Looking Out To Sea

I completely forgot to mention this last week. Last Saturday Helen was already in Glasgow because she’d spent the night with friends there. I went through at midday and we went to an exhibition at The Lighthouse called Haptic.

The purpose behind the exhibition was to follow through on one designer’s idea that more designed objects should cater to the sense of touch — that you should be able to tell something about an object through how it feels, or to have the feeling of the object reinforce the visual information. The finest example from this exhibition was a set of drinks cartons designed to feel like they were made of fruit skins. The banana carton had wide strips with sharp angles running the length of the carton, and waxy skin. The kiwi fruit carton was actually slightly hairy!

It’s a brilliant idea, and I’m trying not to enthuse too much about it or go off on some design-tangent. The important message is that this exhibition was really rubbish for two main reasons:

1. Most of the designers clearly didn’t understand the brief. You’d look at an object and think well what has that got to do with anything? There were so few exhibits (less than twenty, I think) that it was really obvious how many of them were useless and had totally missed the point.
2. The exhibition was designed such that you weren’t allowed to touch the exhibits. I know. It’s kind of like putting an art exhibition in a room with no lights. Instead, there was a finished object on the plinth in front of you, and a sample of the material they’d used that you could touch. These samples were often the unworked raw material, so didn’t feel like anything in particular. The fruit cartons had postage-stamp sized squares for each fruit skin, which had long since been worn smooth by two months of curious-fingered visitors. Some samples were missing altogether.

It was such a good idea and such a poor execution that I really wish they would do it again, but do it properly this time.