A cup of chai’s meaning: from Mumbai to New York
Posted by Ricardo Dutra Goncalves on November 4, 2014Once I had a great friend and personal mentor coming over for breakfast, when we were also supposed to discuss about life and struggles. She is one of the greatest designers “by practice” I have ever met (someone who has not had the traditional training but deeply practices the principles we often discuss in the classroom). While sitting at the table, she started telling me about the “attribution of meaning” that we give to things and experiences surrounding us. I had served her breakfast with a few bacon slices standing out from the bland bread. It was a stereotypical hot sunny day with kids playing outside although still quite silent. In between one cup of tea and a toast, she asked me “what meaning does the bacon have?” That conversation spoke to me and stuck in my mind since then because that was the first time I experienced a feeling of someone instigating me to “deconstruct” something. But also, because of the way she framed the question: was it a meaning the object had or was it the meaning I inputted on it?
It was not long after, that I landed in New York to join the Transdisciplinary program at Parsons. In one of our early discussions in the program, I was prompted by professor Clive Dilnot to think what is the resonance of the objects and experiences we design. By resonance, he meant, “the way a ‘thing’ fits into the contexts of its use and deployment, how it embodies the subject who will use this thing in its design and how it translates an understanding of context and use into its form”. For Clive, design starts with making things whose features resonate strongly with ourselves and at the same time satisfy contextual demand. I was again fascinated by the mysteriousness of how we design objects (for instance, how we create anything in the world) and, through a big leap, how those “things” gain meaning. For instance, a table is not a table unless I say so. And what the table looks like and what it means to me might be different from what it means to someone else.
During one of our class discussions with professor Jamer Hunt, we debated that we cannot escape attributing meaning to the world. The moment we open our eyes or, for instance, the moment any of our senses get in touch with the external world, our brain makes a leap to input significance. But as discussed in class, we cannot also process all information from outside and assign meaning to everything. Hence, there seems to be an element of attributing meaning to what we become conscious of, while much of the rest that we perceive sneaks into our subconscious mind. However, to what extent we attribute meaning and to what extent we simply “access” meaning is rather debatable. Many of us (including myself) might have the slight intuition that although we recognize that we constantly assign significance to our experiences, there are situations that seem to have come our way bringing its own message. That kind of situation or experience that you did not ask for but with certain endurance, you cross the tunnel to find out a road full of meaning on the other side.