INDUVIDUAL IDEA
A dictionary and a textile made of products standing in the living rooms of six random Dutch families,
with children in the age between 0-11 years. The products in which we are growing up are influencing
our understanding of the ideal, our ideal of size, shape, color and material.
The dream
The houses that we create in our daydreams are unexplainable. They emerge from positive memories
of every individuals past. To describe these houses means to visit them. Our parents house for example
is not only a building it is too a dream building. Each of its corners was a resort for reveries. Where
our dreams personalised their character. For each of us exist a dream home, a house of dream-memories.
Lost in a shade of the true past.This dream house is the crypt of the parents home. The parents? house is
not only present in our memories but also physically. It is built out of a group of organic habitants.
Even 20 years after moving out, you will still be able to recognize the step in the stairs that is a little
higher, the weight of the one chair, the feeling of the structured walls, the carpet tickling on your naked
feeds. You will recognize the sound of the doors and you will remember the feeling of the lightest handle
in your hand. The house that we inhabited affected our gestures. But surprisingly, when we come back
after a long time, we still remember them. The parents house did imprint or idea of living.
(Gaston Bachelard) Being a child in the time of massproduction and consumerism makes our memory of
home less individually. That means that the individual -ideal home- gets more similar to the `ideal home?
of the society. When we do believe in this theory, then it means that our ideology has been manipulated by
the economy.
The idea
In Platons idea lore, products play a signifi cant role. In his -Politeia- for example, Platon talks about a
chair; The notion of the chair is present only once. The chair mentioned does not exist in the world of
concrete things, but only in the mind of a carpenter who made it. The chair as a phenomenological
Konkretum is thus only a more or less successful image of this prototype, however mostly the world of
the visible things is a bad copy o f the ideas. At the same time, the imaginary world forms the condition
of the aesthetic perception: If there was no notion of a chair, then nobody who is able to see a chair,
would recognize it as such.
