4. Ideas Illustrated;

Originally published in the Relocated issue of Ideas Illustrated, this piece written by Collyn Ahart encourages us to engage with the fantastic in our day to day work. Illustrations by Martin Nicolausson.
 

I was interviewing Sam and Harry, the "Jellymongers", of Bompas & Parr, in the bright surroundings of their Southwark studio. On a mission to uncover the different ways the creative industries were 
designing magic, mystery and illusion into everyday life; I was quickly recognizing, here, we were very far from every-day life.

You might call Bompas & Parr architectural foodsmiths, or culinary magicians, or some other witty non-sequitor, but whatever they might be - these two make food fantastic.

The history of jelly goes hand in hand with the industrial revolution, and in a sense, is the oldest and purest form of processed food. “In the Victorian age, all the technology and refinement of food processing was being channelled into this one product,” Harry explained. And the further it got from its meat origins, refined to purer and purer forms, mixed with sugars and fruit, “the perceived magic of how gelatin was made, increased.

In the time it took Bompas & Parr to be formally denied a jelly stall at Borough Market, the two 
had recognized the effect jelly could have. “It takes people to another place; it provides such an extreme moment of nostalgia and imagination, even across generations... it has less to do with the taste on the end of a fork and more to do with the experience, the environment, the shape of the jelly, and the narrative around it.”

No longer working strictly with jelly, Bompas & Parr create wonderful food experiences that aim 
to fundamentally shift the way we think about food and eating. At times closer to performance 
art than extreme catering, their work strikes a careful balance between telling enough of the 
story to draw their audience in, and leaving just enough untold to let the imagination wander.

Reality has a death grip on the creative industries. From the hegemony of authenticity to the 
fetishization of user-centered design - which is stayed and referential at best - we’re making stuff and telling stories that are all-too easy on 
our minds. 

User-centered design (which isn’t without some appropriate uses) is effectively the practice of looking at how people currently behave, at what needs are not accounted for or mis-understood, and designing according to these findings. Authenticity, as a dominant trend across creative disciplines for the past decade, is based around consumers’ desire to feel they and the stuff 
they buy, are more “real”, reflecting an essential honesty, tradition, originality, naturalness 
or referentiality.

Designers like Bompas & Parr are challenging these paradigms, not by making stuff up, but by bringing the fantastic to the surface of everyday life. Designer-thinkers such as Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby and BERG London founder Matt Jones are in agreement; they don’t make up stories: there’s enough magic in the natural, scientific, 
and historical world. What’s lacking is the impetus to push our minds from the realm of what’s 
probable towards what’s possible. These groups 
all treat design as a way to train our imaginations, 
not as a reflection of what is, but a projection of what could be.

Dunne, a director of the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions course, 
explains, “There are very few things that are 
truly impossible according to the laws of physics.
So going after the unreal side of design is less about making stuff up, and more about loosening the grip so-called reality has on our minds.”
 

"We engage with the fantastic, not because these designs reflect some idea we can easily relate to, but because they push our imaginations across a magical gap between not knowing and wanting to know more."

So why can’t we create a building flooded with booze, or make pancakes levitate? Well, we can, (Bompas & Parr did!) it’s just very, very hard. What’s important is not the immediate likelihood of a design’s existence, but what it can do to people’s imaginations, becoming a locus for 
lateral thinking. 

One recent graduate of the RCA’s Design Interactions course, Daisy Ginsberg, in her project Synthetic Aesthetics, explored the possible collisions of natural and synthetic biologies. A designer, not a scientist, Ginsberg wanted toencourage debate and thought around the possibility that biologies of the future could in fact be designed with a particular aesthetic: could plants be designed to produce and spray a natural herbicide? Could new materials be coded with natural DNA but with a specific, designed purpose in mind?

“More and more it’s difficult to imagine beyond what’s there in front of us. It’s fine in game space or virtual environments, but in the physical world we assume there are so many constraints, we assume there are no options... ‘it’s just the way reality is’. Students are so worried about something being not real, they don’t actually know what they mean by ‘real’,” Dunne continued. People are worried their designs won’t be taken seriously if they’re 
not perceived as “real”, as though “realness” is 
a measure of a design’s success.

We engage with the fantastic, not because these designs reflect some idea we can easily relate to, but because they push our imaginations across a magical gap between not knowing and wanting to know more.

Like Bompas & Parr, Dunne and Raby’s work and teaching takes assumptions about reality as a challenge to think harder, to let their minds go to some other place. Very little is impossible, it’s just very hard. The scale of ambition must be huge. 

The farther something is from so-called “reality”, 
the more the mind has to work to make sense of it. We make sense of fantastic new designs by thinking laterally about what sort of world it would be 
if these things were made “for real”.

New design thinking doesn’t just create new things; it creates whole new realities, even if they only exist in our minds. If it’s possible in the world of food, what are the implications for industries such as fashion, health and technology? The very question, “But, is it real?” becomes far less important than “What makes it possible?” By disproving one set of assumptions, these fantastic designs unlock our thinking, and move us to challenge others.

The challenge for these designers is to tell just enough of the story, as Bompas & Parr do, to not 
lose their audience to the easy thought of fakery; enough to bridge the magical gap into the realm 
of laterally-imagined plausibilities.

More than mere science fictions or design-student fantasies, this kind of thinking is employed commercially by organizations like engineering giant, Arup, in their Foresight and Innovation Unit. It provides a fundamental component within the process of scenario planning for future cities and communities. By engaging with design students and letting their imaginations run wild, the FIU aims to unlock pragmatic futures.

But why doesn’t all great new design inspire us 
to think this way? “

“Particularly in the realm of new technologies, we’re often discouraged from thinking beyond 
- It’s amazing! It’s like magic!” Matt Jones 
points out. 

“Essentially, if you’re not encouraged to understand a designed object, to think laterally about what possibilities it unlocks, the object quickly 
becomes mundane.” Cars are remarkable things, the iPhone is incredible, but their fantastic 
complexity is only revealed by their breaking.

Essentially, these technologies are too magical; 
they don’t tell enough of their story to keep people interested or curious. Their designed obsolescence comes from discouraging curiosity. If we really investigated how these things are possible, we’d blow our minds every day with what we discovered.

Just as reality gets in the way of our imaginations, too often, the rhetoric of seamlessness gets in the way of curiosity. Let’s not just make stuff, let’s inspire people to think laterally about the possibilities of the world around them, crossing the magical gap in everyday life.

Collyn Ahart is a freelance insight, innovation and brand strategy consultant working with YCN.
Martin Nicolausson is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer.

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