« BehindTheMedspeak: New autism website features video that 'can make you gasp' | Home | EyeFi — Automatically uploads digital photos to your photo processing website »
October 17, 2007
Condition Doorknob
Created by French industrial designer Arnaud Lapierre.
His thoughts:
"A room can be considered as a private sanctuary, the door being a physical and psychological boundary between interior and exterior life. The closed door provides an atmosphere of meditation, isolation, anonymity and also eroticism: intimacy and a feeling of confidence.
By removing the door's opening function this work expresses these moments' importance in a symbolic way. When closing the door the doorknob is pulled towards the inside of the room, prolonging the gesture of closing the door and making the doorknob disappear on the corridor side.
The entry is truly locked because the door has transformed into a wall from the corridor side: it has become a guardian of anonymity, the keeper of a secret moment. This item can be used for meeting rooms, toilets, etc. It can be unlocked from the corridor using a key."
I'll take one.
[via Andrew Liszewski/ohgizmo, electroˆplankton, and Yanko Design]
October 17, 2007 at 09:01 AM | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c5dea53ef00e54ef8c23a8833
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Condition Doorknob:
Comments
All philosophical balderdash aside, the concept is a fun one. It'd be mechanically difficult to make it work on a normal latched door, but it'd work well enough with a passive two-way spring retainer doodad - or magnets in door and frame, for more sci-fi appeal.
There's a functional problem, though, in that a person outside the door can push the knob in and thus leave the door in do-not-disturb mode regardless of the intentions of the occupant, if one even exists. If you push the knob in when there's nobody inside, it won't be possible to open the door at all without hooking it with a coat-hanger or something.
Give me half an hour to come up with a pretentious semiotic exegesis of what this means in the context of postmodern societal hermeneutics.
Posted by: Daniel Rutter | Oct 18, 2007 4:25:00 AM
I can see the vandals enjoying themsevles immensely with a lump of chewing gum stuffed into the tapering hole. Or superglue and pull it shut; with that large an area to glue you'd never get it apart again.
Posted by: Skipweasel | Oct 18, 2007 4:22:07 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
