Dangerous of Design in the Future

Living in a world of design, people’s lives have become incredibly convenient. Comparing to the living quality of people of a few century ago, the many new inventions such as paper, bulb, to the more recent invention of car, airplane, cellphone, and computer, they have totally changed the way we live our lives. However, as our lives become more and more convenient with the improvements of technology the many new inventions and better designs, we still have to pay attention to the “dangerous” of the many newly invented and objects and designs in the future.

The purpose of design is to help us experience our lives in a better way and to help us get rid of the many difficulties in our daily lives from peeling potatoes to traveling to a far a way country. Even though design can improve our lives, it also can be abused. And we have to keep our future designs from becoming dangerous. In my opinion, two kinds of designs in the future can be dangerous which are the one that takes over our ability to create and think and the one that takes over our ability to experience. 

What I mean by taking over our ability to create is that we have to be careful to the purpose of design when it comes to helping us create. In the future, there can be things which are over designed or can be used abusively that by relying on them we can gradually lose our ability to create and think. Design should be tools helping we create, but it is not something for taking over our jobs to think and to be creative. It is like using a calculator. Even though calculator is a good tool which does the calculation jobs for us, having the attitude of simply inserting every number and symbol robotically from a given question for an answer without actually thinking and understanding it mathematically can be harmful to us. 

Besides the design that are destructive to our creativity, some designs are also dangerous that they take over our ability to experience. As I mentioned, the purpose of design is to help us experience the world, it is not something to experience the world for us. To give an idea of what I mean, I find in the Disney Pixcar cartoon Wall.E, the design of the large spaceship in which people just have to sit on their chairs to be moved to everywhere of the spaceship and experience everything is a good example. As a result, the people in the spaceship became lazy and chubby; and they lost the ability to walk and do exercise. Although it exists just in the cartoon, it can become reality if we don’t pay attention to the danger of designing things that do everything for us.    

The "Domsais" - Utopian Design

       Utopia in Design means the pursuance to a better future and a better life; and that means to have a better mood and “feeling”. As I learned in class, “feeling is all” says Goethe, design has a lot to do with feeling and the emotion aspect. Therefore, in my opinion, an Utopian Design, a design which aims to improve the society, doesn’t have to be a tremendous or completely innovative object. It can be as simple as an object that brings good feelings to us. And to have a better mood is a way of improving the society.
       Sometimes a simple, small, funny, and interesting design object can totally change our mood and bring us simple happiness. A few days ago, an interesting design object in a local fashion store caught my attention. The design object were little plane-monsters named the Domsais designed by product designer Matteo Cibic. The Domsais are actually little cactuses planted in small plastic human-leg-shaped pots with a glass made dome covered on top like a spaceman cap. There are six of them; and every Domsai contains a different kind of cactus and has its own glass dome which is different from the others. With the funny appearance, together they look just like a crew of small aliens from the planet of walking pants. The sense of humor of the object left smiles on the faces of people in the store who passed by and saw them.

       What I like the most about the Domsais is how the little plants are humanized through design. The different glass cap each of them has intriguingly gives them different personalities. And it somehow reminds me of my own personality and makes me think about the frontier of our own existence. I feel like we are all like the Domsais having the glass bubble being our exterior to protect ourself and also to showcase our difference. I guess it was the similarity that we found in between ourselves and the funny little plant-monsters that we smiled. It seemed that I was waken up by them from my day to day life to realize who I really am and what role I am playing in this society. The Domsais makes people to think; and they also bring life into the harsh lives we have. It is by given a little sense of humor in our daily lives that we discover a simple happiness. I believe the Domsai is an Utopian design which improves the society through emotional interaction that it makes us to think and smile.

Image from: http://www.matteocibicstudio.com/

Warm and Cool Color in Design

       On color wheel, colors can be separated into two groups, the warm colors and the cool colors. The warm colors reminds us the sun, the light, and the warmth that it gives us a feeling of energy, happiness, unstableness, and life. On the contrary, the cool color makes one think of the moon, night, and the coldness that it often gives out feelings of peace, death, quietness, depression, and stableness.
       One example of the warm color applied in design is the fast food logo design. The warm colors connect with our hunger, especially the color red and yellow. From the many fast food logos, InnOut Burger, McDonalds, KFC, and Jack in the Box, we all can find the color red and the combination of red and yellow. They are the colors that make you hungry and think of coke and fries.
       Besides the warm colors, the red and yellow which is often applied in food products, the cool colors are also applied in some specific areas. Fore examples, the public transportation logos are often designed with color green or blue such as the BART, the MART, and the SkyTrain logo, because they remind people of water and wind which giving out a feeling of efficient and stable which are the goals of transportation systems. Cool colors also can be seen in hospitals where a quiet and peaceful environment is needed that people use the cool colors for the furnitures and sometimes the doors and the walls.
       Color links to our emotion. Different color connects with our different feelings. Therefore, to design, color is especially important.

Japanese Food Product Package Design

       Package design plays an important role in the design of a product. It is almost as important as the product itself. The package of a product gives out fist impression of the product contain. It links directly with the emotion of the consumers as one big factor affecting their decisions on buying or not buying. Being an important medium connecting the producers and the consumers, package design not only has to be beautiful and attracting, but it also has to be functional, economical and, with the recent green movement, environmental friendly as well. 

       Amid the many different package design for different products, food products rely on package design the most. Package to food product is important in both visual and functional aspect. To functional aspect, a well designed package keeps the food fresh, protects the food, and also helps the buyers to restore them. For examples, the design of zip lock bag package helps the buyers to keep the food fresh; the egg container protects the eggs from breaking. (images) 

Besides functional aspect, visual aspect is also one big concern to the package designers because they know the power of our “visual feelings” which plays an important role in our decision making. “Visual feeling” is the different feelings that we get from seeing different things. Playing with the package design, applying image or color, for instance, to have a picture of a delicious apple on an apple juice product or apply red and yellow, the color combination that makes one hungry, to the package of frozen fast food products, the visual feeling we gain can create impulse in our mind that makes us want to purchase these products. 

       To the visual aspect, companies in Japan have being known for their well designed products and also packaging. With their conscientious culture, Japanese especially care about the details. To their idea of package design, they believe that taking every little detail of a product and the packaging into account is to give the buyers the respect. Therefore, in Japan, package design often occupies a large amount of the total budget of a product. Even though many designs may be judged to be over packaging and over wasting the materials which can be harmful to the environment, despite this negative aspect, there’re still many thoughtful and brilliant ideas can be found in Japanese package designs. And for food products in Japan, packaging has become the science, art and technology of protecting and restoring the products that sometimes to open up the package is like unfolding a present. 

       To give an idea of typical Japanese package design, below are some images as examples I found interesting. There are few typical characters of Japanese package design. One of them is that Japanese package designers like the idea of multiple layers, which they like to pack the products using not just one package but placing one within another. “Three layer” packaging is the most common package type for delicate food products in Japan. The three layers are the inner little package for each single unit, the box kind of container that holds the little packages together, and the exterior cover.             

       This multiple layer kind of package design allows the buyers to enjoy the moment unfolding the package. It also helps the buyers to restore the food product inside that the whole thing is well designed as a beautiful box or drawer. 

       Another specialty to Japanese package design for food products is the use of paper. Different kinds of papers give out different feelings. In many Japanese food products, I found that the use of rice paper is common in the design of high class food products. The use of rice paper, the wrinkled texture, gives out a traditional feeling to the product and it makes the buyers to feel the history behind the product which it creates an illusion of “well made”, “well refined” and “good quality”. 

       Besides, another special thing I found in Japanese food package design is the use of characters. Most of the characters are chinese characters, which they called the “kanji”, that started to be used in Japanese from many centuries ago brought back by Japanese ambassadors who came to China at the time during of the advanced Tang dynasty. Japanese respect the history. They generally think that old things are good things because they have been refined by the time. Therefore, Combining with other Japanese characters, the hand written characters as the use of the rice paper also gain the product a kind of ancient and traditional feeling. But not to stick to the idea of traditional and cultural, the character design can also be modern and stylized nowadays that it has become as important as the use of image in Japanese food products.    

SFMOMA

       Although it has been almost three years since I came to live in the bay area, I have never had a chance to visit the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco which I always passed by whenever I went through the third street. However, on Tuesday, the day that every museum in San Francisco was free, my friends and I decided to go to this well known museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For me, as an art and architecture major, I’m always interested in Modern art as well as modern architecture. Overall, this trip to the museum was truly worthwhile to me. It not only enriched my experience and knowledge toward photography and Pop art, it also gained me a lesson about being patient and thinking about the meaning of each artworks. And I really appreciated the chance, the chance that I can communicate with the many artists through their art works. 

       The San Francisco Museum of modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art museum  in San Francisco restoring a large amount of the 20th century art pieces opened in 1935 under director Grance L. McCann. The majority of the artworks in the museum are mix media paintings, color and black-and-white photos and installation arts, which well express the idea of contemporary art in the 20th century. Personally, when it comes to modern art, my first impression of it is alway “abstract”, “profound” and “hard to understand”. However, after visiting the museum,  not only have I seen many of the masterpieces of modern artists and many of the famous artworks such as The Brown Sisters pictures by Nicholas Nixon and Kara Walker’s cutouts, I have gained a different perspective about what “art” really is. As one of my art teacher has told me, art is not purely something that is beautiful, creative or pleasant, it is the way that people express their feelings to their own lives and explanations to their very existences, the meanings of their lives. After seeing the many photos, paintings and other art pieces at the museum, seeing the artists’ hearts in their artworks, I really gained a deeper understanding about my teacher’s words after all. 

The Arrival by Shaun Tan: Wordless story

One day when I was at the library, one book especially drew my attention. It was a picture book made by artist Shaun Tan named The Arrival. This book was very special that it inspired me so much. The reason that I used “picture book” to describe the book was because I couldn’t distinguish whether it was a comic book or an illustration book. In the book, author Shaun Tan uses panels of images as the way which comic books use to tell the story about a person’s arrival in a new strange world. But unlike simplified images and characters in comic books, he instead sketches every image that they’re all looked realistic and full of details. 

The most interesting thing about the book is that different people may have different understanding of the story because the book has no word at all. The reason that the book attract me so much is because I like the idea of not putting any word, any explanation, to the sequential panels that it allows the readers to tell the story themselves. Even though without the help of word, sometimes people may get confuse about what happened, it gets the readers to think again and gain and to make guesses. It is the process of guessing and thinking about the story that made this book so successful. The story is about a person’s arrival to a strange world with various culture, people, and creatures; and about how he settles his life in the strange world through finding a job and learning the alien language. Because there is no word in the book, it gives the reader a feeling that themselves are also the ones seeking information of the new world and to get understanding of what is going on in the new world. I believe this book is a successful book which regarding to design, it connects people’s emotion and feeling with the story deeply.      

images from: steamtrainsandghosts.wordpress.com

Experiencing Architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen

       From animal species to human beings, creatures all seem to be born with the instinct to create a shelter for themselves. Just like what almost every kid did. When I was a child, I always wanted to make my own secret place. I used a rug draped over two chairs to make my personal tent in the corner of the living room or make the room under my desk into a cave or something. Every kid seems to really enjoy doing such things. That is often the simple beginning for us to experience architecture. As time goes on, we experience architecture more and more in our daily life, but we seldom think about the architecture itself. Why is a building designed this way and what is the purpose of this design? Architect and author Steen Eiler Rasmussen answers these questions in his book Experiencing Architecture. He reminds us to be aware of some principal things, elements and characters of architecture and also tries lots of different and interesting ways to make us realize and experience what architecture exactly is.

       He, the author, describes that a good architect is just like a perfect host who provides every comfort and need for his guests so that living with him is a happy experience. It’s similar when we are designing a building, like the host wants to provide his guests the best; we are trying to make our designs work successfully. That’s why we have to recognize the connection of the relationship between human beings and architecture itself.

       In his book, Rasmussen talks about the relationship between human beings and architecture. As I read the book, I think intuition plays an important role when we experience architecture. Rasmussen cites lots of examples from little tennis balls to road paving to show how different color, different surface, different weight and materials influence our feelings. Applying those themes to architecture, the softness and hardness, heaviness and lightness and the surface character of materials from the coarsest to the finest not only change the form of a building but our entire feeling of it. For instance, Architects make their buildings seem to have more weight by adding organic details and make weights of a construction magically disappear by employing smooth concrete surfaces to it and with light color, just like those huge roofs and eaves supported by fairly thin pillars in our college. I can’t imagine how heavy would it look like if their surface were made by granite, which would make you really feel crushed under the weight of it.

       Through the chapters, Rasmussen shows that in different eras, architects have used different materials to build their dream buildings. I found out that when the era changes from one to the other, not only the employment of materials and the form of architecture changes, but also the thoughts of architects are different. For example, one of the interesting transitions in architecture that the author mentions about is the change of conception from “solids” to “cavities”. The concept of solids and cavities is a bit abstract. The difference between them is just like the difference between convexity and concavity. The Gothic architecture is the former because it concentrates on adding convex details like sculptures and vertical elements. But when architects were decorating a Gothic building, they started thinking about making the niches larger and larger. As a result, the concept of “cavity” came out, and it resulted in the Renaissance architecture. The Renaissance form doesn’t focus on the conception of solids. It’s more like curving a cave. There is more focus on creating vast rooms in it and horizontal forms, not like a Gothic building dominates the city.

       As the author mentions in the book, architecture should not be explained, it must be experienced. Reading this book, I learned not only the difference between architecture but also the transition in architecture from one era to another. Through the chapters, I experience more details in architecture such as the applying of golden section and the applying of curves. There’re a lot of interesting chapters in this book. As a result, I’m really happy to experience and apply the author’s thoughts in my life.  


image from: astore.amazon.co.uk  

Image and Word

       In author Brian Fie’s speech he mentioned about how he became a comic book artist and the thoughts he put into the two comic books he made, Mother’s Cancer and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow. In his speech, one thing that I remember the most is he talking about the relationship between image and word which are the two important elements to comic. AS he says, for comic, the combination of image and words helps people to get themselves involved in the story better. And I remember he talked about the way which people memorize things and communicate with the world that in our minds, we store memories in a way just as comics, brief and efficient. Therefore, the most efficient way to connect people’s mind is to use the combination of image and word.  

       As Brian said, image itself can be a beautiful art, and word itself can be a fantastic work as a poem, but the combination of them makes a story even better. To design, interaction is important. How to make efficient connection with people through the designed object that they can understand the designers ideas is one important concern of the designers. The combination of image and word makes the connection efficient, therefore it can be seen as an important element to design. As a designer, we have to keep one thing in mind which is how we can make a design obvious and simple to the user that it is not confusing that people can easily get into the interaction process we expect them to enjoy without thinking. And by applying the combination of image and word can help achieve the efficient connection.    


Image from: http://www.minnpost.com/ 

Computer Keyboard

       Computer keyboard is one essential part to a computer. The design of a keyboard has a long history which can be traced back to the early 17th century.The arrangement of the buttons, “keys”, on a keyboard is not random. There are many kinds of arrangement of the keys. The most common keyboard is known as the QWERTY keyboard as the english letters in the first row from left to the right read QWERTY. This arrangement was first invented by Christopher Latham Sholes in the 19th century. At the time, people had problem typing because the keyboard they used had the most common typed letter near each other that when people typed too fast the keys would get stock. However, the new arrangement invented by Sholes solved the problem by arranging the common letters separately on the keyboard. It has become the most common kind of keyboard people use until nowadays. 

Besides the arrangement of the keys, the “haptic” design of a keyboard is also one concern of the designers nowadays. For example, the new Mac keyboard designed by apple Inc. slightly curved every key and applied a special material that the keys won’t stick to one’s finger but also not too smooth. A good design of a keyboard links our thoughts directly to the screen. Referring to the film Objectified, a better design of a form is when you use it that you don’t really feel the existence of the object. The “form” is the vehicle that helps our interaction with the “content” of the designed object. For example, as I’m typing the blog right now, I’m not really looking and feeling the design of the keyboard on my MacBook, the design of the keyboard links my thought directly to the sentences showing on the screen that it is so fluent that I don’t even pay attention to the existence of the keyboard. This is a success of the keyboard. A good design provides good interaction between the object and us.


Image from: http://www.seoconsultants.com/frontpage/keyboard/   

The pepper No. 30

       The Pepper No. 30 is one of Edward Weston’s most popular works. Edward Weston was an American photographer and also the co-founder of Group f/64, a group of seven San Francisco photographers in 20th century sharing a new photographic style of sharp focus and contrast on the contrary of the Pictorialist photographic style in the early 1900s. Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois on March 24, 1886. After he received his first camera on his sixteenth birthday, his interest in photography was soon blossomed into a passion that he studied photography at Illinois College of Photography and later decided to pursue a career in photography after he moved to California in 1906. In 1922, as a photographer, he started a transition from pictorialism into straight photography, pure photography, that he attempted to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, as defined by Group f/64 that “[P]pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.”After 1927, Weston focused most of his works on still life, nudes and his studies of shells and vegetable. 

       As most of his other works, The Pepper No. 30, a black-and-white photo, was also done using an eight by ten inch view camera. The image contains only one pepper in the middle with dark background, high contrast and sharp edge. Referring to what Weston called a straight photograph, the image appears evenly sharp from foreground to background which this particular style was in opposition to the pictorialist soft-edge methods that were still in fashion at the time. The overall value of this image is dark, but its high contrast highlights the curve contour of the pepper. The image is well balanced, but there is no ground surface for where the pepper was put I could see in the photo. The pepper, I couldn’t tell the color, has a funny shape to me. When I first saw the photo, it looked like a tightly closed mouth and also a first, a boxing gloves. I was amazed by how dramatic this little photograph looks to me. Although it is just a still life photograph of a pepper sitting in the dark background, somehow I could feel an emotion of the pepper. It might be an effect of the expressional shape of the pepper or its dark back ground, the pepper in the photo seems to be angry and about to shout out its anger to me. I was amazed how Weston could find such an emotional pepper or pictured so well that he seemed to give the pepper a spirit and emotion.


image from: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/

Obectified

       In the documentary film Objectified, director Gary Hustwit draws our attention to the many designed objects around us. By investigating many of the well known designers and company such as Apple Inc. and Muji Inc., we gained the chance to understand how objects were designed and what were the designers concerns regarding the interaction between the objects and people. The interaction between people and the designed objects is important. As in the book Design Basic, author David V. Launer talks about the interaction between people and design as regarded to its form and content. The “Form” of an object is its appearance. It has to do with optic and haptic elements. “Optic” elements affect our visual feeling, about our feeling about what a certain object is looked like to us. “Haptic” elements on the contrary has to do with our physical feeling, texture, about what we feeling when we touch the object. Both optic and haptic elements are concerns of the designers when they are designing a certain product. Besides the “Form”, the “Content” of an object is the interaction between us and the designed object. Form gives us the first impression of an object, it is also the vehicle that brings the content of the object to us. For one example in the film, one designer talks about the interaction between a designed object and the users that after the form brings you the first impression, it becomes the access to the content of the object that we no longer notice the existence of the object but the interaction. Like when we use a laptop or a pen, at first we will pay our attentions to its form, to how these objects looks, but after we start to use them, be focus no longer on the film but the content that the form becomes something that helps our experience to enjoy the content. Both form and content is important and inseparable. Form helps us to access the content and the contents gives the meaning of the form.

image from: http://swisslegacy.com/

Color Design in Casino

       To celebrate my friend’s 21st birthday, this weekend, we went up across the state border to the town known as “the largest little city in the world”, Reno. Arriving in the town around midnight twelve, the wonderful night in the casinos passed incredibly fast as we totally addicted to the various slot machines. I found that casinos were such magical places that you could easily forget the time and how tired you were; and I believe as one important element to design, "color" plays an crucial role in it.

       One important element to design is color. Different colors and combinations of colors affect our emotion differently. For instance, the combination of blue and green makes you feel the harmony of nature; the combination of red and yellow gives you the feeling of passion and energy.

       Casinos are places full of passion, emotion and energy; and also places full of colors. In the casinos, the color design affects our mood and feeling deeply. The typical color patterns appeared frequently in the casinos as I observed were contrasting combinations such as red vs. green, and yellow vs. purple or blue. Those color patterns are not harmonious combinations which we usually see in nature. On the contrary, they are colors of passion and energy which by the contrast between the hues, it creates a sort of tension that releases energy that seeming to keep people from getting tired and maintaining their excitement. Besides, there were also other special colors that we seldom see in nature such as magenta, very light aqua blue and chartreuse green. These colors as I understand are artificial colors which you cannot produce them by combining colors on the color wheel. They are so bright that when we look at them, they also trigger our emotion and make us excited.

       In the casinos, the colors are designed to keep people excited, energetic to increase their potentials to put greater bet. Having the chance going to many of the casinos in Reno, it really gained me some new understanding to the relationship between color and mood. As Goethe said, “Feeling is all,” by controlling one’s feeling, we can easily control one’s behavior. I believe the color design in the casinos is one successful example. 

Design as Conversation/ Interaction

       Some people see design as a process of problem solving. For me, it is also a process of story telling. However, telling a story through design is different. Instead of receiving the story through listening with just one-directional, it requires them to think, to ask questions in mind, to participate in the story, and to have conversation with the story teller. In other words, the story that is display by design is multidirectional, it starts from the designer, but ends in different ways as far as the conversation and the audiences’ imagination goes. It is the different conversations happening in the minds of the different audiences make a design meaningful.

       Looking for the root of the word “Design”, in ancient Greek, the definition of design is close to the meaning of “nearly” and “almost” that it has the linguistic connections to “incompleteness” and “imperfection”. From my personal understanding, design itself is always incomplete. It will never be a finished work without the participation of the audience. The connection, interaction, and conversation between a designed object and the audience is the actual purpose of design. That’s why I would considered the word “design” as a verb instead of a noun. Because a designed object itself has no meaning unless there is interaction happening. The interaction, the action, happening at the moment when we look, feel, or use a designed object is what I think design truly is.  

       After all, thinking design as an interaction and conversation instead of a physical object helps me understand more about how to improve a design. As I say, design is like a multidirectional story, we as designers should always be thinking about what kind of interaction we would like to see whenever we are designing things. We have to remember that what we are designing is not a physical object, but a conversation and an interaction we want our audience to experience. A good design provides a great experience of interaction which the audience can involve themselves into the story. It connects the audience with the designers’ initial ideas and allows them to tell the story in their ways. The reason that I think a design object itself is always incomplete is because that there are endless possibilities that followed which one can’t define.    


image from: www.choszczno.info

Comparison and Contrast: Path and Node

       Different species inhabit in different environments. Their behaviors, life circle, food supply and many basic needs of their lives all count on nature. However, for human beings, since we have high intelligence, amazing creativity and the ability to build, we are no longer limited by the environment that we can create and design our own environments -the cities. However, the environment we designed is the reflection of our natural delight. In the city for example, we can find many similar element as we can find in nature. In his book The Image of the City, Author Kevin Lynch points out some elements of our built environment, our city in comparison to the nature, “the path and node as the stems in a leave.” 

       “paths” is important element in a city. All the “images” and “aspects” are related and arranged through paths in the city with which we engage as we move through it in our daily lives. Paths are also like efficient highways and important links of the city as arterial lines that connect one world to another. On the other hand, paths in the city are also emotional. Everyone has their own path in the city which they deeply experience the city and build their daily lives on.

       The intersections of paths, the junctions, the “nodes” are also important. They are the meeting places which are like the key points of the city. As he says, nodes are important for people because they have to make decisions there about where to go, to discover perhaps where they are, and so their awareness is heightened.


Image from: wp.delta.ncsu.edu

Design Is a Language

       In last week’s lecture, Professor Housefield brought up an interesting aspect to look at design. That is, to see design as a “language”.

       As a non-native speaker to English, I know deeply how hard and painful it is to learn a new language. I still remember how I got to know about English. After getting through all the a-a-a~a-a-a apple stuff, and all the spelling and pronunciation practice, the most important and also the most difficult part in English is to learn the grammar, a life long nightmare for me. 

       Grammar is essential to a language. Without grammar, there will be no rules to our language and therefore we will have difficulty connecting our thoughts to one another. Thinking design as a language helps me understand more about what it is truly about. Although I believe design is our nature, but to connect our ideas through the things we design, we have to understand the grammar of design just like learning a new language. 

       So what is the grammar of design? When language works, it contains the right elements, and also the right syntax. For a design to work, it also has to contain the right element which is the material, the medium, and the right syntax which is the structure, the function, the way it is created. That is, when you want to talk about something, you have to choose an object, a topic first; and when you design, you also have to pick a medium to start working with. Also, just as speaking with the right syntax, when designing, one also has to follow a certain rule, a certain concept and thought to give the designed object a meaning. If a designed object is not an expression of a certain idea, concept or thought, it is not a design and it would be as meaningless as a sentence made with random nouns, verbs and adjectives like “One going apples painting fly big Museum pigs....”. 

       There are many similarities between design and language. Besides proper grammar and spelling, to speak language well, to connect our thoughts deeply to others, emotion is an important element. Similar to when we design things, besides the concepts and ideas we put into our design, we also have put our emotions into it. It is like using different tones when speaking, people can be touched deeply by the emotion of the designer.   


image from: express2impress.blogspot.com

Design from Without

       At first I didn’t understand naming the blog, Design From Without. I did not know what the differences were to say whether someone’s design is from “without” or “within”. However, by watching Andy Goldsworthy’s films about how he makes art and the ways he gets inspired by nature and the environment, I started to understand what the concept “design from without” truly is. 

       Andy Goldsworthy is famous with his special ways of making art. Different from many other designers and artists, who make their design and artworks in studios, Goldsworthy prefers to expose himself to nature to look for inspiration. For instance, in the film, he went to a creek deep in the mountain. By seeing the water flowing in front of him, he was inspired by it and came up with the idea to use garlic leaves to make art. He used a stick and the water inside the leaves to paint curve ribbons on the leaves. And by placing many painted leaves in a line on the creekside stone, he made a ribbon that went across the leaves just to continue part of the creek under the stone. That is his concept of art, simple but deep.      

       At first, I just didn’t understand why Andy Goldsworthy even bothered making something that will not last, like placing leaves on the creekside stone, which has no purpose at all. Nevertheless, I kind of got what he was trying to express. Different from the regular design process which you already know what you want to make, how you’re going to make it and how you are going to achieve the idea that is preplanned in your mind. Designing from without is allowing yourself to immerse in the ideas around you, to open yourself to the “muse” around you; not just your own ideas and thoughts, but also thoughts from the environment, nature and people. 

       I found that most of the time when we judge a design, we look at its purpose and whether we think it is beautiful or brilliant. These standards are like views and beliefs we hold true. Even though these views can help us tell whether a design is good or bad, it can limit our ideas and thoughts and leave out many ideas in nature. I believe that to practice designing from without prevents us as designers from being limited in a particular frame of mind when looking for creativity and inspiration; and by opening our heart to the people and nature around us, we can sometimes find ideas we’ve never thought of before. 

 


image from: http://media.photobucket.com/

The Stone Soup

       Stone Soup is an old folk story. In the story, there were three soldiers passing by a small town who were very hungry. They asked the people of the town for some food, but they couldn’t get any because the people were all afraid of them. However, in the end, the three brilliant soldiers tricked the people of the town to bring out their hidden food supply by cooking a soup with stones and asking if any one could just add a little of anything to the soup to make it taste better.    

       In our Design class, we also had a chance to make our stone soups with our classmates. However, with the same concept but different from the actual stone soup in the story, our stone soups were “design objects”. On the day of the stone soup project, we were assigned to bring our own materials, by which we could create like scissors and wrinkled paper etc., without knowing what we were going to make. 

       That day, I worked with seven other people and mentor Tyler together as a group to make whatever we could create with the materials we brought. Every one of the group added a little part to the object to make the “soup” taste better and contributed their creativity. As a result, I think we did a wonderful job. 

       Recalling what we did on that day, I think of the three steps of creative process as Lauer says in his book Design Basics - “Thinking”, “Looking”, and “Doing”. 

-Thinking-

       At first, we all had no idea about what to make. We thought for a long time looking at the materials and each other’s face. However, after a while, one of the people got inspiration from an old green t-shirt brought by one of our group members. She suggested to the group that it would be a cool idea if we could use the t-shirt as a basis to make a three dimensional human figure. 

-Looking-

       With the ideas we had in mind, we then looked at the materials we brought to search for the best objects to apply to our ideas. The ice broke, and people quickly followed with ideas of how to make a head, how to make two arms and feet, and so on with the limited resources we were given. That was our successful beginning of the project. 

-Doing-

       The most interesting part was the “doing” part that we saw our thoughts and ideas transform into reality. We made a big head using a plastic bag filled with paper. We added knitting wool as hair and eyebrows and a robber band as the mouth. We covered the t-shirt over a box by which we carried the materials to make the body. Then we connected two pieces of cardboard to make legs and arms. We also made two hands with popsicle sticks attached to it. After all, we were all surprised by the result and took some pictures with it, the design object; or perhaps not “it” but “him”, who professor Housefield named “Dessie”.

       After all, I feel that I really gained a precious lesson from this assignment. I never knew that design could be making things without even knowing what to make. 

Old Apple V.S New Apple

       Apple Inc. has become one of the leading companies in the computer, cellphone, and media industry. Almost every American owns at least one of the various Apple products from MacBook, iPod, to the recent iPad; and almost every person on earth recognizes the famous Apple logo - an apple with a bite mark. The famous logo was first designed by Rob Janoff in 1976. However, at first the logo had a rainbow color of green, yellow, orange, red, purple and blue, but since 1998 as the new iMac came out, Apple Inc. discontinued the rainbow apple by replacing it with a monochrome one. 

       So why the color change? In my opinion, I think Apple designers changed the color for many reasons. I tried to understand why they changed the color by imagining the apple logo on my macbook being the rainbow one; and it just doesn’t look right for a rainbow apple to appear on this silver and seamless machine. The reason that Apple used a rainbow apple was believed to represent that the screen of the early apple computers could produce color image and also to humanize the company during the years when people were still not familiar with computers. At the time, I believe a rainbow apple made people feel closer to computers by not thinking them as cold metal made machines but regular everyday stuff like a fridge. However, as time went on, computers have become part of our modern lives; and the rainbow apple logo just seems to be a bit dated. In modern years, the new trend of design is to make things simpler, easier, and pure. on the contrary to a rainbow apple logo which may look a bit old and cheap, a monochrome one gives out new feelings of new, clean, and modern. By playing with the color of the logo, I believe Apple successfully created a new impression for its market.


image from: WikiPedia  

What Is Design; What Is a Good Design: Function and Emotion

What is design? and what is a good design?

       I believe these are big questions that have a wide variety of answers that could be debated endlessly. Therefore, since there’re no certain right answer, I’m not trying to draw an answer to these questions here. However, I’ll try to provide my personal view, experience and understanding to the two questions. 

First of all, for what I think design is, I believe design is a gift to humans just as the gift of language. It is not something nor an ability that we have to learn in order to get it. With our creativity, I believe it is our nature that when we want to create a certain thing for a certain purpose we “design”. We cannot create things without designing them. That is, when cavemen needed something to cut the raw meat thousands of years ago, they not only just invented stone knifes, but they “designed” a stone knife, designed its shape, and even designed a handle attached to it so that it would be easier to hold in their hands. 

       For the second question about how to judge whether a design is good or bad, and whether one design is better than another. For my personal view, I believe one important element to design is the function. I would say the design of a stone knife was a brilliant idea, but I would also agree that a japanese katana has a better design than a stone knife. Why? Because a katana is considered a better design with its better function. It cuts better due to the new techniques used to create the katana, in comparison to the first stone knife as more resources were made available. And I believe when an object works better, it is a sign that some people have put some ideas and thoughts into it; and with the thoughts and ideas it becomes a better design.  

       However, although function is important to design, I believe a good design also contains another important element which is emotion. A good design contains not only better function but also an emotional interaction when people look at it or use it. When people design an object they also put their emotion into the object. It is like when we see Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream that we can really feel the anxious and vexatious mood he wanted us to feel. A good design has strong emotional connections. When we connect our emotion with the designer and feel what the designer want us to feel through the designed object, the object itself is a good design.   


image from: icollector.com

First Memory of Design

       There is a whole box of LEGOs on the very top of my shelf which has been covered with dust for some years. I already forgot when the last time I played with them was. Looking back over my childhood, I remember myself spending pretty much every afternoon and weekend playing with LEGOs just to create things like aircrafts, cars and robots. I still remember how much I enjoyed constructing things using these colorful tiny LEGO pieces and how much I was impacted by them as objects that allowed me in my early years to be creative and to experience what design truly is. 

       LEGO is a popular line of little construction toys, little plastic bricks of various shapes and colors with joints on them allowing one to freely connect them in many ways to construct various things. Different from any other toy, I never got bored with LEGOs. Unlike other toys, there are no certain instructions regarding “how to play” or “what to make”, it is all about creativity and how to apply the different shapes to the design in one’s mind.     

       It allowed me to experience what design is. For instance, I remember myself making aircrafts many times, but every time when I made a different one, rather than sticking to the previous idea, I would always add some new ideas making it in the way that I thought was better. I believe the attempt to improve things in their appearance, function and even style according to one’s delight is the way design is. I believe LEGOs are my first memory of the impact of design in my early life.     


image from: flickr.com