One of the moments I recall most meaningfully from my childhood memories of The Little Mermaid is when Ariel, in her underwater world naïveté, uses a fork to brush her hair. Not knowing its original intended purpose, she assigns it one of her own, and in this I learned a lesson about form and function that has stuck with me ever since.
The common principle is that “form follows function,” and this is true for many products we encounter and use daily. Your toaster not so coincidentally has bread-shaped openings; your water bottle has a cap and fits perfectly into your hand for utmost portability—blah, blah, you know this. A lesson we can learn from Ariel, however, is that while a product may be designed for a certain function, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the only function it has.
Take, for example, something I once did in high school (and has since, from what I’ve seen, been replicated—we can argue provenance another time). Anyone who has ever forced a utensil into a solid block of ice cream should be familiar with the metal’s malleability—especially if you shopped for the set on a budget. Knowing this and noticing that my fork had a metal mass similar to a bracelet I had recently lost, I decided to use a pair of pliers to bend it at a few different spots to curve around my wrist. Voilà! What was once a fork for eating is now a bracelet for wearing (a forklet, if you will? No?).
Over the years, I’ve also bent hangers into doorstops, formed yarn into a wallpaper-like pattern, turned old window treatments into wall lamps. The list goes on. It has become a bit of a habit, which can be especially beneficial for anyone like me—an art school student in NYC with limited living space and a much more limited budget. Finding new functions out of existing objects has saved me a ton from buying the product actually designed for that function. Generally, it’s cheaper.
I encourage you to take a look around your apartment. Ignore the original function of everything, and start to look at what’s physically there (especially the stuff you’re about to throw out). A fork doesn’t have to be an eating utensil. Instead, see it as just mass of metal, one that you can turn into anything. It’ll open up the door to “a whole new world” (I know, wrong Disney movie) of living solutions.
