>7 Everyday navigation (objects 61-70)

The pocket as a survival container for personal use; the Braille embosser as a tool for improved awareness and readability in environments designed for the visually apt only; the barcode, in its multiple and increasingly sophisticated contemporary versions, as a passive communicator and a symbol; the credit card as a transactional facilitator with simplified materiality. It is not easy to find links among the 10 last objects published in this blog (61 to 70). If anything, they have to do with everyday navigation, portability and enhanced efficiency derived from their single functionality. Everyday navigation implies reducing design to solving one problem only, and doing it really well. This is a heroic feat in a moment when multi-functionality and hybridization are, increasingly, the protagonists of design publications and events worldwide. Multi-functionality addresses increasingly complex sets of demands. In our capitalist world, we have managed to create a multitude of disposable needs in order to justify the production and commercialization of new, disposable objects that feed the process of buying and selling; objects that we have been convinced to consider essential in our interaction with our everyday environments. The beauty of the pocket money brailler is that it is truly essential. It is also inexpensive, reliable and user-friendly, qualities that need to be part of the design of an object that eases the limitations of those who are not able to see the world we so readily take for granted. That is alternative design.