I remembered how everyday things were strikingly beautiful in my grandpa and grandma’s home in the countryside. The cups, teapot, furniture, bedsheets were not expensively made but always with indigenous cultural soul in it, used, delicate and elegant. Many were ornamented with auspicious patterns, usually fauna and flora. Some were traded from the village market, some are made by local crafters. That was a time when western ideologies and design were not pervaded. Those memories and sensations of everyday things were so strong, but I am not aware of. I was obsessed in seeking for old things when I started to have some money to manage by myself since high school. I tried to find handmade old cloth shoes in the forgotten old market store, I collected indigenous old apron with beautiful stitched pattern on it, similar to those I saw when I was young. I didn’t know why I loved them until now. It was looking for lost ideologies in the process of adopting western aesthetics. It is a complement for the lost soul.
It seems I am now again in an identity crisis — reflection of what does it means being a designer. Am I epistemicly colonized by western ideologies of modernity? If so, what should I do with it?
Design never produce things or culture at all. It seems designers are never the generators but only the mediators of innovation, but designer wrongly represents it. The arrogance of wrongly representation blinds their perception and boost overconfidence in intervention — over-design and over-production. If one scrutinises carefully and deeply, there is nothing that is created zero to one from designers, but only modifying, or borrowing knowledge from one place to another. Its subject matter is the change of relationships.
If we look deeper in the narrative of design, its subject matter shifts cross different dimension, tangibility, perspective, scale and levels of culture. It is no wonder design finally failed to define itself from its subject matter. But if one scrutinises carefully with an anthropology eye, it is innately relational and ontological. Design history can only be truely understood in the perspective of changing relations — how culture reshapes itself, removing designers at the center of design history.
These crisises have been happening multiple times in my life that I should have used to. It always triggers question of asking myself who am I, what am I doing and what I am going to do with it? It happens when I first went to work, when I was diagnosed bipolar disorder, when I first met buddhism, when I have teachers with conflicts between sects, when I started practicing yoga, when I was diagnosed free of bipolar disorder. Is my identity of “I” defined by my “self” or defined by others? Opinions from both sides are always different and conflictual. Maybe the ultimate answer leads to, my identity of “I” does not exist.
