A post about maker style and failed experiments in plastic beauty.
Maker Style
The maker movement has it's own unique aesthetic. It's the look of exposed wires, circuit boards, slot-and-hole joints, plywood, cardboard, and anything that was something else before it was turned into what it is now. It's bricolage; makers seemingly create things out of other things that happen to be available. And there's value in that. The maker aesthetic has a kind of honesty, it gives you clues as to how something was made, where it came from, and how it works. But it also creates what I think of as "loud" objects.
Visual Cacophony
Loud objects send many messages. They're made of components that we recognize and with which we associate ideas. This NeoPixel Tiara, for example, doesn't hide the Gemma controller or the wires for the battery pack or the circuit board part of the NeoPixels. Its design tells us a bit about how it works and how it is put together. This is great if you're trying to make one of your own. But there is, in my opinion, a visual cost; all of these clues shout out at the observer and make the object more like an intellectual puzzle and less like something to be enjoyed purely for its effect (or its effect is mediated and altered by the material information?).
Becky Stern's NeoPixel Tiara (above) is an example of Maker Aesthetic
Anyway, an iPhone 6 is a device that does not have a maker aesthetic. It doesn't tell you what it's made of or how it works or where it came from (which, I think, makes it easier for many of us to ignore the unethical working conditions of the factories in which devices like this are made). BUT it also sends a clear impression. The NeoPixel Tiara is a visual chorus. The iPhone is a single beautiful note.
Not that I want my Jaunty Fascinator to look like an iPhone. That sounds weird. But I do want it to have more of a phenomenological aesthetic impact than a material one. I want its components to combine in such a way as to provide a harmonic impression. I don't want someone to look at it and say, "oh. look there's plastic and there's LEDs and there's a microcontroller." I want them to have a cohesive visual experience resulting in delight.
Easier said than done, amiright?
I feel that I've got the lighting behavior nearly where I want it. So I experimented more with the plastic this week: ironing layers together in various way to change the diffusion and structural qualities, trying to make something resembling feathers. But everything looked awful and limp in the end. I threw it all out. I'm planning on totally redoing the plastic to give it a lower vertical profile and create more depth somehow. And I'll probably end up using real feathers to accent. But it's all just looking uglier and taking longer than I expected. And I really want this to look good. Like, damn, lookin' good.
