My design work varies from the poetic to the pragmatic. With self-initiated projects, I tend to design for the domestic sphere, at the scale of the individual, and often without a lot of technology. My academic projects involve greater ethnographic research and participatory methods and tend toward systems-, service-, and strategic-design. The images below represents the "making" aspect of my design practice, often in collaboration with Stephanie M. Tharp and our studio, materious.
Umbrellas for the Civil but Discontent Man combines a symbol of gentlemanly refinement—the full-sized, dark umbrella—with an element of more manly sword-bearing times. The umbrellas offer brief psychological respite from the dictates of social amiability; aggressive fantasies are allowed and encouraged on the daily commute to the office. The effete civilian’s grasp of the handle engenders the spirit of the masterful samurai, the medieval barbarian, and the triumphant cavalryman.
UMBRELLAS FOR THE CIVIL BUT DISCONTENT MAN
Freud-inspired umbrella set with carrying sheath
Licensed to Kikkerland
Design patents issued
2007–2009
Cast resin exhibition versions, before licensing
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud contends that aggressiveness is a fundamental human instinct whose inhibition is a necessary obligation of social life.
Fundamentally there is a tension between the freedom to gratify these natural desires and the conformity demanded by civilization. What results is a muted, guilty, and ultimately a discontent populous in which the possibility of more complete happiness has been traded for a degree of security.
"Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment." —Sigmund Freud
Mass-manufactured collapsible umbrella version in sheath
"Humans clearly do not find it easy to do without satisfaction of the tendency to aggression that is in them; when deprived of satisfaction of it, they are ill at ease." —Sigmund Freud
