>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.

70. Pockets

Pockets have generated their own universe of custom-designed objects. There are pocket books and pocket knives; pocket watches and pocket flash-lights; handkerchiefs, keys and key chains, wallets, coins, cell phones and ipods; wrinkled notes and special pocket pens. Pockets are responsible for the miniaturization of our lives, the gift of enabling us to be self-sufficient and operational by being able to carry what we need to have with us at any given moment. A few things. Only what fits within. Pockets store, protect and carry our own daily survival kit, no matter if we go trekking or we go to work. They reassure us in our ability to operate in our own terms, in different environments. They are essential to trouble-free living: we lose our car keys, and we’re doomed; somebody picks our wallet from our pocket, and the day becomes simply catastrophic. Pockets are functional in their own chaotic way. They are part of our clothing (word is that the great Max Bill had special, custom-sized pockets added to his coats, to carry his drawing implements). Pockets hide. They keep things out of sight. Shy people keep their hands in their pockets, a habit that I have never been able to understand fully. Hiding the hands is an imposed paralysis that limits the free-flowing propensity to expression that extremities have: it reduces communication to verbal enunciation and suppresses complexity at many levels. What is the form of pockets? How does it predict our lifestyle?