Good Design is Innovative

"At the end of the day, and you're looking around at the objects around in your house, and you're deciding 'What really has value here', it's going to be the objects that have some meaning in your life." -Rob Walker

         Watching the feature-length documentary "Objectified', I was drawn towards Rob Walker's speech near the end of the documentary. Throughout the duration of my second viewing, I really couldn't help but ask myself, "What would I grab first when the Hurricane is coming?" Looking at my phone, my first thought was that I would probably grab that on a whim: after all, the modern phone has been the most value to the modern individual. Thinking through the question again though, my eyes drifted onto the pen on my desk, right on the other side of my phone.



          How important is a pen to it's artist?



For me, surely, it must have the greatest value of all the objects that one can perceive, for it is the identity of the artist. Interestingly, throughout the entire duration of the documentary, the pen only appears once, which is at 55:23, when the lady is observing a pen in a store.

This was the thought that pierced my mind when I decided that the object I was going to design would be a pen.

The overall idea of the pen i designed was that the pen was supposed to relieve strain on the hand when pushing on the ink. This was an idea I pulled from the documentary when Dan Formosa is talking about the design of a peeler for people with arthritis.

Pens are sometimes really annoying to deal with, the actual pen is held from the front, near the tip, but the button that pushes the pen out is all the way at the back, or as a lid on the cap that has to be removed and put in a safe area so it doesn't get lost. Similar to the potato peeler case, that can become really dawdling to some people.


The concept behind my pen is that applying pressure to the rings when your fingers slip into them will cause ink to naturally flow out, which removes the requirement to open the pen from one side or the other. You can just grab the pen and push, and you can start working.

In the documentary, Dieter Rams notes that
"Good design is innovative." I feel like that is the crux of design fundamentals, and that was the overall concept I followed when making my design.