Soft Renaissance

1 Soft Skin

A progressive radii on every corner, particularly on electronic devices, has become a kind of default in design circles, settings fetishised by Apple. We have all seen those advertisements of the close ups and dynamic shots of crescent reflections dancing around corners and bezels of phones and watches often on a black background, as if it was some undiscovered horizon in space. We find this shapes attractive haptically, but also it’s non threatening, no sharp edges or pokey bits. We are more worried about damaging it (our most intimate object) than it damaging us. But in this language there is no place for simulation, like an acupuncture needle, a sharpness or awkwardness can produce new sensations.

This softness has extended into our homes in the form of fully upholstered couches to the extent where softness is pure decoration. We have all at some point removed a cascade of 'excess to requirements' throw pillows from a hotel bed. Not to mention the cushion cover as the ultimate medium for domestic self expression, as the t-shirt is to the outfit and the mug is to the office.

At the same time the fully upholstered megastructure of a sofa becomes a status symbol. There is a desire to keep padding our lives out with foam, fearing contact with anything that has a shore hardness greater than our skin. Designs are bloating out and inflating to absorb any element that poses a risk to our vulnerable bodies. Removing the effects of gravity in the same way we have tried or insulate ourselves from the natural world in so many other ways. We are trying to bypass the laws of physics. But on the other hand, we also need to feel the presence. For example, in space, with no perceivable gravitation pull, and in theory infinitely comfortable, astronauts report strapping themselves down, with like space straps or something, to simulate the feeling of weight. Too much of a good thing. This is a reminder that our bodies have adapted to gravity as an environmental factor, in the same way as evolving with the environment and with other living organisms. DON’T BE SO SOFT.

While we are more and more driven by softness and comfort we are becoming less tolerant of discomfort, hard surfaces or flat planes. A cycle given by no longer having to be physically mobile for stimulation or social interaction. It’s ironic that the mobile phone was a liberating device, allowing us to communicate from anywhere. And it is true that it has fulfilled its promise of digital nomadism. But as a matter of fact I would expect that most of our phone screen time happens to be spend in bed. The most immobile, homely and soft place in our lives.

In contrast there is a cultural revival of a certain hard minimalism in work of Donald Judd and alike. However this is more sympathised visually rather than functionally. Luckily Donald Judd’s chair is too valuable to be sat on anyway. This stems from nobility that is associated with Zen and aura and the beauty of the simple and rejection of the complexity and excess stimulation. But does this really cross over into our real lives? We are happy to invite Marie Kondo to blast our physical objects with fire hose onto the front lawn, but if we are asked to simplify our digital presence, a metaphorical tangle of wired headphones and old chargers, we would have fewer converts. This is under estimating the power of hypercapitlaism’s dependance on our digital footprint.

We are not against comfort or softness, but we believe that functions and needs are more plastic than the market demands of us. You need this thing, then you need this thing, and you may also like… We feel it’s our role to question these functions and programs, as people have done for centuries, and not just reset to Apple's default settings. Let’s not take it for granted that most comfortable is the best. For example, we often say that the best chair for your back is the most uncomfortable chair, because it forces us not to sit for a long time and to get up and walk around or change positions.

2 Software

Softness is also digital movement, a metaphysical promise. Software over hardware. Objects can service us in a physically intangible world. The ultimate soft object is the computer program. The cloud is the softest throw pillow of them all, but it also alienates, the feeling that we are not in control of our digital objects, dictated by a sometimes fragile internet connection.

In various computer learning circles there is a desire to create programs with outcomes that fool or seduce humans. This enviably leads to the questions about whether it could replace the creative industries. GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks are AI systems that are a reasonably new field of machine learning. They rely on learning from the vast body of data like other systems, but are more successful because part of the framework is constantly being ‘adversarial’. Two systems: generative and discriminative, simply put, fighting each other for the best results. This is often associated with realistic outcomes. For example, you might have seen a website thispersondoesnotexist.com that is using this method to create realistic head shots of people that don’t exist. This method has been applied to interiors, stories, poems, recipes, music…. creating artworks, some more successful than others.

A friend was telling us about a job where they had to produce a modern wall based artwork for hotel rooms. Abstract blocks of colours and sprinkle in some found objects maybe. Making agglomerations and hybrids manually from a mood board, where authorship is not important, brings us to completely decorative furnishing exercise. In this case one of these programs and a "painting/found object scattering robot” could replace our friend.

We could see that functional objects could be rudimentarily converted to an equation, something like. Function + decoration/surface + material/form. We could design objects with a series of sliders by turning the volume on each dial. Similar to the tool we use to change the brightness on an image. We can imagine Amazon using some algorithm that evaluates the meta data of products and use this tool to predict, manufacture and market objects, and shape our reality. We would be surprised if there wasn’t already a simple version of this. A system that trawled the internet for popular memes, photoshopped, uploaded onto a platform, sold and printed on demand. A generic object, with no human creative input (apart from the source image, which we now know can be realistically generated without human input).
We are not thinking about these systems, because we are worried about losing our jobs, but more as an exploration and interpretation of our creative process. In other words. Not what a computer can do for us, but what it tells us about ourselves.

As a thought experiment how do the objects we design fit in this data set? What would the computer think? Would it be disruptive? Thrown away as an outlier or a valuable data point? I wonder what the trash pile of this system would look like, the stuff that doesn't fit the parameters of the system? What objects can we make that would fool AI systems in the same way that they are trying to fool us? Programs can have hallucinations too.

3 Soft Sell

Our needs are becoming more and more perverse and service based. Mainstream object design flattened to not be controversial anymore. People are rethinking post modernism because it is not optimistic and solution based, and seems too egotistic in a time for urgent action on issues like climate change, racial equality and human rights.

We think this is completely understandable, but we have lost a way we can critically think about design culture though the act of participating in the system. We like to make items that are part of the market, but also question the value structures underneath. For us this represents the ultimate soft sell. A product that is friendly, subtle, humorous, beautiful and with a strange aftertaste. It inspires us to think critically about our world. It can backfire and we find ourselves get stuck in a quagmire of self aware meta one liners and realise that no real meaning or solution is presented. So it is important to think about the power of beauty or sympathy in these scenarios.

Presented at From Here For Now talk series. Melbourne, June 2020.