In a recent project created by designer Matt Brown — a former expat, trained at Sweden’s Umea Institute of Design and currently based in Boston — he created a futuristic world in which we’d print our own food from our home printers, marinate beef from the inside out and grow fruit that would look like an ordinary apple but, when chopped, would reveal an alien core of strawberries, grapes and cherries.
He wrote the booklet for this visionary project on a crappy old typewriter that lacked both a working space bar and an @ symbol.
There’s a saying that goes, “If you’ve got one foot in the past and one foot in the future, then you’re pissing on the present.” But I wouldn’t really call what Matt Brown is doing “pissing.” Hell, I’d call it art.
I always like to understand the evolution of artists and their work. With that in mind, when did you first become interested in what you call “interaction design” in particular, as opposed to other forms of design, and what were some of your first projects?
I’m not sure if what I try to do is really interaction design, or industrial design or something else. I still can’t really give a straight answer. When I was a kid I could draw pretty well, but I remember being 16 and rejecting it because it seemed like that’s all people knew me for- the kid who drew the nice poster for the “Santa Parade” or whatever. I started getting really interested in people’s stories when I moved to East Lansing, Michigan and spent all day riding the bus and talking to strangers or walking on the railroad tracks and finding stuff. My first projects were crude comic books written about the people I saw- and those books would sort of have product ideas in there. I really wish I still had some of those.
What is your process for creating your artwork, and do you have a favorite type of material and/or medium that you work with?
I just usually work with what I have. At school we had a laser-cutter and I used that thing all of the time. For a while after graduating I stayed in my friend’s basement and they had a screen-printing business, so I tried doing some shirts. Sometimes you just have an inkjet printer, you know? But my favorite material is probably acrylic.
What inspires your work the most?
Stills from ‘70s and ‘80s movies really do the trick for me. You watch these lame sci-fi films and hit “Print Screen” when something inspires you. A lot of inspiration comes from the fact that I never do anything right, so I have to figure out other ways to do things. Honestly I think spending junior high watching Seinfeld influenced a lot of people my age, too. My advice for ideas is to make sure you have a notepad/pen by your bed, or a cassette recorder. There’s a lot of good ideas floating around there while you’re almost asleep.
I know from reading over your site that you have moved around quite a bit — from Michigan to Sweden to Italy, and now to Boston. How has place affected your work, if it has?
I know that place affects my work but I’m not sure how. I know that there have been some people that have really opened my mind in all of those places. When I first met my girlfriend, she told me that I was free to be as strange as I wanted to be and it was a simple thing to say that really helped me out. I will say that living in northern Sweden for a year was great because of the daylight shifts. It would be so dark for so long in the winter and then it would never get dark in the summer. Extremes are always inspiring to me.
I think it’s really interesting that you say you like design fiction, and that with a lot of your projects, you assert that they probably won’t work: for example, a group project that you did at the Umea Institute in Sweden called the “Peasley Society,” in which you and two other artists, Roberto Christen and Chao Wang, created a fictional society named after Jamie Peasley, the society’s “founder.” And basically this Society produced design projects that could, as you say, “help people think about their energy use.” But right after that on your site you make it clear that “Peasley’s energy awareness products aren’t functional and many of them were failures, but it was our hope that people remember the fiction.”
To me, that really sums up the meaning of a lot of your work: that you don’t really know the solution to creating a better world or how to design for the future — that’s maybe the job of your viewers, while your job is to provide them with a medium for inspiration, a little spark of fire.
I’ll be the first one to say that I’m not the smartest guy in the world. I like to do experiments, explorations, and let people interpret them how they will. Every once and a while, I get an email from another student, or some random person that got an idea or something else from one of my projects, and then instantly my day is made.
Right now I’m doing a column for core77 about fictional designers and their stories. It’s a lot of fun because hey- it’s not me designing the stuff it’s “Carlo Heckman” or “Kurt Manchild,” so there’s no fear with coming up with questionable ideas because you can talk about why they failed. Hopefully someone sees some of these sort of half-baked ideas and comes up with something truly beneficial to humans.
Your project “Night Horses” is one of my favorites; I like how you found these horses in a thrift store with no idea of where they came from and you basically took them and rewrote their history, saying they were from an “ill-received toyline from 1989.”
This is one of my favorites too. I like it because it happened so fast; I found the horses at a thrift store, came up with the names on the bus ride back to school, and then did the packaging in a couple of hours. It’s those types of situations that really keep me going, knowing that a cool project can just happen. You go through a lot of dry spells, you know — and it’s good to know that everything can change in a few hours.
Unlike a lot of other designers and artists, you seem to want to create things for everyday people. For example, your project “33 Robins” is labeled as a game for lonely kids, and you chose the robins for Michigan, so this is something lonely, maybe latchkey kids growing up in suburban Michigan could play with. You have the “Forkplate,” designed for people who have trouble with their motor skills. And you have the “Money Pizza,” created to “help eliminate the shame people feel when they pay for something all in change.” And I get the sense that there is absolutely no irony – you’re identifying ways to improve people’s lives.
Yes! I mean a lot of this stuff is sort of funny, but I’ve spent my life as an awkward derelict and I keep thinking that there’s got to be other people out there like me. All you have is quarters and nickels and you’re hungry, but you still have to rev yourself up to spend them on a pizza- and you need that pizza. I’m happy that you mentioned the 33 Robins project- it’s an old one and no one ever seems to really like it.
Your most recent work, “Food and the Future of it,” is a compilation of food and food-related products that you think humans could use in the future, specifically the year 2040. Can you tell me a little bit about why you chose food as the theme and what general ideas you had about food in the future that you had in mind when creating this exhibit?
I wanted as many people to get in on this project as possible, so food was the choice because we all are experts on it in some way. Some are experts in cooking, and some in microwaved burritos — but experts all the same. For the project, I wanted to create things that would sort of disgust/entertain people, and get them thinking about what could happen. Jack Schultze did a project on lab-grown meat that was really inspirational to me.
Not to get too political, but I’m curious to hear how you feel about the corporate food industry, because it’s very present in this exhibit and you reference it quite a bit. For example, you talk about how, in 2040, Burger King will drop the “BU” and just become URGE King because they’ll feel that their former name is too “limiting.” And you talk about how Kraft and Unilever will have “a great time” with printed food and its respective cartridges.
I don’t know. I mean I’m sort of on the edge. I want to eat the good local stuff, and I wish that all of the crap towns out there had their own types of food- but at the same time I was raised on Pop Tarts and stuff like that. I was always obsessed with trying the new type of soda. Crystal Pepsi, Surge, all of that stuff. When I was in junior high we had Slush Puppies and Domino’s Pizza in the cafeteria. When I was living in Italy I tried to stay away from the familiar and found some great regional stuff, especially some of the cheese over there. So anyway, I’m not sure where I stand. My official response is that I’m against all of these processed foods, but to be honest, that’s not how I always live my life.
Again, going back to the idea of helping people’s lives: the way you see food in the future is that people will be able to print out and grow their own food, which would be a great convenience for a lot of people, cutting down on time they’d spend driving to the grocery store and time they’d have to spend cooking family meals. Also, you say it would encourage more people to eat at home. But of course, you say that you had a lot of mixed reactions to your exhibit — which you wanted — so clearly not everyone interpreted your exhibit in this way.
Well for one, I’m just glad that some people got upset and took my work seriously. Better than just laughing at it, you know? The thing is I didn’t make it clear enough that my project wasn’t really about solutions, like I wasn’t introducing the ape food meat creator as a real project. I still don’t really know how to talk about it. Lab-grown meat could be really good for us humans, but how can you talk about it in a way that’s not trying to tell people what to do? I mean I’m not sure if I would be into it myself.
Any ideas for future projects?
I’m working on a lot of stuff right now. Scanning 30-year-old cutting boards to make new boards with the tried-and-true wear patterns of the old, doing more fake toy lines, trying to sew some pants for parents…I have a real design job now, so I don’t have as much time as I did a few months ago, but I’m feeling pretty good and I’m hoping to get a lot done. It’s been a sort of dry spell for the last month with moving and everything, but now I’m starting to take in the new city and ideas are starting to come back.
To check out more of Matt’s work, visit skrov.com.
