Is it Just a Stick?: The Origins of Design? Design Mysteries Series

STICKS: The Origins of Design?

Chopsticks: Chop Sticks from simple to complex, all designed to enhance the value of “just a stick.” We value the simple wood ones least, and think of the pearl inlaid ones as “expensive.” The orange plastic device allows people who haven’t developed the skill to use chopsticks.

The transformation of a stick to a tool is the act of using it as a tool, not its shape; color, texture or any of the other attributes designers can give it. Presenting innocent found sticks as workable, usable tools with appropriate instructions and warnings also points up the complicated social process of transformation that takes place once a “stick” becomes a valued object worth far beyond its natural found state. Chopsticks were probably “just sticks” until someone picks them up and used them as a tool. Chimpanzees, crows and other animals use sticks as tools, but do they impart special values and powers to the sticks the way we do? So just using a stick as a tool is not a rare occurrence, it is the special things that humans do to sticks that makes them valuable: our ability to DECORATE and MODIFY the stick is what sets us apart from other animals. Our ability to INPOWER the stick and transform it is called DESIGN. Maybe that is one definition of design: the ability to create added value to an object.

Grill Scrapper: The caption reads, “Intended for use as a grill scrapper any other use the user puts this stick to is done at their own risk and is not the responsibility of the manufacturer.”

Picking up a stick and transforming into a scraper for an outdoor grill: scraping the grill and then discarding it is a profound act of transformation. The stick can then lie on the ground as a useless object hiding its ability to “work” as a tool or becoming a piece of kindling or someone’s boot scraper or a cane, etc. Tools are natural objects transformed by use. Once we “design” it, we process it. It becomes ours. We identify it as ours, not theirs. We brand it. Once it is branded it can never revert fully back to just stick. A stone becomes a hammer by use, not by definition. Incas used river stones to form boulders into building blocks by chipping away at the edges until a usable rectangular block was formed. For generations archaeologists looked for the “tools” that the Incas used to form the blocks, not realizing that the “tools” were hidden in the rubble of the villages they walked in. The “tools” had literally returned to their former incarnation of stone. As tools become more sophisticated maybe we should re-investigate their origins from the floors of forests and the rubble of mountains. Sticks and stones are the origins of many tools.

#DesignMysteriesSeries [#30]

Design Mysteries Series
Bruce Hannah 2018©