Aesthetic Hack

According to Simondon, techno-aesthetics is something that serves multiple purposes in that it is technical and aesthetic (On Techno-Aesthetics 2012). He describes this as an "intercategorical fusion". The object serves a very technical purpose, but it's also aesthetic to the maker, creator, and consumer. It is also something that has the potential to serve another purpose - one that can be discovered by the creator or consumer.

My personal hack was using my quick-boil water heater to cook pasta. There are a couple of different perspectives for the aesthetics of the hack. The time it took to cook the pasta was much shorter than it would normally be on stove top in a pot. Partially because I didn't have to wait so long for the water to boil. Also, the nozzle where the water comes of the water heater has a strainer so that I didn't have to get a colander to drain the pasta.

The trade-off though was that the pasta had a different texture than normal. I think that this is because of the limited volume of the kettle as well as the inconsistent source of heat. I had to keep re-boiling the water while the pasta was in the container to keep the water hot. The source of heat might also have not been uniform throughout the pot.

There were a lot of things that remained the same though. The pasta was still edible and it got soft like it would if you cooked it in the traditional way. The taste was pretty much the same. The smell, the heat of the boiling water, the steam from the water; those were all things that felt the same.

Although the volume of the kettle was not as big as I would have wanted, the size was also what allowed for me to cook within the pot. This was one of the margins of liberty that allowed this process to be possible. I think that maybe the fact that pasta only needs boiling water to cook is also something that could be considered a margin of liberty. Even further, the fact that water is a liquid and conforms to the shape of the container that you put it in made it so that the shape of the kettle didn't have to match the shape of a pot and there was liberties in that sense

The hack was successful because I still got the end product that I wanted (edible pasta for dinner), but the texture of the pasta was definitely change, which I think counts as an aesthetic feature to the hack. The point that Simondon continuously makes about creating and designing something that has an open purpose can be shown here as well.

The water heater was meant for heating pure water. It makes brewing tea really simple, easy and quick. It's made for boiling water for instant noodles (but pouring the water into the dehydrated noodles instead of the other way around). By using the tea kettle in multiple ways and more specifically in the way that it was not intended to be used, it became a product with the design that allowed it to be useful in multiple contexts. Its potential was increased and I think that that contributes to its aesthetics.

I think that there is definitely validity to what Simondon argues, but I also believe that the relevance is determined by the contextual details of the situation/hack. My struggle with this concept of techno-aesthetics overall is that it is very abstract and your interpretation or interaction with a subject really defines whether or not you view the object as having techno-aesthetic qualities.

There will be great variation in the interpretations, but maybe that's the point. Maybe that is what allows creators to make the discoveries within subjects that allow them to serve different purposes. Thinking about this idea specifically can force thoughtfulness about the subject and how it relates, but I'm not sure that it's a completely natural or "organic" thought process in response.