“Human nature”, Victor Gerardo Martinez, Vgmdesign, Mexico

“HUMAN NATURE”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Victor Gerardo Martinez, Vgmdesign, Mexico

Victor Martinez started his professional experience collaborating in transportation design. He has worked in the USA, Mexico and Italy working on projects for companies like Ford, Audi, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Italdesign Giugiaro and Ferrari among others.
In 2004 he founded Vgmdesign. He is also a teacher at the Tecnologico de Monterrey College at the Industrial Design School, in Mexico, where he runs the laboratory of research on new biodegradable materials based in natural fibers. Among other awards he won a Red Dot in 2007 and participated with LED in the Salone Satellite 2008, Milan, Italy and the International Furniture Fair of Valencia, Spain in 2007.
Vgmdesign is an innovation consultancy, that believes that design does not describe exactly what nowadays we do for work. They analyze, imagine, search, and discuss new ways of creating progress within societies where products are just one part of a bigger concept.

Today, claims Martinez, our own “human nature” restricts us from achieving great things; our greed, our short-term vision and inattention to the consequences of our simplest actions are our greatest challenges.
Industrial designers have a big role in this process, in the products that are made and the services created. Most of the these don’t really contribute to a better quality of life, social equity or increased knowledge, values we ought to be pursuing. Instead it’s about raising false expectations and cultivating needs and feelings that can’t or shouldn’t be satisfied by objects. Private property and consumerism are transforming people into buying machines, instead of subjects pursuing happiness and well-being.
Designers can offer far more than just solutions in the form of products: in the future we will see how using “experience” as a holistic concept that integrates, science, technology, economics, raw materials, cultural habits, manufacturers, and disposal can transform our presently unsustainable consumerist structure.
The first basic step we can use as an approach is the feeling created when using an object; or looking backward, the feelings we want to create and propose a product or service to which you can apply it.
One simple example is the footrest designed together with his colleagues at G-LED. Among a long list of feelings and sensations they drew up was the special feeling of grass beneath bare feet – outdoors, holidays, peace and relaxation. Later they developed a second position for this same smart office footrest which would warm one’s feet in winter.
Similarly, the car’s steering wheel has remained roughly the same for 100 years, yet few have ever considered whether the interface is actually correct for basic human physiology. After some time thinking he came up with the Noloos, a steering wheel that in fact is not a wheel, which offers a comfort and practicality conventional, “unthinking” wheels simply can’t.

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