Catalog Development
Following last week’s researcher meeting, I’ve been reflecting and thinking about streamlining my plans for my final end product to really focus on the rack as a protocol and on its range of applications. I’m now thinking that my product at the end of this month, which I’m imagining as a catalog (stylized as being of the fictional FutureRack company’s “new products for 2024”), will show a larger number of simple and straightforward illustrations showcasing the range of rackmount products, with selected full-color mocked-up photos being retained to draw attention to particular products. That feels like a kind of visual hierarchy you already see within certain kinds of commercial and specialized catalogs, and it allows for an efficient work process where I can focus on describing either more technically-informative or more attention-getting “products” in the best ways to represent each type. IKEA instruction manuals have also come to mind for me as one source of inspiration, where they provide technical information to the general public in a way that’s accessible.
One reason for making a (partial) shift from absurdity to more straightforward technical descriptions: as I’ve been working more closely on the 3D design of the different rack systems, I’ve started to notice some moments where the introduction of the rack geometry doesn’t only complicate existing household objects/environments, but perhaps in fact also has the potential to improve them.
For instance, in this idea for a rack-based living room coffee table / side table, the customer would purchase a set of table legs, multiple rackmount plate covers to form the tabletop, and then a standard off-the-shelf rack rail* of varying lengths to determine how long they wanted their table to be. That means that the language of the rack system can easily scale to different sizes of tables, in an efficient way.
Similarly, I’m also tying that idea into this marketing text for the kitchen rack products; even in cases where the racks are relatively awkward or space-inefficient to introduce into a space, they could still provide advantages by being easier to reconfigure over time (or even more possible at all ie. if you’re a renter) compared with the alternative of remodeling. Some of my ideas which I started out thinking would primarily have value if I could turn them into absurd memes may be in some cases also practically useful.
*6U/8U/12U are more common standard rack rail sizes, but existing rails and rack products in 5U/7U/11U sizes are also available.