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.
Marxist Fruit Bowl is a typical wooden ladder with a traditional wooden fruit tray permanently attached atop; the two components are recast as a single entity—a fruit bowl—that speaks to production issues and social relations surrounding the consumption of fruit in America. Its utility as a fruit bowl necessitates that users climb the ladder, acknowledging in a small way the efforts of the often migrant- and itinerant-fieldworkers who make possible the quantity and variety of produce available for so many others’ enjoyment.
MARXIST FRUIT BOWL
Wooden fruit bowl
Maple wood, laser engraving
2007
Advanced capitalism presents consumers with goods whose material origins and production history are often veiled, whether intentionally or as a natural consequence of the system’s complexity. Karl Marx’s writings on fetishization address this mysteriousness, acknowledging that commodities are not only material things, but social things that reflect human relationships. Fetishization is commonly understood as an over-valuation of these non-material/peripheral qualities, but an alternative reading figures fetishization as an under-valuation—where the individual labor and social forces are not apparent to, or duly considered by, the consumer.
Engraving of Marx's quote on tray bottom
"A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties."
—Karl Marx
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