Semi-professional design series explores the field of DIY from the perspective of digital tools and resources used for prototyping things that could only be imagined before. Evolving around technologies and platforms, and within multidisciplinary communities interacting with systems and each other, semi-professional design thinking often manifests as playful objects presenting new viewpoints to the world. The third part of the series looks at “useless things, designed with tools that are typically used for scientific purposes,” as Jari Suominen puts it.
The animation loops printed on Shogun Kunitoki’s picture vinyl LP can be viewed using a special strobe light that the true fans of the band will build themselves.
With all the different ways of perceiving the world and with all the tools and instructions available to make almost anything, what will we do?
The most maverick manifestations of semi-professional design may be compared with chindōgu, a Japanese phenomenon of creating surreal tools for everyday life. For example, Portable Zebra Crossing is a carpet for pedestrians to fight against the tyranny of cars – the striped carpet can be rolled out across the road in a suitable crossing point. Chindōgu are sometimes described “unuseless” – that is, they cannot be regarded as useless in an absolute sense since they do actually concoct a method for making certain aspects of life more convenient, but in practical terms they cannot be called useful either. However, separated from the constraints of utilitarian application, they can take us into a new world of human invention (see also Kenji Kawakami’s book The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, 2005).
In the spirit of chindōgu, small-scale utopian ideas are being materialised and shared within semi-professional communities where new trains of thought get involved in design processes.
Shogun Kunitoki’s album Vinonaamakasio was released as a picture vinyl LP featuring two animation loops that can be viewed using a special strobe light which the true fans of the band will build themselves. The Shogun Kunitoki Strobe Light Kit containing a circuit board, a 9V battery clip, a blue resistor, a brown resistor, a capacitor, a 555 timer IC, a super bright LED and a switch can be bought online and compiled according to the soldering instructions Jari Suominen, the keyboard player of the band, posted online.
Jari Suominen is a semi-professional designer. He describes his projects as something in between design, art and science; “embedded systems that work magically, hiding their digital nature.” He also regards them as DIY activity because of their exploratory nature and the fact that they are usually inspired by the possibility of making things for oneself within reasonable price.
Typically using the open source Arduino microcontroller and Processing programming environment as tools, Suominen believes that a successful design process either starts from forgetting what’s possible and what’s not or simply from what’s available: ”if you find a bunch of cheap electronics somewhere, then you buy it,” he says.