A Journey of Nine Pencils
This month, Do The Green Thing, the environmental charity I help to run, launched Everyday Things, a wonderful collection of everyday objects made by artists and designers to act as inspiring canvases for sustainable messaging and inspiring examples of sustainable design. The collection was made in collaboration with WWF-UK and celebrates Earth Hour, the worldwide lights off event.
We received many brilliant submissions from many brilliant creative people, including Flower Glass, a beautiful vase made from a wine glass and a coat hanger by Daniel Weil, Marina Willer’s handmade Sketchbox sketchbooks made from recycled cardboard and paper, wonderful badges made from old bottle tops by Ron Arad, a working record player made from paper by Simon Elvins, lights made out of Hawaiian beach litter by Sophie Thomas, and many more.
Inspired by these submissions, my team decided to turn try and create our own Everyday Thing. We’d noticed a slew of pencils in Pentagram London’s studio, discarded before they had been sharpened very far. To combat this wastage, and celebrate the creative potential of the humble pencil, we decided to challenge ourselves to create a set pencils that would encourage people to use them to the very end.
It turned out to be way harder than we first imagined, and took us nine attempts to get to something we were happy with. So you can enjoy our pencil highs and lows, allow me take you on our pencil journey through the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly to our final idea, Pencils To The End.
1. Sentimental Pencils
Our first instinct was to play to sentimentality and remind people that sticking with things can be rewarding, be that a friendship, a goal, a box set or in this case, a pencil. Pencils record our thoughts, our feelings and our accomplishments and this pencil celebrates the loveliness of all these memories coming from one lead.
We liked it for a day or so but then decided it was too quietly wholesome – ‘icky’ someone said – and moved on.
2. Whiplash Pencils
After the sentimentality of the ‘old friend’ pencil, came the aggression of this bootcamp pencil. Here, we gave the pencil the personality of JK Simmons in Whiplash, goading you into using it to the end with initial abuse and eventual but begrudging compliments.
After a while we decided this pencil was a little too mouthy, and went in search of a little more restraint.
3. Sweet Spot Pencils
So we decided to take a break from words and try our hands at product design, sketching out these these sweet spot pencils: pencils will small finger grip indents at their ends, presenting a tactile and tantalising goal for those who stuck with it.
Sadly, when we went from sketch to prototype and scooped some wood out of a short pencil end, it was incredibly uncomfortable to hold, and another sharp idea was quickly blunted.
4. OCD Pencils
Having failed as amateur sculptors, we became amateur psychologists and played with the idea of pencils with designs that looked unpleasant and unsettling at the beginning and more pleasing and more ordered at the end, encouraging OCD people to keep sharpening. So hairy pencils that resolved to smooth pencils, pencils with jagged bands that resolved to straight bands, and so on.
We got excited – for a few minutes. Then realised that these pencils were a perfect storm of random, mystifying and freaky. It was probably the lowest point of our pencil journey. After that, we decided to go back to the safety and comfort of words.
5. Hidden Message Pencils
Our next idea was to create pencils with shortened leads that would room allow for a small rolled up piece of paper to go in the end, filled with hidden messages – love notes, IOUs, profound pencil thoughts – that could be found, unrolled and enjoyed. Until someone pointed out that the extra energy needed to drill the holes and produce and insert the messages perhaps defeated the point of making them in the first place.
6. Four Part Pencils
After much soul-searching, we decided that the reward couldn’t be inserted, it had to delivered in a narrative on the pencils themselves. So we designed these four-part pencils that make each section a hero, giving them all an equally important word to show that pencils go way beyond the first part. So pencils emblazoned with the name of the four Beatles, or the four seasons, and so on.
We decided it was an idea that helped to draw attention to the full length of a pencil, but didn’t necessarily pull you towards using it all.
7. Good End Pencils
So we sharpened the idea by means of some wicked humour with our next attempt: good end pencils. These pencils were based on the idea of taking a negative statement and sharpening it away into a positive phrase. So ‘Love is rewarding until you wake up the next morning’ would be sharpened down to ‘Love is rewarding.’
These pencils were witty and noisy. But they were also needlessly provocative. We didn’t feel great putting the unsharpened messages out: especially when one of them was ‘A smile is contagious but not as contagious as chlamydia.’ It seemed a bit, er, unnecessary.
8. Movie Plot Pencils
So having beaten ourselves up about those snarkisms, we went magnificently mainstream, deciding to write three part plot lines based on three act hollywood blockbusters, with the final part being the most resolved, happy or rewarding. So for example: Teens visit empty house – They’re not alone – The quiet one survives. To ice the cake we spelled the idea out even further on the other side of the pencil, where we wrote: The beginning – The middle – The end
We were getting very close. We had pencils that were clear enough, interesting enough and pulled you through to the end. But something was still bugging us, and it resulted in one last evolution.
9. Pencils To The End
Although we liked the idea of a pencils based on movies, we felt that the silver screen wasn’t pencil domain. Pencils are for books, poetry and scribbling notes, not for film.
So we decided to shift our focus from movie plots to archetypal tales, inspired by Joseph Campbell, Ernest Hemingway et al, and created our final idea: Pencils To The End.
We created six pencils with six archetypal and extremely short stories, each one with a thoughtful or satisfying or bittersweet ending that stands alone as a great phrase when the pencil is sharpened right down.
We debuted them at the Everyday Things private view at Pentagram London on Thursday night, and they seemed to go down very well indeed.
I hope you like them, and enjoyed the story of how we got to them. And since they were created as pieces of inspiration, I also hope they inspire you to use pencils – and anything else you can – to the very end.
