For Provocation #2 we looked at the outsides of books.
Now it’s time to look inside them. Inside novels, in particular.

Exploring the way designed things function in literary fiction, can help us as design critics and as designers. As critics we can observe how fictional characters use designed objects and imbue them with meaning. Noticing how they are associated with certain characters and used in certain scenes helps us see them in a new light—perhaps they are exaggerated, perhaps they break or are abused or misinterpreted, perhaps they are just described differently from how they are in design magazines and blogs. Reading designed objects in fiction helps us to re-notice them in everyday life—the way they are used, could be used, or shouldn’t get used.

Considering design in fiction also helps us as designers. Discovering the aura and agency that certain designed objects and environments have in novels—they way they insist themselves upon the characters and upon our imaginations, might encourage us to invent things, not in response to the bland, perceived need of some average user, but for larger-than-life characters and their larger-than-life feelings—a wardrobe full of wedding dresses and shoes for only one foot for Miss Faversham or an extra deep freezer unit for Patrick Bateman, for example. In fiction gravity may be irrelevant, time flows irregularly, and space can fold in upon itself. Immersing ourselves in such worlds might encourage us to conjure new design ideas into existence, to bring some of the qualities design has only in fiction into reality.

Literary theorist William Egginton argues that sometimes reading fiction helps us to understand reality more clearly. There is always going to be a tension between what is real and imaginary within a novel where the novelist toys with our ability to recognize reality but yet also to be willing to embrace fantasy. There is also a tension between the reality of the novel and the reality of real life. The larger question Egginton is concerned with is how does reading fiction affect how we experience the world?

Prose narrative can be considered fictional if it is written for a reader who knows it is untrue and yet treats it for a time as if it were true. I’m interested in what role designed objects and spaces contribute to this fabrication process, the sense of veracity it brings, how it helps us perform what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ or ‘poetic faith’.

Sometimes we need the banality of electric toothbrushes, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and cars to bring credibility to fictional narrative. The accumulation of convincing detail is often used to locate us in place and time—1980s Wall Street, for Brett Easton Ellis in American Psycho, or the underbelly of millennial London for Martin Amis in London Fields. But in both these examples, design is doing more than stage setting.

In London Fields domestic appliances acquire malevolent intentions when handled by the story’s anti-hero, the sleazy small time crook Keith Talent. Not only do they reflect his inner state, they start to take on sentient qualities, to fight back: ‘Keith went at the ironing board like the man in the deck chair joke, the tube of the hoover became a maddened python in his grasp…’. All the appliances in Keith’s orbit are faulty, broken, useless junk—neatly symbolic of Keith’s own malfunctioning moral compass. His heists are pathetic: ‘in the end [he] came downstairs with a fake fur coat, a damaged TV set, a broken alarm clock and a faulty electric kettle’.

These objects that resist Talent’s attempts at either repair or ownership are the other side of the coin of the consumerist critique in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho where design is always new and graspable. Patrick Bateman depends for his identity on status-conferring brand names that cascade through the prose in a relentless catalogue of consumer excess. Bateman’s engagement with design is always at the point of desire, identification and box-freshness, like ever-flowing naturally sparkling mineral water, the just-bought Mont Blanc pens, Rolexes, the subtly embossed business cards set in Silian Rail (a fictional typeface) fresh from the printer, the Burberry raincoat and a car stereo that he wants for Christmas even though he doesn’t have a car.

Design often gets used like this in novels—as appliances with malicious intentionality, trash, or as the butt of a knowing insider joke—the banal and material counterpoint to sublime thought and feeling. English novelist and critic E.M. Forster reminds us that, ‘all novels contain tables and chairs and most readers look for them first’. And yet designed things can be used in intensely poetic ways, to bring meaning and poignancy to scenarios—memory, grief, yearning, and ambition—major themes of literature—are often bound up in things.

PROVOCATION #3: Write a short fictional scene featuring either a designed object you own, or one you have designed yourself. How might your object be brought to life through its use by a character, its role in a plot or its contribution to the mood or setting of a story. If you do not want to write a scene, you can create it visually.

Some background reading: 
Matthew Ward, ‘Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice’, 2013
Stuart Candy’s blog, Found Futures
Bruce Sterling’s blog, Beyond the Beyond