Design Journey
In design, we often think about—or our clients most often think about—the result, the end point. Designers—themselves—do like to show off the results, sure, but are often obsessed with the process, with the voyage itself. It’s a peculiar division of appreciation, but its one that makes sense—perhaps imperfect sense—in the context of how design, and to a greater extent everything else, is created, packaged, and sold.
But as a wider and wider swath of the consuming public in the West is coming to recognize, the thing that really speaks to them, that resonates, isn’t just the end product, rather it’s the story of its conception, its context, its meaning, and yes, its process. Designers who’ve worked on bespoke projects—be they interiors or products, clothing or media—know this in their bones, and have long tried to incorporate their clients into the process. The result, of course, is not only a more successful finished product, but a greater allegiance and passion to and about the product from those paying to have designed.
We talk a lot at PARE about journeys. As our inspiration we often refer to the ur-journey in the western tradition: that of Odysseus’s trip from the ravaged warfields of Troy to his rocky little island of Ithaca. As anyone who’s read about that trip knows, Ithaca isn’t the story. Getting there is. Yes, there’s a reason, an end point—saving his wife who’s been busily pining away for him while simultaneously eschewing the very forceful efforts of local upstarts to declare the big man dead and take her for a new wife—but all the interesting, fantastical, impactful, meaningful stuff takes place in the leagues between one side of the Aegean and the other (with stops along the Mediterranean).
This story is inspirational because it revels a great truth, one we’ve been holding on to as humans for more than a few thousand years, that the journey is what matters. And after sixty years of unrelenting advertising, economizing, and feature-packing on one hand, and on the other, a global system of trade designed and developed to obscure supply chains, origins, and labor, early twenty-first century homo sapiens is starting to catch on, and feel the loss, even if we have a hard time articulating it.
Our buying preferences are starting to make this clear to all but the most obstinate commodifiers. It’s becoming clear, once again, that stories, that histories, that meaning sells. These things make for the purchaser a home in the deluge of things to buy and want. How they live becomes an extension of time as well as a satisfaction of desire. Of course, this is not true of everything, and in every case, but if you’re wondering where to go from here, where to go from a rupture in society that has made lots of people reevaluate their values, the answer is right in front of you, and has been since Homer.
Products—here, in the broadest of contexts—that speak to people, are storytellers. These stories can be personal and contemporary or universal and ancient, and most likely, both. Whether it’s purchasing a lighting fixture designed by traditional craftspeople drawn from the rich seams of their aesthetic and cultural milieu, and made using methods that reveal the individual’s hand and perspective, or redesigning a home to evoke a family’s history and their place in the world, the end product is the same: a thing or a place that is more than simply a thing or a place.
Tell stories. Help others tell stories. Be part of those stories. It’s a simple mantra, one that benefits everyone.
—Peter
