Objects of affection
The things we love and what they say about us
College Station, TX. 2008. I’m a 22-year old liberal arts student at Texas A&M, without a car, living in a public transit desert. I comb the postings on Craigslist and eBay looking for a vintage (read: cheap) bike. After some diligence, I find it.
A golden-yellow Puch. Austrian-made. Mixte frame. 80 bucks. One of my friends helps me custom build it up with a coaster brake (the ones on kid’s bikes you pedal backwards to brake), gum wall tires, and chrome bull horns with pink handlebar tape. It couldn’t be more perfect.
I ride it everywhere — to class, to work, to band practice — feeling like the coolest adult-child with my coaster brake and spokey dokeys. (Elementary-school kids got nothin’ on me.)
Coming home from class one night, I stumble upon ‘Wheeler Wednesday,’ a nocturnal gathering of cyclists and fixie-riders. It starts with practicing tricks, then progresses to foot-down contests and races, and finally ends with a group ride to Paddock Lane — the designated Wheeler bar — for pitchers of Lone Star and Wednesday night karaoke.
“Hey, cool mixte.” I hear someone say when I show up the following week.
It isn’t long before I realize Wheeler Wednesday is more than just an event. It’s a window to a counter-culture beneath the surface of conservative, small-town Texas. A culture of riders—but also artists, musicians, performers, and entrepreneurs. A community held together by creativity and expression, and a haven for all unable to find their fit within the predominant truck-driving, country-music-listening, traditional culture of College Station TX.
My bike had led me here.
I spend the next two years with this crew. It’s bike rides, themed parties, art shows, field days, and movie nights. I meet bandmates, roommates, best friends, boyfriends.
Denton, TX. 2010. With bike in tow, I move to Denton to study design at the University of North Texas, with two BFFs from Wheeler Wednesday. I work my butt off, spending many a late night pencil-sketching thumbnail after thumbnail. Bike rides become a way to decompress, to clear my head.
Washington D.C. 2013. I land a summer internship at National Geographic Magazine and head up to DC. By now my bike and I are in a very serious relationship. I’m not spending the summer without her. Disassemble. Fedex. Reassemble.
Every morning I wave to the Obamas as I bike past the White House. In the evenings I take the Pennsylvania Avenue bike lane, getting a grand view of the Capitol Building as I ride down the middle of the street. I spend the summer riding all over the district — alongside new friends and old ones.
Seattle, WA. 2014. My bike and I make a cross-country move to Seattle, but between frequent rain and living atop Queen Anne hill, the conditions for riding are less than ideal. Coincidentally we don’t stay there long. Work takes us to San Francisco.
By now, my bike has evolved quite a bit, the result of all the work I’ve put into it. I’ve changed the color from golden yellow to olive green, the handlebars from bull horns, to drops, to risers, the gearing from coaster brake, to fixed, to single speed.
We rode thousands of miles together — across 5 different cities in 4 different states. I rode this bike all the way through my twenties. It’s the thread that wove together nearly a decade of experiences.
Until it was gone.
In the summer of 2015, just after my 29th birthday, it vanished from an Oakland BART station like it never existed.
It’s been over a year now and recently, a friend asked me why I haven’t bought a new bike.
“I’m in mourning” I said.
How could I begin to replace something that was so rich with personal meaning? It’s not as simple as going out and buying a new one. Where he saw a bike, I saw a montage of memories.
Now, I’ve always been sentimental — maybe more so than most — but as humans we have an interesting relationship to physical objects. As we interact with them, they take on meaning, becoming bigger than their physical form. They become story containers. Artifacts of our past lives.
A concert ticket becomes the memory of a first date. A first edition hardback becomes the symbol of a formative friendship. A leather wallet, the memory of a grandfather.
But the way we experience many of these things is changing. Tickets exist inside apps now. People continue to trade in their bookshelves for iPads and Kindles, and how long will it be before digital wallets replace the need for analog ones? As our world becomes increasingly digital, will physical objects retain their emotional power?
I can’t say.
But at least for now, it‘s still in our DNA.
So in the midst of a digital revolution, physical objects and experiences become more significant. More powerful. And for designers, it’s important to consider: What might the objects we create, or the objects we see in the world, mean to people today? How can we use their power to unearth stories, to tap into emotion, to understand each other, and to create empathy?
Whitney Smith is a visual and experience designer at SYPartners. She is currently looking for a new bike.
