“There is a feeling of comfort in using anonymous things that have been around for along time. Out-living other things, which proved less enduring, there have become so familiar to us that we rarely ask ourselves who their creator might have been.”
Naoto Fukasawa - Super Normal Sensations of the Ordinary.
When we started Super Ordinary Life, our intention was to dedicate half of journal to exploring the under appreciated examples of good design that improve of our daily lives while we all take them for granted. We made a good start and even had a steady flow of posts. Unfortunately the entire section was permanently deleted during a website format rejig. Yeah - tears were shed, all the cuss-words flew around and morale was knocked. Fast forward a year and we are going to do our best to bring it all back and then some.
Setting out what we mean by Super Ordinary Objects seems like the best logical way to begin. This may change as we continue plod along our learning curve. Speaking of learning, we tend to do most of our research in the analogue way. Books, magazines, listening to and watching documentaries with notebooks at hand and of course a ton of scribbling. So included below is the pile of books that we are currently working with.
Visual bibliography
What do we mean by “Super Ordinary Objects”?
everyday objects that are often low-cost, unsophisticated, anonymously designed and quite often unbranded yet epitomise “good design”.
to use a term coined by Sori Yanagi, these objects are “unconsciously beautiful” because they are functional without being expressions of the designer’s personal tastes and not created simply for aesthetic appreciation.
objects that have become part of our life stories, they are comfortable in our lives - weather we realise it or not. We’d really miss them if they were gone.
these objects are unfettered by trends - their function and appeal is timeless.
many of these objects are culturally relevant and address local needs rather than global ones.
Are there any other books we should be learning from? Please do let us know!
Aside from the books pictured, we also have a digital copy of The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi and various issues of Pen.