Kirk Newton | Assignment 6: Mental Armor

Clutter is something that pervades everyday life; walk into studio and notice how everyone's desks are piled with scraps of paper and forgotten study models; walk into someone's apartment and see used how cups and plates teeter in the sink and spread across the counter. And then there are the so called "organizational devices" that don't work to solve the problem, but just put a surface in front of your crap, so there can still be a cluttered pile, just that nobody can see it. Just because there's now a cabinet door in front of your haphazard pile of saucepans doesn't magically make it less of a haphazard pile. No, I said, this must change. And so, as though divinely inspired, I created the revolutionary, organizational device with holes in it. Ermahgerd. Behold:

Anyway.

It's a small vertical stand for thin objects, like laptops or sketchbooks that holds them upright, reducing their footprint, rather than having them be pushed to the corner of your desk. The actually important part is the perforated surface, which pushes it beyond an organizational tool, to something that uses abstract, layered geometry to hide the fact that it's just another thing to store your stuff.

That said, making a revolutionary object that truly transforms something is a tall order. I appreciated how the CNC Router enables curvelinear, lightweight, patterned shapes, pretty much the opposite of what can be made conventionally in the woodshop. Making such a complex, modified, checkerboard grid for this simple object is something that could be seen as unnecessary, but thanks to the increasingly computerized means of manufacturing, the bar for making inherently complex objects has been lowered, for better or worse.