The Practical Value of Impractical Design
Allan Chochinov of Core77.com writes up this "so obvious it's not obvious" thinkpiece about the usefulness of products that are designed digitally, transmitted to other designers through the internet (via bloggers like yours truly), but are too absurd or impractical to ever reach tangible production.But I'd argue to not dismiss them quite so easily; that these design ideas, even when they're patently absurd, provide something that is very worthwhile. They exists as small stories—discursive gestures, narrative indulgences, even evocative abstractions. They travel virally exactly because they are there first to tell a story, not because they serve a function. And when you think about it, this isn't such a bad place for design to be right now. Too many of our products are function first/form second—or form first/function second—with narrative, story-telling elements nowhere to be found. How bad would it be if our products began with narrative in the first place; with an idea of the experience of the product in mind, before that product ever had the chance to turn into landfill? Not bad at all, really.
Creative gesture or vapid prototyping? The importance of fictional products [Adobe.com]
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In other words, there are designers who are basically designing for Second Life rather than stuff that people could actually use. Got it.
I think that sometimes people (like me) will critique a design as being impractical because blogs (like this one) will post about it as if it were meant to be produced/used.
Maybe I'm parsing your comment as snarky or dismissive, but I think you may be missing the point, which as I read it is that publishing the sketches or fantasy products out to the world at large helps spin out newer—and perhaps practical—ideas. To slag off something just because it's impractical and acknowledges itself as such seems like making it play by rules to which it never agreed.
I mean, sure, whenever someone comes up with a bad idea, even with no intention to produce it, there's nothing wrong with commenting "This sucks X because Y!" But can't you see there is some value even in that?
I think they're useful as an idea; an evolutionary step - even a discarded one - might yield results for an astute observer. If it sucks x because of y, maybe z is useful and/or pretty. If it's completely impractical and useless, it's probably also ground-breaking in some small way and might open a new perspective on an old problem.
And people posting "this sucks" on design posts just drive me crazy. Actually, on any posts.
It's always good to try to get out of the rut. You can see this in the progression of the steam engine, when some of the largest advances were made by people who weren't very familiar with the state of the art at the time.
From Sol Lewitt's "Sentences on Conceptual Art"
10) Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
http://www.ubu.com/papers/lewitt_sentences.html
I get that it's important to create designs that won't be produced, ever, but stimulate thought about the possibilities; I'm remembering a concept for the next-generation Macintosh that frogdesign did for one of the Mac magazines back in... the late eighties, early nineties, maybe? A sort of modular computer with curved shapes in primary colors, completely unlike the beige boxes. It was never produced, of course, but some of the spirit of the design showed in the original iMac, years later.
I think that my main objection with some of these things isn't that they'll never be produced--see this thread on io9 about imaginary gadgets--but that they could have been better if someone had put a little more thought into them. Take this thing, for instance; not a bad idea, but right away, someone pointed out, where are the star and pound keys? Yes, that's easily fixable, but it kind of reduces my enthusiasm for seeing something like it in the future if the designer blows something so obvious. Maybe I should just look at the good points. Maybe I'm just like my mother, she's never satisfied...
"discursive gestures, narrative indulgences, even evocative abstractions"
Dear Mr. Allan Chochinov of Core77.com: please tell me what these words mean.
or are you just saying "play = good" ?