Avenue Magazine Calgary

Developing a design that will likely never be created into a useful or saleable item seems rather pointless, until you consider that if everyone thought that way we wouldn’t have cellphones, helicopters or submarines. These inventions started as mere concept designs, fantastical ideas from the minds of Gene Roddenberry, Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne, respectively.

Concept design is a concept unto itself, in which an idea takes precedence over the practical considerations of actually materializing. There is an element of plausibility, but getting a product immediately into the hands of consumers is not top priority. More important is allowing an idea to develop without being derailed by practicalities like manufacturing and marketing. When imagination is given free reign, the resulting designs can be downright off-the-wall, or insightful and inspirational, or both.

With all due respect to da Vinci, who sketched a helicopter (or, in his words, a “Helical Air Screw”) long before one ever took flight, and Verne, who wrote in detail about a submarine-like Nautilus in his science-fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, it was Roddenberry’s communicator from the 1960s TV cult hit Star Trek that mass populations have benefited from on a daily basis.

The device that allowed Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock to communicate over great distances in their fictional 23rd-Century universe was the inspiration for the modern-day flip phone. After watching the show, Martin Cooper tweaked the design of the communicator using technology available in 1973 and — voila! — created the mobile phone.

But creating concept designs isn’t just about coming up with cool gadgets. It’s also about exploring where those ideas come from. University of Calgary Environmental Design professor Barry Wylant supervises a six-week senior industrial design studio course that is all about creating concepts, but with an element of cultural context.

“So much of our technology is framed in terms of functionality,” Wylant says. “This studio questions whether there is a broader way to consider technology so that it is not just about the conveniences it provides.”

Wylant’s students are given almost carte blanche to come up with a portable piece of technology that stretches their critical thinking and product-design skills, with only two caveats: their concept must be possible to manufacture based on current or imminent technology (available in the next five years), and it must explore the perspective of either Futurism or Dadaism, two 20th-Century art movements with opposing views on the value of technology.

Futurists were a mostly Italian group that started to organize in 1909. They were keen on war and militarism under the belief that technology helped compensate for humanity’s inadequacies. Dada began in Switzerland during the First World War as a reaction to Futurism; the avant garde movement against the manufactured nature of war argued that technology was taking away our humanity.

“The point of the studio is to show those cultural attitudes are still with us and still informing our world today, even if we’re not aware of it,” Wylant says.

The Environmental Design graduate students have come up with some interesting devices that either enhance our humanity (as the Dadaists encouraged) or replace it (in the spirit of Futurism). Choosing to explore the ideas of Futurism, one pair of students eliminated the need for small talk altogether with a conceptual wristband programmed with personal profile information. Where you work and live, if you are married or have children — plausibly, all of your personal specifics can be wirelessly downloaded to another person’s wristband, thereby giving them everything they need to know about you without exchanging a single word.

A student-created badge with an LCD display that translates conversation into emoticons also explores language and how it has been manipulated through technology. A cheeky gadget, maybe, using keyboard-character “feelings,” but it might also have useful real-world applications — for example, in a loud bar, where symbols streaming across the button would be more effective than conventional conversation.

Another student pairing capitalized on the notion of social networking by developing headphones that encourage interaction with fellow users. The headphones are equipped with a set playlist memory of 10 songs that repeat in a continuous loop at the same volume level until another user of the same device is recognized. Once participants are within wireless range of each other, they can exchange songs and volume levels to increase the capacity of the headphones. The invention offers social commentary into the isolating nature of technology and how it can instead encourage more social contact by forcing users to interact with each other to make it more useful — a concept Dadaists might appreciate.

With an idea that appeals to commuters, two of Wylant’s students came up with a mode of transportation that allows them to weave through traffic, slip in between cars and hop up on sidewalks. Drivers stand in the centre of a two-metre wheel, holding on to a crossbar that runs the diameter of the wheel. This allows them to manoeuvre sideways through the streets, much the way a windsurfer does on water.

An internal framework ensures the driver remains upright while the outside tire rotates. The narrow shape and ability to easily manipulate direction makes it easy for the single-person mode of transportation to get around slow moving vehicles, similar to the way scooters weave through traffic in Rome.

Not to be outdone, there’s also an anthropomorphic robot that mimics biological functions. Shaped like a leaf, the Foflora Aqua Robot can clean air and move around to seek out sunspots, acting like a living system all on its own.

The exercise of creating a design without creating a product allows the Environmental Design students to stretch their creative muscles and critical thinking before moving on to careers in product creation and development.

“This is the place where you can really explore these ideas,” Wylant says. “It may seem like a frivolous indulgence, but it gives students a better awareness of what the role of technology is in our world today.”

U of C grad Allison Wood was also interested in exploring technology’s role in society, except from an architectural and urban-planning perspective. Her graduate thesis, iCITY: Public Space v2.0, is a conceptual design for redeveloping Calgary’s downtown East Village into a wireless community that brings people together through technology.

“The inherent ways in which we have interacted for centuries hasn’t really changed — it has merely switched venues,” Wood says. “If you create engaging public spaces that speak to, and support, the way we interact with digital media, and by extension our peers, we can begin to reengage our public realm — something that I see as being slowly lost as we walk through our cities, plugged into our own private world.”

Wood incorporated into her design digital graffiti boards, an uncensored digital speaker’s corner and portals of streaming real-time views of public spaces in action around the world, or in other parts of Calgary. She says these elements of technology could not only bring people together and provide a sense of pride in community, but could also be used as a tool for education, allowing information to be shared about the city itself, current events, global issues or just as a way for the ordinary citizen to sound off and feel heard. Wood’s concept won the 2007 Mayor’s Urban Design Award for student projects before going on to win a 2008 National Urban Design Award.

The practice of concept design is not limited to developing applications for technology. It is most importantly about the idea and the manifestation of that inspiration into a design.

“Design is a form of media,” says Greg Ball, a Calgary industrial designer. “You can communicate and tell a story with an object.”

Ball still has to make a living and spends his time developing products that will be developed, but he also enjoys the creative freedom of exploring ideas without inhibitions. He conceptually designs for the sheer satisfaction of the art form, with inspiration coming from anywhere and anything. Ball’s sculptural ceramic cream-and-sugar vessels, Blend, for example, were inspired by a simple cup of coffee.

“I started thinking about how people interact when they have coffee and the social nature of the interaction,” Ball says. “And then I started thinking about how cream and sugar blend, and that there is a relationship between the blending of ideas and the blending of fluids.”

With that, Ball began sketching and re-sketching before eventually developing the final design for the containers that fit together organically, mimicking the shapes of moving fluids. It’s a simple object simply explained by its creator: “You throw around these abstract thoughts and eventually they funnel into something that makes sense.”

Palette Industries, based in Calgary, employed a similar process of working through abstract thoughts to create its Buddhist-inspired art chair, the Dharma Lounge. Designers Nathan Tremblay, Ian Campana and Samuel Ho wanted to create a piece of furniture that would evolve with the owner and act as more than just a place to sit. They turned to the power of the written word, using cutouts of the Buddhist phrase “Stand, Forget, Breathe, Acknowledge & Observe” as both decoration and structure to form the chair’s body. Both the finished product and the process of assembling the fibreglass letters into the quote offer a source of reflection.

“We were trying to create something that prolongs the interaction and lifespan of a product by creating something that constantly evolves in somebody’s life,” Tremblay says. “It is like a piece of art. Every time you look at that piece of art,
your opinion and appreciation of it grows and transforms depending on your present mentality.”

The designers at Palette Industries say they didn’t necessarily design the chair to be manufactured. When they debuted the Dharma Lounge at the 2008 Interior Design Show in Toronto, their intention was mostly to gather feedback and observe reactions.

But the response was so great, Palette Industries was motivated to take its chair from just a concept and prototype to the manufacturing stage. Easier said than done, however; the designers have experienced a few hiccups along the way, including finding a manufacturer that could successfully produce the chair the way it was envisioned.

While Palette irons out those details, it’s revisiting the original concept of using language to create a relationship between the object and its owner. Enter the Camus Floor Lamp. More easily manufactured, the light’s drum is made of cutouts of the Albert Camus quote, “You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”

The lamp debuted this past January at IMM, an international furniture show in Cologne, Germany, where it received more overwhelming feedback than the Dharma Lounge.

Whether it’s an interactive chair or a device that changes the way we communicate, sometimes designs start with only an inkling of an idea that could take off in any direction, or sputter out completely. And sometimes that idea is also the end point.

However concept designs shake out in the end, they’re meant to be conversation starters, exercises in creativity, objects of inspiration or a means to boldly go where no one has gone before.