If a product could illustrate the funny side of design better than this red monkey, I would like to see it. This, as you can or maybe cannot see, is a red wind-up monkey. I bought this object in Bangalore at a market toy shop with a plethora of other neon coloured animals, cars and toy soldiers. It was the monkey that stood out and I had to buy it. I’d invite you to just take a second and just look at it. Firstly look at its expression, slightly constipated. Now, its tremendously realistic fur covering; amazing. The monkey has no relevance for me in terms of India, but it has cemented its place on my mantle piece in my bedroom. Why? Because it’s a product that contains real humour. A humour that is not intended by the manufacturer but one which is posited on it by my own understandings of what a monkey looks like and the all together different proposal of what a monkey looks like, put forward by this toy.

This opens up an interesting point about the function of a product which I mentioned in my last article (Tribal Mask). The use of humour within products has been taken advantage of by a number of product designers with varying degrees of success. Companies like Alessi have produced a number of products that use characters in their product semantics to create a relationship with a product and ultimately put a smile on the user's face. Product designers/artists Dunne and Raby use products to highlight the more amusing sides of human behaviour. Both have great value when looking at product design; more importantly when rationalizing why products should be made in a climate where the creation of new objects is often criticized for reasons of sustainability. The emotion that you feel for products like this makes them last and people are more likely to keep them if the object makes them laugh, cry or reminisce.

The negative aspect of these types of products is that they are often priced much higher than they should be. Design shouldn’t be an excuse for higher profit margins. It should be an excuse for longer lasting and more meaningful products. But can these types of emotions and interactions be designed into a product? This is a tough question and recalls my previous research into the kind of objects that people collect/keep during their lifetime. The data from the study found that the objects were often of low value monetarily and were what could be considered waste in a lot of cases. Some objects were of great value and things like jewellery obviously had high value emotionally and economically. But looking at the cheap end of the spectrum they were rarely objects in their own right; they were often pieces of packaging, disposable items and objects that had fulfilled their utilitarian origins and now become a different object all together. The last example really interests me as a designer. Products and objects can morph and have a transitional quality that other outputs such as art and music don’t possess in such abundance.

So, can this phenomen or quality be designed into a product?

This is a challenge for any product designer and one that has fueled my interest in product design as a discipline for the last five years and I think it still will for many years to come. There are a number of design writers and researchers that have touched on this topic of tangible memories and objects forming a person’s sense of self but it is rarely tackled from a producer’s point of view. There are rarely makers of objects like this and if there are they are restricted to conceptual works which rarely, if ever, see a wider audience than that of design academics.

Next week I’ll be looking at possibly the best lunchbox ever!

About the author: Alan Manley is a product designer and design researcher based in the UK. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  

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