious looking rose. Sharing this personal enjoyment with others has in the past evoked humorous or embarrassed responses. I think it is to do with roses representing romance to so many and the act of squeezing it suddenly suggests something more perverse or sexual. This is actually not my motivation, I just like the feel of the petals and the way the rose bounces back to shape like a spring. On a really fresh rose it is also a productive way to encourage the scent to come out.

The door handle in a traditional victorian mushroom knob shape is also an object of similar size that is inviting for a hand to take hold of. It is different in the sense that the surface is smooth and you would tend to hold it differently. Roses are often held with fingers by the stems or by cupping the base of the rose and resting the head between the fingers or around the outermost petals.

To create a door handle so inviting from metal petals will play with the senses of pain and touch in an ironic way. I am also toying with the idea of juxtaposition and creating soft thorns from a more malleable material like foam, sponge or silicone.

Spot Squeezing 

1. Approach – Emotional
2. Take- Obscene and desire
3. Senses- Touch
4. Materiality- Silicone or sponge
5. Multi-function- No, humorous
6. Transgression- Holding previous generations accountable

 

Door handle represents to me a traditional house or home. And more importantly a home I cannot afford in London. Media and popular culture is dangerously playing with the public opinion that the reason that young people cannot purchase their own home is due to all the avocados they keep eating, buying, making smoothies with, face masks. Millennials are no longer portrayed as spotty teenagers, they have make up and tools of disguise. I would like to create a door knob that looks like an avocado and when you squeeze the handle puss comes out.

The Avocado has got a bad press recently for it’s association with Millennials. Though it is still considered a superfood, it’s popularity with today’s youngest generation coupled with our economic situation has caused a world changed quite dramatically: Last year, 5 million avocados passed through Pret A Manger’s kitchens, more than double the number that did in 2013, and today 12 of its products contain avocado, which is savvy because avocado sells. In 2015 British shoppers spent £142 million on their avocados, while in the same year, in America, the largest global avocado consumer, 4 billion were eaten (an estimated 300,000 of them in Los Angeles). Over in China, 33 shipping containers of avocados are delivered weekly on to its shores; three years ago the country didn’t import a single avocado.

Why do people like squeezing spots? According to Neuroscientist Heather Berlin, “There’s a cycle of anxiety or arousal before the act and a sense of relief after,”

Below, I have been experimenting with the raw materials and modelling clay to see what this might look like.

Door knob stamp

1. Approach – Emotional
2. Take- Ironic
3. Senses- sight
4. Materiality- rubber or plastic
5. Multi-function- stamp
6. Transgression- 

Trying to avoid crude imagery, I tried some stream of consciousness exercises and kept returning to the word knob. I thought about hold childish this is and played with the words of ‘marking your territory’. A statement like Rene Magrite’s ‘This is not a pipe’ could be ‘This is a door knob’. The idea is to use the handle as a stamp and print the image with ink in public spaces, like graffiti. The object is less important itself, but the mark it leaves behind. The stamp creates uniformity, as though it were the logo for a cult, gang, tribe or organisation.