Machine-made products: a reflection of pleasure and the affection of form in visual design

Abstract

Our life is always obsessed with and preoccupied by many machine-made and commercial products. Thus, to make our life meaningful, more sound and lively, dynamic and so on, we need to consume various types of objects, tools and instruments. By doing so, we are actually becoming part of possessors and collectors of consumer’s machine-made products. We were later imprisoned by them, instead. At the same time we are quite fussy and selective too, and perhaps, too choosy, to purchase certain items for our own use from the nearby shops/ supermarket shelves. Obviously, when we buy a product, and beside our awareness on its main usefulness / function, we seldom ask ourselves what do we really look into and judge for? We also hardly ever ask ourselves why we choose a particular product and without much realization, would also reject other products of the similar type and function. Do we say that, when we buy something, because of its function alone – as a deciding factor, or perhaps it should be for certain hidden reasons which has relatively influenced or struck our taste and imagination. Machine-made items / products are no more alien to most people. It is a kind of dayto-day engagement with them. In fact, with rapid mass-production activities by the means of advanced robotic mechanizations, design becomes a high-minded process required by most modern industries or requested by high-tech producers. Together with the advanced and fast delivery system, the manufactured products can be distributed to / purchased by any user-customer-client in the global markets almost anytime, anywhere. These manufactured products of all sorts of aesthetic properties, indeed, used to become familiar industrial commodities to us. They are regularly shared by everyone, by many people of all cultural backgrounds across the globe. Like many “beautiful” objects found in our natural landscape or environment, some of our personal, commercial, “machine-crafted” and iconoclastic products we possessed, become parts of objects of fondness, affection and admiration. These objects, of which we directly consumed, are being placed / positioned inside our own home or private room. They were displayed, inside our own time-space confinement / personal imprisonment, ready to be contemplated. Is it true, that we actually caught between the function and beauty, or psychologically framed by our inner desire - pleasure and affection – imposed by these imaginative products