Design for Bric-a-Brac

One of my weaknesses, which developed predominately while I have lived in London, is accumulating curious objects from charity and second hand shops. I cannot call these objects a collection with the strict meaning of the term, as they haven't got enough characteristics in common with each other, other than the fact that they have something of interest to me. Often it is their design that appeals, other times their curious nature and rarity, it could be the materials used and the colours or that an object is really old and carries with it a story and a narrative. Often they are objects from far away lands which give me the illusion of having travelled there and brought something back. Although they are not a collection of one type of object, they are still a collection of objects, and one of a considerable size which resists to reach full growth while I still live in London. Once in a while a new addition creeps in, as the low cost and the excitement of an interesting find have become irresistible to me and an important part of living in London.

I need to note here, that by using the term collection I have probably given a misleading impression of the state of these objects. Personally when I think of a collection, I often imagine a display cabinet, with porcelain figures for example, carefully arranged inside. Or a collection of music records on shelves, arranged by alphabetical order, by genre or even by colour. Or I think of tables full of objects arranged in a way that makes sense to the owner. In any matter, I think of a way in which the objects of a collection are easily accessible, safely displayed, personally arranged and of some use in a person's life. Most of my objects are wrapped up in newspaper, some in bubble wrap, and are placed in storage boxes. Other than vaguely fulfilling the criteria of being safely kept, they do not play any other role in my life other than to have given me a short shot of excitement and pleasure when I saw them and bought them and to take up space.

There is no question here about throwing them away, at least at this stage, even if I often open a box and realise I have forgotten I ever bought what lies inside. I am not sure if the fact that I have forgotten an object means that it is not important enough to keep or merely that I have too many things to remember them all. But I know that often the renewed pleasure and surprise of seeing an old object again is so intense that it calls for me to find a solution to this problem. At the least Aretousa would be able to also see, handle and enjoy these treasured finds. Instead I have to re-wrap the old friend of an object back into its box.

In the beginning I thought of getting a display cabinet for them, but it never felt quite right. A display cabinet gives the objects inside it a precious character, which my objects do not carry. Also you need to open the glass doors to reach them, which suggests they are not meant to be always accessible and should be protected when they are not used. Some of my items are delicate and fragile, but I do not feel they would be "at home" in a cabinet with glass doors. Then I thought of putting them in shelves of some description. There they would surely be more easily accessible and we would have full view of them, being able to use, handle and look at them, as and when we pleased. But I was not happy with this solution either and I worked out that the problem is in both cases that the objects would be grouped together. These objects are interesting to me for several different reasons each, but when they are grouped together they become a mismatched cacophony of weird and creepy rescued oddities. They lose their individual characters and what I liked in one now is shadowed by what I slightly disliked in another one, till they all become a big pile of merged rubbish bits.

The happiest I have ever been with displaying these objects was when they were placed on the bookcase, amongst the books and CDs and DVDs. There they looked at home, they could be picked up just like the books could, there was sufficient space between each object to take away the creepy feeling they gave me when they were together as a group. There, they were just like the books I have; slowly accumulated through the years, much loved and displayed for reference and for pleasure. However there is only so much a couple of IKEA Billy bookcases can do, in terms of holding items and also in terms of customised design. I think an ideal design for anything, a house, a shoe, a bookcase, a car, a jacket and so on, would be one that is made specifically for the owner, specifically for a space and would be ideally able to change with time. The most beautiful Californian villa would not only look out of place in a small Greek island for example, it would be impossible to run, impossible to maintain and you would very likely be happy to exchange it for a small, cool, white stone house within a couple of years.

I remember reading in Bruno Munari's Design as Art, a few examples of what a successful, ergonomic design is like. He used the example of the design of a wooden spoon, one we use to stir a fry up in a pan or a pot of soup with. If you were to buy a flat edged spoon, after prolonged use you would notice that one edge starts to become worn out so that the spoon loses its flatness and becomes sloped. A good design for a spoon would be one that has the form that the object would eventually take after prolonged use. The same goes for shoes. Children's shoes have the most ergonomic design in their soles; they are rounded, just like adult shoes will become after prolonged use. This kind of design works with the use of the object in mind, with the laws of physics, rather than against them, making life smoother and more comfortable. So should I be also thinking of creating a "bookcase" specifically designed to host these objects together with some books, CDs and DVDs?

 

I think that it is an interesting prospect; to be truthful I have been sketching a certain kind of shelving for these objects and books, here and there for a while. The reason I never took it seriously, is because I thought that such a shelving unit designed for specific objects, books, CDs and DVDs should surely also be designed for a specific space. If I had in mind a specific wall in a house we owned, then I could design the shelving unit for that specific wall. Then not only the unit could be freely attached to the wall without the worry of leaving a mess behind, but most importantly, the proportions and dimensions of the unit would be designed to work in harmony with the given space. This kind of expectation of custom made objects has no end though, and one could argue that in turn, the ideal thing would be if you could design the house in which the wall was in, design the wall to which the shelving unit is attached. But then how boring would such a place be, one which you have designed everything yourself? Would there be a place there for such a curious collection of objects such as the one I have accumulated or would they look so alien there that one would have to even design their own curious objects to go into their own personally designed shelves?

As a compromise I can imagine finding an old house with some character of its own and then building the shelves there. In the meantime, I thought of creating a kind of prototype design for the shelving unit I have been thinking of for so long. Some of the spaces in the shelving unit have a standard measurement, some that of the height of a CD, some that of the height of a DVD and some are based on very tall books. The depth of the shelves is a standard market one and uniform throughout at this point. Although I have tried to distribute the weight evenly through this unit, there would need to be certain places were the unit is screwed to the wall for additional support and extra security. I have no access to all the objects I have collected at the moment, so the spaces I have made to host them amongst the books are made out of memory and I am sure a unit of the size of this prototype would not be big enough to keep them all. As I have been designing it today, I have been thinking of the objects Aretousa would be most interested in and so have designed spaces for those objects. Following this I have been also thinking of her books occupying the shelves rather than mine. As it is more and more apparent these days, my projects seem to organically transform into projects designed for a child, which is a bit annoying, but also very refreshing and funny.