“Good Design” can improve your life. How? By making products that solve a problem or solve it better. This is one approach but there is another; Good design can add joy to your life and it is with these objects that I choose to surround myself. Design must be more than smart, streamlined and durable; objects must be pleasurable. They must provide a joyful experience in some way. I want to be surrounded with things that put a smile on my face. I refer to this as Design for Delight.
Let me give you an example. I am the type of person who uses a funnel in the kitchen but instead of getting a set of graduated funnels that would sit quietly in a cabinet ready for use I have a Pinocchio funnel from Alessi and I keep it mounted on my back splash so I can see his smiling face every day. It tickles me to grab his nose, lift him off the hook and stick his nose in a bottle or jar. My Pinocchio funnel is whimsical and a visual pun but Design for Delight works in other ways as well.
Sometimes function or the hand feel of an object is so pleasurable that you want to use it over and over again. A friend of mine paid $100 more for the blender model that had the buttons that were a more gratifying to push. I think of the designer Carl Aubach who designed simple functional items such as corkscrews and letter openers, which were meticulously crafted to feel exquisite in the hand.
Here are three examples of design for delight in the EgdewoodAve.com collection:
Flux Furniture Chair – Origami has fascinated us since childhood, but would the forms be as precious if we did not know they began as a flat sheet of paper? The Flux chair delights us in much the same way: Abracadabra! I made this! We experience the magic and joy of transforming the flat shape into a side chair.
The flat shape pops-up into a side chair and we experience the joy transforming the material into an object with our own hands.
(So much more pleasurable than assembling an flat-pack dresser!)
