bauble is a small print-based publication chiefly focused on evaluating “function” as a social as much as a utilitarian concern. issue number two · functional baroque An American obsession with the luxuriously utilitarian issue number one · so much depends · moveable café · smell-o-vision If you would like a copy of bauble, please write to bauble (at) blackplum.com bauble is a Black Plum Production blackplum.com		functional baroque (exc: iss. no. 2) A particularly American way of embracing, even fetishizing, functional items. Taking them up, polishing them, dressing them, giving them lives of a richness far greater than their humble origins would have suggested. We have an amazing ability to dote on and exalt the utilitarian. The American design contribution is first in creating very basic very functional items and then in imbuing them with romance. Something that is both functional and beautiful at the same time tends to be viewed as suspicious and European (foreign). But giving the humble and practical object a beautiful, even fantastic or improbable, life is not only sanctioned but is proudly encouraged. We also love to adopt the exquisitely specialized and well-equipped. Those things developed for the powerful achievement of some great deed - not just of war and winning, but communicating, playing, cooking. If it can be demonstrated that a tool, machine or garment is the best way to attain a particular goal, then we want that thing. It is the promise of achievement, whether or not we have an abiding interest in the goal. why bauble? (exc: iss. no. 1) A bauble is probably most commonly imagined as a cheap trinket — a small decorative object, a gewgaw. It is meaningless, useless and without much value. It is like a symbol that signifies almost nothing at all. Or like a currency that has lost almost all connection to any real power or strength, a penny. I say almost, because I am confident that there is a use and function to baubles however tenuous and obscure or debased this may have become. It is in this almost that I wish to begin the process of tracing, or really just discussing, the connections between meaning and objects. Objects can be something that we hold in our hands or they can be less solid but generally fixed and so agreed upon like images (even moving images) or more loosely, things like words or phrases. Because the idea here is that all of these things — silly little things, grand temples, couches, hair dryers, pictures of birds, what kind of bicycle pedals one chooses — are part of communication. Many of these things are functional too. But function and communication are not so easily pried apart. For instance, knives and forks work very well. So do chopsticks. Essentially, they work equally well. But it hardly matters. Because what set of tools one uses to eat is not strictly a matter of function, of what works well and is useful. What one uses is determined by a number of factors most of which are social, are a result of relationships. And communiction has a great deal to do with relationships. So a bauble does have to do, in a variety of ways, with relationships and communication. I won’t attempt to elucidate all of these, to uncover all of the origins and connections. But I will be thinking in this way, making the assumption that a bauble is an object that communicates and what it communicates has a good deal to do with relationships between people, between individuals and groups. Further, a bauble is a designed object. It is created specifically by people for people under a particular set of circumstances. So, a main focus will be on what designed objects — again, objects ranging from what we can hold in our hands or touch, to those which are printed on a page or projected on a screen or held in our collective imaginations — can tell us about the varieties of our communications and what this means for, or simply how it may impact, our relationships. That is, designed objects are a way of speaking.