Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Prologue
This site is a culmination of a number of factors. The factors have accumulated over many years - decades, in fact. Now, like the camel forced to make lemonade by the final lemon that dropped on its back, I have to do something with all this stuff.
Currently the most acute factor is that I'm cleaning out an old workshop: the workshop of a man who is an artist, a sailor, a builder of wooden boats and above all, a hoarder. Ol' Salt and his wife Penelope (names have been changed for discretion) bought a house in the country and were moving out of their house in the city when he fell ill. For reasons not central to the topic it fell to me to clear out a few remaining items from the residence and to remove a great many things from the basement workshop.
Here another factor comes into play: I also went to art school. Years after Ol' Salt graduated with a degree in Studio Art, I studied Industrial Design. I don't know whether studio arts turn people into scavengers and hoarders, or if people with those traits lean toward material-intensive activities. Either way, there is some correlation. Maybe it is the "found-object art" assignment that art students inevitably get in some class; or the tight budget of many art students and artists that forces them to be creative in acquiring materials for their works; or maybe the ability to see the intrinsic beauty and potential of a piece of raw material or repurposed object. In any case the result is the same: the reaction of "oh, I can't throw that away - it'll be useful for something one day" when odds & ends, or drops & scraps, or other random objects cross our path.
Ol' Salt asked for a few specific items and told me to use my discretion about everything else: just clean the place out so they could put the house on the market. It was an overwhelming amount of stuff and much of it was junk to me. But I fell in the "I can't throw that away..." trap quite a few times. However, I have resloved to not let Ol' Salt's stuff, or my own stuff that I've been accumulating for only (only?) twenty years just sit around and collect dust. I'm going to make a project of it.
Wading through this avalanche of material and objects, examining pieces of wood, scraps of metal, broken appliances, rusted tools and rickety pieces of furniture, and having much of it come to rest in my own workshop inspired the ideas of slow design and trailing edge design. It inspired the ideas and provided a quantity of material to use in developing the ideas . . . .. . . . . . .