Make Something Functional

Until now you have made things that look nice. Today you make a thing that earns its place. A functional object is one that solves a small daily problem in your house. The problem can be tiny. A phone that slides off the bed when you are watching a video. Pens scattered across the study table because there is no holder. A kite spool that never stays still on the roof. None of these are huge problems. Every functional object you ever own started exactly here, with somebody quietly annoyed and willing to fix the thing themselves.

Pick one of three. The phone stand. Take a sturdy piece of cardboard from a leftover box. Cut a rectangle the height of your phone in landscape. Make a bend in the lower third so it leans back. Cut a small lip at the bottom so the phone does not slide off. Test with your actual phone. If it falls, widen the base. The pen holder. Take an empty ghee tin or a 1.5 litre water bottle cut to the right height. Wrap it in clean paper. Decorate with truck art borders. Drop your pens in. The kite spool stand. Two pieces of wood, an A frame, and a single nail or screw at the top so the spool spins free.

Pakistan has a long line of jugaad designers. The fan blade fixed with a paper clip. The CNG cylinder regulator built from spare radio parts. The motorcycle exhaust shop on Empress Road that converts a 70cc into a sounding beast for two thousand rupees. These designers are not less serious than engineers from MIT. They are more serious in one way, which is that their object must work today, on this road, with parts they can find in their gali. Functional design under constraint is the hardest kind of design.