ID Chronicles

It’s hard to imagine that my worth equals how much the shirt on my back costs. I spend a lot time thinking about what it is that makes me worth something more to one person than to another. To some the answer is the shirt on my back, and to others it is something else, I couldn’t say. To me this is what it all comes down to, my worth, our worth as a community, monetary value realized or imagined, quantified or ignored. My design philosophy is based on my personal identity, who I believe I am, the stuff really good tattoos are made out of. I put pressure on myself to relate my worth to every action I take, especially my designs.

My world was put upside down when I came to Providence. I come from Jacksonville, Florida, a place of diversity, football, the beach, and boiled peanuts. A lot of the reason I came into design was for that place, and the people I knew there, Jacksonville is the biggest hodge-podge of ideas, decades, and dilemmas. To be accepted there all I had to do was wear a Juicy Couture necklace, and the smallest shorts I could buy, in my childhood I had no real understanding of treasuring things. Honestly, I didn’t need to; we moved so much that anything I loved was generally lost along the way. I learned to make new friends, buy new clothes, and play with new toys. This resulted in an eagerness to have a concrete belief in the person I was, so that I wouldn’t have to change along with my surroundings. When I got to Providence I thought I had done just that, but it quickly became obvious that with a simple shift up the coastline my worth had become something unquantifiable, it was no longer relevant to my environment, especially relating to the things I owned. In Providence the relationship between cliques is defined. The hipsters, the locals, the cool kids, the outcasts, it is all clearly defined, and I was expected to choose.

In my first timeline, I discussed Time Capsules, and I had to ask myself, if I was going to create a Time Capsule what would be in it? Would it be things that I thought would make me look cool, or would it be things that made me look different and unique. A Time Capsule is something that is temporarily final. Once you bury it, it is lost for the rest of your lifetime, until it is opened again by another generation. The path my life has taken makes me want to understand who I am at all points in my life, so that if I had to create a capsule that encompassed all of my experiences, it wouldn’t be so hard.

The simple transition from a place that was born from fifties architecture, to a place that is full of rich history and beautiful symmetry, makes me appreciate the worth of a worn t-shirt, or the inside joke on a button, in contrast to just another Chanel bag. I have always had what I need, I guess that is why I thought I needed something more, and it’s just a coincidence that RISD provided that. It was an outlet for something that was never-ending, creativity and drive. That is my way of dealing with the past. Piling it up as high as it can go, and molding it into what I am today.

This idea that that the things you choose to own can dictate who you are, not only to those around you, but to yourself, is a strong argument supporting function in relation to form. You decide what an object means to you, you also decide what it can mean to those around you. If you want to be the girl with the Louie Vuitton hair clip, or the girl with the head band she purchased from a thrift store in the fall, it is up to you. That is why I love design so much, everything is relative. What I want to put in the Capsule is relative, what I make of the things I own is relative, it is relative to anything or everything that I want it to be. That is why I started this essay discussing personal identity, because I believe that through each one of these essays we are all trying to tell our stories, we are all trying to communicate who we are. We are trying to describe what we would put in our capsules if we had to.

To relate this to my design philosophy is simple. I have learned to value the precious nature of belongings, I’m a college student to put it plainly, and new things don’t come cheap anymore. I have just begun to understand how fragile the balance of objects and property are in our modern world, no amount of signatures makes something tangible intangibly ours forever. I can only learn from my experiences and appreciate what I have. And what I have is what I make of it. That is why I want to help those in need. The theme that continues across each of my timelines is one of worth and responsibility. I believe that every designer has to take responsibility of what they put into the world. If you look at my second time line “Lighting in the Developing World”, you can see some of the exciting examples of things people, just like me and you, are doing to take responsibility for their designs.. I know now more than ever that the only thing I am capable of doing is helping people, and that will never change no matter where I am in the world. As I grow, and my morals and beliefs become more and more important to me every physical material and item I own becomes obsolete. It is no longer matter where I am in the world, whether or not I am in Jacksonville or Providence, it is only a matter of peace within myself, the stuff really good tattoos are made of.

“So you’ve been where I’ve just come/From the land that brings losers on/So we will share this road we walk/And mind our mouths and beware our talk/till peace we find tell you what I’ll do/All the things I own I will share with you/If I feel tomorrow like I feel today/We’ll take what we want and give the rest away/Strangers on this road we are on/We are not two we are one”
-The Strangers, The Kinks