It is not an uncommon story to link the notion of the self to space. Many of us do it as very young children when writing our names and addresses, expanding the address locating us in our street, town, city and country, to encompass the world, the solar system, the Milky Way, the universe.
If our childish selves are dynamic, ever changing, with novelty compounding upon novelty, then stability—and therefore any sense of identity—can only be offered insofar as it is spaced. We soon find that this stability is a mythological one, with new spaces and new opportunities for our selves being unveiled as we age: homes, schools, the interstitial and liminal spaces between domains, workplaces, public, private and so on. And so with each space comes the chance for new selves to blossom. “At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of a being’s stability,” wrote Gaston Bachelard a little over 50 years ago, in his book The Poetics of Space, in which he examines the twists and turns in the relationship between self and space.
Time (and therefore identity), for him, only makes sense insofar as it is spaced. He continues, “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. This is what space is for.” Our supposed sense of stability, of identity, is merely a fleeting moment, concretised only because it is spaced and is as quick to change as we move through spaces. In each place, time stops, we stop, our selves are deposited and we are left only to wonder—for Bachelard, to dream—burrowing into the deepest crevices of the soul, spreading across the territory of the moment, or soaring into the farthest realms of the cosmos. Any sense of identity over time, across spaces, becomes just a story, a superposition of all the different momentary spaced dreamed possibilities, cosmic, subatomic and earthly. We become real only insofar as we are allowed to dream, to tell stories, by the spaces in which we move and are at repose. Here designing becomes important.
It is a staple of much design education and analysis to talk about designing as storytelling.
The use of terms such as “design/visual languages” highlight this; as well as highlighting the notion that—as language—designing operates within a cultural space in which it is determined by contextual meaning more often than it determines such meanings. Each thing that has been through a design process becomes a materialised moment of a storytelling that is started by those involved in its designing and production and continued by us. While things like brands attempt to tether such stories strongly to meanings determined by the brand owners, even these can break free and generate a whole new life, sometimes antagonistic to their origin. Each object, system, service, image once let out into the world spawns its own mythological universe. And we, of course, are parts of this universwe. Each object—even if “identical” to others—has its own narrative or biography (as the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai would say). My iPod will have a life different to that of any other, even if it has exactly the same specifications. Each Toyota pickup—to use Appadurai’s example from The Social Life of Things—from the farms of France and the deserts of sub-Saharan Africa, to the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Tokyo, has its own biography: its birth, use, who maintains it and what happens when it “dies” will be unique.
The point, now, is that these object stories impact upon our own in very material ways. Just as we are given the opportunities to exist by spaces and the stories that they allow us to generate, these stories are at least augmented, at most constituted, by those of the things, systems, images etc with which we are in constant contact. The acts of designing, then, are also acts of articulating the material spaces of probabilities in which we can dream our selves. To our childish addressing of ourselves, stretching into the universe, we now need to add all of the designed things (including systems and images) that constitute the material spaces of our lives. The stories of subjects (us) and objects (things) are intertwined, spaced and as full of dreamed opportunities as we can allow.
By: Jamie Brassett