As a designer, I have always loved experiencing art or design that made me feel like I just saw something new. I love trying to decrypt abstract messages that are being told, even if I come to a wrong conclusion. One of the most vivid memories I have is when I decided to listen to electronic music producer SOPHIE. Her signature production style was so unique that it pioneered its own musical subgenre: hyperpop. After my first listen, I was unable to describe what I had just listened to but it made me want to learn more—I was hooked.
We experience new things in this world from the moment we come into it. We are at the peak of our curiosity as children. We ask our parents what everything under the sun is. Answers are given and then our curiosity leads us to our next, maybe more complex question. Over time, we gain familiarity with how things generally work and we ask less questions. We begin to use common sense: You’ll get burned if you touch a hot stovetop; U.S. presidential elections are every 4 years; an orange is orange. The ability to utilize common sense is the same skill that our brain uses to process multisensory information. Our brain connects the reflected light of a flower’s red petals via our eyes and its airborne molecules via our nose to create a visual and aromatic experience. And if we have experienced those stimuli before, we can more quickly define the experience as a blooming rose.
I looked at this ability from a design perspective and considered what would happen if we didn’t use it. Will it be easier or harder to create design solutions without common sense? I interviewed Benjamin Levy, Co-Chair of the Psychology Department at USF, and he apprised me on the term functional fixedness. It is the inability to see something as anything other than our established understanding of it due to our familiarity with it. Basically, our complex question-asking skills go from being used full-time during childhood to part-time as an experienced adult. We relax our curiosity and rely on our accumulated answers from our past.
This made me think about how much potential there is for new answers to old problems. Problems whose ‘meh’ solutions might be common sense’s answer. I want to challenge the viewers of my exhibition to expand their concluded understanding of a single object: an orange. If I can give them the confidence to explore their curiosity at the micro level with a single object, hopefully their curiosity will push them to put the same critical exploration towards even larger things in life. These outdated social systems we put up with could always do with some untangling.