The Human Objects.
The Human Objects (tho.) is something I am actively working on and thought I share here how I am spending my time while on my next pursuit. Most of my time since I returned to Melbourne on 01st August has been devoted and split between job interviews and juggling few personal projects I have been meaning to push towards the development stage. “tho.” at the moment is just an idea and is definitely in it’s early stage - something I would like to keep on growing. The literature I have looked at since my Honours year at Monash University as well as post graduation, my curiosity towards the subject of “how we perceive physical objects in an environment” has led to further exploration towards our daily interactions with tangible objects. This has also influenced my design practice to date.
Constructivism Notion - “Knowledge does not begin in the eye or the object, it begins in the interactions. There is reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one and object on the other. There is no structure apart from construction either abstract or genetic.”
The Human Objects (Tho.) envisions bringing interactions to the forefront of the design process and reimagine potential products and services like never before. Objects at phenomenological level; the level which we most easily perceive that consist of the five major senses - vision, hearing, smell, taste and most importantly touch, these objects act Newtonian (space is distinct from body and that time passes uniformly without regard to whether anything happens in the world).
Meaning, you can and do in some way make sense of objects around you according to how they act with other objects of its size and shape with mass. For instance - you can sort of predict what a door handle does in respect to a door. The meaning for both - the door and the door handle does not sit in the object itself but how they act in respect to each other.
The above mentioned notion began with the idea of thinking about Humans historically - a man in an environment interacting with an object consciously decides the type of potential and possible interactions with its given size and shape with mass. A man in an environment may consider sitting (Interaction) on a stone (Object) of its size while a smaller stone might not hold any relevance in that regard. Moving forward to this very day this notion sits securely in the nature of being a Human. As time has passed, we have evolved both physically as well as mentally but as a result there is also a simultaneous development of the environment around us.
The same Constructivism Notion becomes interesting when we add technology to the mix - as technology takes the intrinsic value of the object away from its environment. Now objects could be of any size and shape and do amazing things like allowing you to speak to your loved one 10,000 Kilometres away.
I want Tho. to act as a vessel for this approach which opens new realm to look at objects and design meaning for humans today and humans to come. I will be sharing some work which serves this ideology in the coming months.
