I called my talk “Designing Plasticity” because, as a designer, plastics are a wonderful thing to use and manipulate. When I graduated from college with an industrial design education, I thought that my whole career would be trying to create every day things, made in metals and plastics, for people to use. Now we find that design -- can be applied in a much broader way, but I certainly did not think at that time that I would end up at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, and be working with the
Smithsonian. Roland Barthes described plastic in Mythologies in 1957 as “the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic” (Barthes, 1972:98). The prosaic part of it is something I really like as a designer thinking of everyday things. I thought it would be interesting to take a single product category and look at a few examples as a first thing.