LETTER no. 77Week no.11: Telling Stories. SundayDesign 101 MOOC, Abadir for iversity

Greetings from the lost desert,

We are now exploring metaphors, meanings, and some doors.

Doors in walls guiding us through. Doors of perception framing the everyday.

From an exterior to an interior, or vice versa. From an exterior to another exterior,

or from an interior to another interior. Doors mark changes in time and space and energy and matter, and things.

Sometimes, doors are locked and need special keys to be opened. Other times, you need to be granted access to enter them. Some of them are even invisible!

The door you saw on todays postcard is a special one designed by Ettore Sottsass sometimes in the early 1970s... In a desert in Spain, along with his girlfriend.

We found it into his Metaphor book.

A great book to make us think and envision different worlds and possibilities.

Heres a link to some images from it.

If you think youre meeting your destiny on the other side of a door you may not be interested in its design, says Sottsass.

Question of the day:Seeing the world through metaphors?All the worlds a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,said Shakespeare.

We usually do not quote Shakespeare, because we sometimes find his words a little hard to grasp and translate... But we found this metaphor of his quite appropriate. Not to mention that it is one of the most famously quoted metaphors in English literature.

Metaphors help us understand things by illustrating different ways of seeing and understanding them. Shorter than the allegory (which is an extended metaphor), this literary/poetic device quickly sheds new light on abstract sometimes obscure ideas. In this way, metaphors animate conversations, build interest and underlying tension, and finally encourage a more lively exchange.

Its a play with words. Its about creating a story. An idea is drawn with a flexible outline: one that is blurred by the overlapping of our individual interpretations.

Homework no. 77Today, you will ponder the very sensitivity of your doors to the world: your perception of things.How do you see your surroundings? What do you observe most?

These stories we trace in the sand (in the sandbox that is our mind) are ephemeral. With time, they change form just like the dancing sand dunes in the desert.

These fragile stories are also inevidently transformedby the vision of retrospect. Indeed, time is a thief. Time passes us by: before you know it, the present has become the past, and the future is the present.

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. Eugene ONeill

And continuing with our literary device...Time is like a handful of sand- the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers. Henry David Thoreau

:-)

What will I learn today? You will learn to address things in terms of perception and symbolic meaning.

To transform your thoughts and your inner emotions all shaped by past experiences into narratives. To spark other peoples curiosity. To let them look through your eyes and discover new things.

Why do we do this? To underline the fact that contemporary design is 99% linked to the production of symbolic meaning and the telling of stories.

Good design is about adding a symbolic value to an object, a food, a short story etc.

To communicate with other people. To convey meaning and messages.

Or as Sottsass once said, When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism. Its not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.

Something to remember: Design is making things and then perceiving them as meaningful through the doors of time.

Further inspiration... The Solar Sinter by Markus Kayser.Do you remember when we gave Andrea an Arduino for Christmas? Well, this project was made using Arduino.

Pretty impressive dont you think?

There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors., said Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Aldous Huxley and William Blake. They inspired each other through through metaphors and literature... and finally we have a very powerful saying.

From Huxley, we (very) strongly suggest The Doors of Perception. And from Blake, we suggest The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

One last song...You know the day destroys the night,Night divides the day... The gate is straight, Deep and wide,Break on through to the other side...

Design 101. A How-To.We know we have some late-comers, here are a few instructions on how the whole thing functions...

A typical Design 101 day:

We send you an email around 9 in the morning (Berlin time) with the link to our daily unit + some news, updates, cool Design 101 things we found etc.etc.

Note: you can find all of our previous emails in the Announcements section of Design 101 on iversity.

Once you land on the units page, you find our shipment (which consists of a video-postcard + a letter). You watch the video, read our letter, get to work and complete the assignment (or relax if its a weekend day). For even more fun, you can always refer to the Design 101 encyclopedia, which is updated every week.

Dont forget to take part in the conversations of the Discussions forum!

Now, going beyond the iversity platform, we have setup other places for us to meet and spread things we do.

On Facebook:the Design 101 page: to follow whats going on (in general terms)the Design 101 Exercises page: to check out picks (things that fascinate us the most)the Design 101 Arena group: to post your pictures, share your thoughts, emotions, references, lalala (as a complement to the discussions happening on the platform).

On Twitter,@design1o1: to follow whats going on + discuss with each other.#design1o1: to connect us all under a same hashtag.

On YouTube:the Design 101 channel: to view + share our video postcards (which is not possible to do from the iversity platform)

On Instagram:#design1o1: to connect us all under a same hashtag.

Regarding the hashtag, make sure to use #design1o1 with an o and not a 0...

:-)

PS Uploading your homework to the iversity platform is very important in terms of archiving. It is the only way we can collect all the things we do in one same place. Once the course ends, it might turn out to be reorganized into a wonderful book and/or exhibition

Ettore Sottsass

SolarSinter, Markus Kayser

Todays postcard

Desert from SottsassMetaphors