# Designing problems and solving problems

This is me rambling about design, plagiarism, and being bored. And stuff like
that.

## Design for the sake of design

Before I was a dev I studied furniture design in the uni, back then I was really
into the scene and followed the trends and all that. Somewhere at the back of my
head I developed a roster of designers that interested me, just stuff that made
me go "Ufff, wish I’d done that". The more I learned, the more I realized how
much furniture designers actually love chairs.

**There are millions of different chair designs**, quite literally. Every
designer has to have their take on it, and this leads to a bewildering multitude
of different sitting devices: for working, for taking it easy, for laying down
(chair for laying down... isn’t that a bed?), for multiple people to sit next to
each other, chairs that rock, chairs on wheels, chars without a backrest, padded
chairs, tattooed leather chairs (yes), egg-shaped chairs, chairs that hang from
the ceiling, and tons of just plain uncomfortable chairs. This kind of
chair-cornucopia is great, it celebrates the beauty and diversity of life and
art, yada yada.

But, there’s a rotten underside to that.

Not to go too deep into the purpose of design in general, but allow me to be an
idealist for a moment: its purpose is to support life, design should make the
task of living in the human-constructed world a bit easier. The reality of
things might be different, though. A designer wants to do a chair that is
innovative and somehow new so they can sell it, but there are so many chairs
already, it easily feels as if every feasible structural solution has been
conceived already, and the designers needs to reach deep into the bottom of the
proverbial chair barrel to stand out, a somehow forceful process of birthing new
ideas. I can’t help of thinking that the design process happens only as an
intellectual exercise, design for the sake of design, not from any sort of
eloquent worldly need.

On a good day like this, when I’m feeling high and mighty, I think that design
in general is a philanthropic pursuit, unselfish act devoid of the ego,
invisibly serving the humanity. Like cleaning, you’re not supposed to notice it.

## Creating problems

**One of the designers I gravitated toward was Jasper Morrison**, an English
furniture/product designer. He has done a lot of chairs, and a lot of them look
very familiar somehow. Have a look at the image below.

![An ordinary looking chair designed by Jasper Morrison](/images/chairs_basel.jpg)

A chair you might have seen before

You’ve seen this one before, right? But that’s not the chair you’ve seen, most
likely. Sometimes he takes an old chair and looks how to make it better, usually
there are only very minor things to change and the result looks a lot like the
original.

What about plagiarisms? I guess legally you’re safe if it’s an old piece
(copyright has expired) or the maker is unknown, or if it’s derivative enough,
but that’s beside my point. Obviously you (or a lawyer) might disagree on that,
**but I don’t think we should**.

I somehow like idea of **not designing when there’s no need for it**.

If we don’t have a problem to solve, we tend to create the problem and then
solve the problem we didn't have. That’s how we humans are wired. To create
something new, just for the sake of creating is not necessarily the way to go.
In functional design that is, in art that’s the whole point. And this bridges to
my next point of being bored.

Here’s another interesting one, a very bench looking bench:

![A very typical wooden bench](/images/chairs_botan_bench-e1386238388729.jpg)

A bench by Jasper Morrison

## But I’m bored

I personally get bored when there’s too much conformity. As much as I need it,
the minimalist "purity of form" just bores me. After just ranting about how
things should be, I should also say that there are no rules, no dogma, you think
there is, but there literally isn’t. There’s nothing to tie you back. The
life-loving, ecstatic exuberance of creating problems is ultimately so much more
appealing than the nihilist minutia of solving them... to a degree.

Norwegian design duo [Yokoland](2) said in an interview (I can’t find it right
now, but it was most likely on the now defunct [I.D. Magazine](3) from around
2006, [Momus writes about it in his LiveJournal](1)) that they rather create
problems than solve them. Creating problems is obviously a terrible idea when
you want to, you know, solve a problem. But it’s fun, and unboring.

[1]: https://imomus.livejournal.com/222181.html

[2]: http://www.yokoland.com/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.D._(magazine)

## How does all this come together in context of web then?

I’m still not sure... I mean, does it have to "come together"? I don’t think I
have a strong point to make. But maybe we’re all dead inside, rutted into these
landing page layouts, infinitely circulating the same themes.

I rarely anymore do any design, but when do, I try not to. I like the idea of
letting performance and the browser’s the capabilities to render code to define
all my design decisions. Same way, if a piece of furniture is hard to build,
maybe it should be built in a different way then? Just keep it dumb simple and
the rest will follow.