MCGUFFIN Lamp

The McGuffin lamp is part of Aurelie Hoegy’s Design Contextual Master graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Borders between Normality and Abnormality.

The project includes 14 scenario drawings, 6 short films (written and directed by Aurelie Hoegy), 1 McGuffin lamp and 1 McGuffin door handle.

“ Everything around us is complex enough to create a vocabulary of enigma. Ordinary objects can create a new language, and they can take us to another dimension, to another world. As a designer, observer and person, I feel it is my responsibility to question society’s prejudices and fallacies towards human nature. – our individual qualities- . My work is to trigger individuals to go beyond the usual, safe regularity, to see and explore the rituals of everyday life from another perspective.
I would like us to put ourselves in the realm of the unbalanced, to find space for this liberty of expression and see the true value in it. Behind the veneer of normality every person has a mysterious side that is waiting to suface. Everyone is full of life, passion and madness, visible or suppressed. How often do we mask our actions or reactions because of social rules and the fear of becoming a misfit? I trust we need this craziness! We need these moments of alienation, dreams and explosion to survive within society. I believe design can help to liberate, express and bring about these moments, abandoning its norm of disciplining and shaping behaviour; seeking out the so-called ‘fringes of society’ such as madness and alienation. My design derives meaning from the externalized expression of madness and explores other ways of functioning within daily life. These experimental behaviors express something inefficient, incongruous and dysfunctional. My design research is aimed at creating tools to push the hum-drum reality of daily life towards a more poetic absurdity.

As a medium I am using film, to show the potential of free expression and unexpected use of surroundings. I create McGuffins as trigger objects or tools to stimulate situations and behaviors. They are catalysts to experiment with the spontaneous touch of madness.” *

WHAT IS A MCGUFFIN?

“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says” “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”, and the other answers, “Oh, that’s a McGuffin”. The first one asks “What’s a McGuffin?” “Well”, the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands”. The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands”, and the other one answers, “Well, then that’s no McGuffin!” So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all” *
* Interview in 1966 by Francois Truffaut of Alfred Hitchcock.

“A McGuffin provokes action but is not the main point of interest, letting you focus on what is provoked.They are trigger object! Madness often seems terrifying and is still taboo today because it touches the depths of our humanity and raises questions about our free will and identity. Our fragility and the idea of losing control is petrifying. Finally, we are the prisoners of our own system. How can design create the tools to push the hum-drum ordered reality of daily life towards a more poetic absurdity? How can we create opportunities to see the complexity and strangeness that humans can have through daily action. Often this does not take much. Often, a seemingly small thing can change many things; we only need a little stimulus. Then daily routine could be more light and unexpected. How can design offer that trigger?” *

* 2013, Thesis Aurelie Hoegy Border between Normality and Abnormality