Meaning vs. Saying

When I began designing my chair I thought about what people do while they sat. They eat. They study. They wonder. They poo. She pees. They drink. They drink tea. They relax. They’re in a conference. They negotiate. They’re serious. They’re in the principal’s office. They have coffee. They laugh. They procrastinate. They rest their knees. They shift. They (do not want to) get up. They chew and swallow. They wait. They read. They write. They reach. They stand on them. They put them in a circle. They take one out. They stack them. They arrange them in rows. They curl up. So now I know that people do different things in chairs. What are the different ways people sit in chairs? How do certain seats make people sit differently? The chair I was designing was going to answer these questions. These questions are what inserted meaning in the chair for me.

The inputs of a meaning into a product by the designer will either be completely lost, be altered through experience, emotional associations created by the user and environmental context much like the stiletto heel. The medical experts probably did not think they would impact women’s sexuality at a cultural level when designing the vibrator that was a device that simply saved them time and trouble. In the case of making my chair, meaning was being implanted by me as the designer through all those questions I wanted the chair to answer. I wanted to make a chair that offered the sitter an array of positions to sit in. The chair also arranged people’s postures when they sat in it because of the asymmetrically placed foot and arm rests. Whoever sits on the chair will also insert their own meaning into the experience they get from sitting in it. Certain elements like the feeling of cork against your arms and the solid wood beneath your finger tips will be associated with the user’s memories. These sensations highly affect whether or not they will like the chair. My intention as a designer was not to evoke emotions through materials. (Structure and aesthetic determined my material palette choices) The materials to the user became an emotional catalyst, something I did not include in my plan at all.

We design products or services imagining the user group and base things around the context in which it will be used and anything that is experience beyond our plans is coincidental and benign. This makes me think about what something means versus what something says. Meaning in products has associations with the designer’s intention. Products can also say things or be received in a certain way by users and this is happening one-way, from the product to the user. Compare meaning reception to the subjectivity of two-dimensional art like painting. Deriving meaning from a row of colour swatches on the wall would yield infinitely subjective responses. There is no one certain meaning. There is, however, certainty in what it says to the viewer. The red, orange, amber and cobalt blue certainly say autumn to me when I see that combination.

In this way being a designer is very much like setting up a sandwich bar. The entire bar is the product or service we are designing. Each filling are different meanings and the users make their own sandwiches. They pick up on things we put there on purpose but sometimes they don’t. Every user will make a different sandwich which will taste differently. We can put as much or as little meaning into something. For example, we can put out only white bread, slices of ham, cheese and humus and all the users can only choose between those options but not all will take them. Not all meaning comes through your design as you intended. This is frustrating when you want to affect change through your design and your meaning is lost and users are only eating slices of cheese. Your power is lost as a designer. Time, favouritism, emotional and physical associations, social and environmental influences will affect the user’s reception of anything. Anything. That is why we research and do tests and trials.