This essay was a dissertation submitted to Critical Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, in October 2010 and received a grade of distinction.
Excerpt | p16 | Chapter 2, Speculation and Extrapolation
‘If design can be a way of creating material objects that help tell a story what kind of stories would it tell and in what style or genre?’1
A designed artifact can connect an idea to its expression as a made, crafted, instantiated object. These material objects that have a form, texture a certain level of intensity that becomes real before themselves. They sit on a landscape of meaning that pre-exits them, because ‘they could never exist outside of an imagined use of context, however mundane or vernacular that imagined context of social practices might be. Objects tell stories, even by themselves. In cinema they act as props or in design they act as conversation pieces that help speculate, reflect and imagine a world without the use for words.’2 They are items around which a narrative is weaved, and this helps us to imagine and plot out the details of the environment in which they are located. But they can also act as ‘gateways’ into other kinds of worlds: extrapolated tangents, parallels and instances that exist beyond the immediate experience of the narrative, giving us a dense picture about where the ideas and themes originated and of course where they cross over at points of familiarity with our own world.