When do I have to decide by?

To identify the themes present in the essays I had written this semester, I tried to think about what I was saying in the essays I had written, not just on the surface but what I was really trying to investigate and communicate. I found that what keeps coming up in my essays is the theme of “I really just don’t know the answer, and this is may be why I don’t know.” And to me, this is not too surprising, because that how I am feeling lately.

There has been a lot of pressure this semester to explain our philosophies, and reflect upon our own thoughts about complex decisions we will all eventually have to make, and to explain the direction we plan on taking as we live the rest of our lives. And to be honest, I don’t know, and I still think that’s okay, but the point of these essays is not to announce to the world what we want to accomplish with our lives, but instead, reflect upon what I think, what I think the answers may be.

What do I want to do with my life? Although I am not sure what I want to do, I am going to force myself to answer this question to the best of my ability for the sake of reelection and thought. I guess the best place to start would not be investigating possible career paths, but to instead lay out the things that I am interested in, believe in, enjoy doing, and the things I am not interested in.

I am interested in; technology, fine art, the idea of shared ownership

I believe in; helping people, enriching the lives of the lower middle class, being ethical, trying to help solve big problems

I enjoy; solving problems, working in a creative environment, working with nice supportive people, doing things that are exciting, doing things that are new and different, doing things I can be proud of to my friends and family.

I am not interested in; selling pointless shit, brainwashing people into buying things they don’t need, encouraging consumerism/overconsumption, working with selfish people, selling things I would never buy, catering to the ultra-wealthy

Now with that decided for now, I feel as though I cannot take the next step. It is impossible to think that I could decide what to do with my life before I ever get a chance to try it. As a student, I don’t see how I could pick a career path right now, when I have never experienced the carrier path I have chosen to take. I think what I will do before college will be to do the things that I enjoy, explore possible directions I could go in, take risks while they still aren’t truly risky, and get internships in diverse fields so that I can experience the professional world before graduating college while I still have a chance to make dramatic shifts in the direction that I want my career to go in. After college my plan is to try out as many different careers as I can until I get a better understanding of what I want to do and the work environment I enjoy. After that point, I guess I will just make more informed decisions about what I want to do with my life

Art vs. Art-Design vs. Design

Limited production, experimental design has its place, and it is not in industrial design. This genre of work is more similar to sculpture. Like sculpture, limited production, experimental design objects are not intended to be functional but are instead intended to convey an idea, feeling or statement. Like sculpture these objects could be shown in a gallery, or a museum, or collected. They have value associated with value of the artist or designer who created the work.

The limits to art-design are extremely loose yet restrictive. Anything could potentially be art-design; there is no set definition to any aspect of art design. The art-design world invites any artist or designer to create the work that they please and the artist or designer is encouraged to be as experimental as they can be.
This work is then sent through the art-design filter, where anything can enter, but very few things pass through. This filter separates good art-design from everything else and who can be a professional art-designer and who cannot. This filter is the market of art-design, and it is defined by the wealthy critical art-design collectors of the world.

These rules are as follows;
To be a desirable piece of art-design,
The work must be produced on a limited scale.
The work must be innovative in some way.
The work must be beautiful.
The work must have an interesting story.
The work must be made by a “Designer” (someone who becomes their own brand, a person whose image and body of work adds value to a product),
The designer must be admired by the design community.
The designer must be recognized by the big design stores/museums
Ect.

This system defines successful art-design. So, although the limits of art-design are theoretically loose, success is extremely limited. In some ways, art-design is kind of like the world of professional music, anyone can start a band and play as much music as they want, but there are many factors, many factors having nothing to do with talent, such as image, trends, marketability that decide a musicians fame.

Art-design is not industrial design; industrial design deals with mass production and ways to make sure the object will get sold. The objects made by an industrial designer are purchased by many people, are functional, and are sold at stores.

With that said, art-design is strongly influenced by the world of industrial design and the processes of mass production, and if an artist is interested in art-design, an industrial design degree at an arts college is probably the best place for them to get an education.

Personally, I don’t ever feel like an art-designer, I would consider myself an Industrial Designer, or an artist, depending on the project that I was working on. By that I mean that I find a strong distinction between the industrial design process and the art process. From an outsider’s perspective, my art work may be seen as art-design, but I believe this is because of my industrial design background.

So to me, an art-designer is simply defined as an artist inspired by industrial design.

Cameron Sinclair

I learned about what makes a project or non-profit succeed or fail. I learned about how ego can get in the way of achieving a larger goal. I learned about an architect turned spokesman, Cameron Sinclair, who began the successful non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity. I learned about what he thinks led to his organization being as successful as it is today, and what he thinks stands in his way of getting further. To me Cameron Sinclair’s lectures, comments, questions, and conversations were the most interesting part of the conference.

He views the people he is designing for as clients, who have a crucial part in the design. He believes that by engaging the clients in the design process the client gives insight and crucial research to the architect. He said that the client is the best designer, because who would know more than them about the place that they live, and the needs that they have. He also feels that the clients need to be part of the design process so that they feel a greater sense of ownership of the finished project. Without a feeling of ownership, a project is doomed to be neglected over time, or just never accepted as part of a community.

He also talked about the difference between started a company and starting a movement. If architecture for humanity had stayed just a company, they would only be able to accomplish a small number of projects every year, and only make a small amount of change. Instead, they started a movement, by creating a company that served as more of a model of what Cameron thought was the ideal company so that other people would start companies like his, creating a network possible of achieving goals unachievable alone.

To me this was among the most valuable, inspiration information that I encountered during the conference. Hopefully I will be able to use this information in the future as I try to create some change of my own.

Designing Good

I have always enjoyed doing “good”. Growing up I helped at various organizations and groups in my town, feeding the hungry, visiting the lonely, mentoring children and many other things. I strongly believe that I want to do good the rest of my life, and do good with my career.

Recently I have been given the assignment to design any service I want to (more or less). It sounded like a dream assignment, whatever I wanted to do, whatever cause I cared about, I could spend six weeks developing a project around it. This assignment has been nearly impossible to start, and has caused me to ask myself many more questions about what I want to do with my life.

It always seemed so obvious, I want to do good. Good, it’s such a broad statement, how hard can it be to design good? When I began to think of a service to do good, I instantly realized, it is not easy, at all. Where do I start? What do I care about? What services really do good?

The first thing I realized was that designing good is a small field. There are only a handful of designers who are designing good, and even more than that, how do you know if it actually worked? It seems there is more information about projects that were meant to do good and failed than projects that actually worked. There is no way to measure success in the field of designing good, no way to know for sure if the people that were meant to be helped were actually helped in the long run.

All of my projects so far have started with a problem given by a teacher, which we than have to come up with a solution in a few days. It is a much, much different process to identify the problem ourselves. It requires a great deal of research and creative interpretation of that research before a meaningful problem can even be identified.

The issues I care about are world issues, issues with extreme poverty, no access to clean water, and extreme lack of healthcare, are huge issues that I would love to try to make better. But when I actually tried to address one of these issues I realized that I have absolutely nowhere to start. I know nothing about what is like to be in extreme poverty. I know nothing about not having access to clean water.

Even less extreme issues like high school students dropping out of high schools, I have no idea what that’s like. I could sit in my RISD studio at come up with as many fantastical ideas about how if you put better lighting in high schools, or come up with an after school program to encourage leadership, at the end of the day, it’s all worthless because I simply have no idea what it is truly like.

Recently this has been my biggest realization/issue. To even begin to solve a problem, you need to have a true understanding. Truly understand who you are designing for, what problems they identify as problems, and what they are going to be willing to accept into their lives. If you don’t start a project with an understanding, before you even identify a problem, you are going to most likely end up with a failed project.

Meaning/Usage

Not all products have meaning or uses. Meaning and usage is decided over time, through a dialog between a society and designers. A designer can try to create a product that has meaning or uses, but by no means can they control a society. Sometimes a product that was never intended to have meaning is assigned meaning by a society. The same is true with usage. Designers can try to design a product to be used in a certain way but there is no way to enforce this usage. Also, people will use a product however they want, and not consider how the product was intended to be used as any sort of limitation.

While thinking about products which exemplify the concept of the product as a dialog, I looked at the recent history of the safety razor. Since the design of Gillette’s first safety razor, the design of the razor has not changed much. A razor blade is attached to a perpendicular handle that is a straight rod about four inches long. This has been the standard from 1904 until a few years ago. It was designed for men to be able to shave their own faces instead of having to count on others for a clean shave.

Society adopted the image of a man who has shaved to be someone who is clean, put together and professional. This was a pre-existing notion starting with the straight razor and a shave at the barber shop, but none the less, the availability of the safety razor and convenience allowed more professional men to be able to buy into this image.

As time went on society began using the safety razor in different ways. The clearest example of this is that women began using razors to shave their legs when society was ready to allow them to show their legs in the 1940’s. This changed both the meaning, and the usage of the razor. The shaved face for men still kept the same meaning, but shaved legs meant that a woman was sexy and fashionable. The usage was changed as well, the same razor designed for a man’s face was now being used for women’s legs.

Women used the same razors as men for a number of years until the market for razors was realized and a designer made the first razor for women. This razor was almost identical to the men’s razors except it had been “feminized” by adding pink and making it smaller. But none the less, this marketing acknowledged the societies change in meaning.

Recently Gillette has looked at the way people in society use the razor, and what it means to them. Through this investigation they found that people constantly reposition their hand to hold on the razor depending where they are shaving, a usage that razors had not been designed to do. Using this information about how people used the razor they redesigned the razor to aid people in doing what they were already doing with it.

For men they created the Fusion which has a handle that is designed to be held in different places to aid in either gross motor control, or fine motor control. Also they added a “precision trimmer” to acknowledge that many men have some facial hair which they need to manage. The other important thing that Gillette acknowledged is that women shave differently than men. The handle for their Venus razor is much different than that of the Fusion, and instead of playing into the idea of “feminizing” something by making it smaller and more slender, they made the handle bigger to be easier to use with gross motor functions needed for shaving. They also designed the end of the razor to be easy to hold when trying to reach, which is something that men do not have to worry about when shaving.

Although the Fusion and Venus have been designed to be used in a very specific way, dictating how you hold it for what kind of shaving your doing, there is without a doubt, someone who is, or is going to use it differently. And as society changes, so will the way they use the product. In the future it may become necessary for men to shave their knuckles, which they will do with the existing razors, until a company comes back with a razor designed for men to use with both hands.

?

It would be safe to say that I am confused about my life. I have hardly figured out what I want to do and I have many unanswered questions. Questions like; what does good design mean to me? Which professionals do I respect? What could I design that I would be proud of? Who do I want to design for? Do I want to do design? What is design? These questions are not easy to answer, and I do not expect to answer them any time soon. But none the less they are questions that I am trying to explore, understand, and come to conclusions about.

Because of the lose structure of the ID history class I have decided to take the assignments as an opportunity to investigate some of these questions that I have. Every week I try to research and find an area of design that offers a unique perspective on some of the questions that I have. The subjects I chose are not answers to any of the questions I have, but instead investigations that may possibly yield partial answers to some of my questions.

There are many aspects to design that I find interesting, but have not taken the time to explore. This has had an effect on my choice of objects for my timelines. I know a lot about informal contemporary design because I read blogs such as core77 and read magazines like ID Magazine which showcase designs that have been unveiled within the last month, week, day and sometimes even within the hour. But what the blogs and magazines don’t always do is explain the history of design; how the things we have today came to be, why certain designers are important, what caused them to do what the did.

I was perplexed when you responded to my project about lighting the way that you did. You said “Clearly, it seems to me, you are in the ID as modern cultural practice camp here, with all that implies about arena for ideas to circulate and the role of the designer as closer to artist. “ I was perplexed because that was not what I thought I was investigating. It made me ask myself, if it’s not that, than what is it? Why did I choose the objects I did? The answer to this question is just as complex as many of the questions I have had.

I chose the lamps I did because they were by designers I had seen one or two of their pieces and I had heard a lot about (Ingo Maurer, Rody Graumans (Droog), and Front Design) but did not know much about their many of their products. I know of these designers to be considered good designers, but I wanted to investigate why they were considered so. I wanted to try to understand a little more about what the “deciders of good design” think good design is and why.

I found the examples style of visually minimalist and yet unnecessarily complicated intriguing. This style is different than what I am used to. I am used to simplistic meaning minimalist but these lamps clearly illustrate the difference. I realized a minimalist lamp would be a light bulb, in a socket. Any more than that is ornament and it would no longer be minimalist. The lights I chose all had unnecessary ornament yet still appear to be simple, elegant and refined. This style is exemplified by these five lamps because of their unifying theme of having the exposed light bulb. The exposed light bulb shows that the functional aspect of the lamp has been stripped down to its barest form and therefore the functional aspect of the lamp is separated from the rest of the lamp, leaving the ornamental aspects.

I was also interested in how technology was used in the examples I chose, and how technology can be used as a way to push design forward, and as a source of inspiration. The Fly Lamp by front design uses technology developed for the video game industry which sensors are set up to track the movement of something in a three dimensional space. Front applied that technology to design a lamp by tracking the path of a fly as it flew around an exposed light bulb to create a 3-d computer file of its path. That was then applied to 3d printing and prototyping which allowed Front to produce the lamp that wouldn’t have been possible to produce in a traditional way. Technology was also a source of inspiration/hurtles for the Holonzki lamp by Ingo Maurer as well as with the Lamp/Lamp by Hironao.

These lamps being part of the “modern culture practice camp” is just one of the many ways to look at these lamps. And yes, as a design scholar that is the way you would look at them. But as a 20 year old design student confused about the world I look at these lamps differently. The reasons for choosing the lights I did, as well as the chairs and the passed/past examples were personal reasons, they were for my own investigations. The choices I made do not necessarily reflect who I am, or my design beliefs in any way. My ethic beliefs and designs beliefs aren’t even visible in my designs, because there too, I am investigating. I do not feel in any way that I have to know now what I believe in or want to do, but I do want to question it. I also do not feel that there is any one point in my life where I have to define those things, but instead I would like to continue to investigate, and to question.

Chairs

Functionalism serves as a guideline to create objects that are reasonable, meaning that they are devoid of frivolous features and are broken down to include only what is necessary to perform the function it is intended to. This can suggest a bland design with no attention given to expression, style or interest. I have found five examples from the Arts and Crafts movement to modern day that uses the guidelines of functionalism and convey expression, style and interest.

The Argyle chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is simple elegant and geometric. Unlike most of the other functionalist furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement the Argyle chair does not appear heavy and blocky. The dark oak pieces appear to be solid and sturdy in the back legs and chair back, but still light and delicate in the front legs and braces.

The Standard Chair by Jean Prouve is made of metal and wood. The rounded wooden forms contrast the painted metal legs make this chair interesting. Also the unique triangular back legs give the chair a unique look. It was designed to be practical and durable but in no way sacrifices originality.

The Zig-Zag chair by Gerrit Rietveld gets rid of the legs and breaks down the chair into simple flat planes. Unlike any chair that was built before it the Zig-Zag chair was incredibly innovative yet did not lose its functionality taking up very little space and being stackable.

Castiglione saw tractor seats as an object that had been refined to be the perfect seat, so to make it a formal chair he designed chrome plated steel and beech stand to be flexible and comfortable. There are no unnecessary elements to this chair but through a careful choice of materials the chair is able to tell a story.

The Myto Chair by Konstantin Grcic is made as a single part in an injection mold. The material and production method influenced the form. The mesh patterning on the seat and back allow for ventilation and are also crucial for the manufacturing process.

Functionalism is the reigning style today. In high design and in cheap manufactured goods, most objects abide by the rules of functionalism. It has become the standard the consumers expect for reasonable cost and performance.

Lighting

The incandescent light bulb has become a classic icon, yet most lamps are designed to hide it. I have found five examples from designers who have decided to embrace and celebrate the light bulb’s simple form.

Lamp/Lamp by Hironao is a hand blown light bulb that appears to be a regular light bulb place onto a fixture with the threads exposed.

The fly Lamp by Front design examines the flight path of a fly circling around a light bulb. They used motion capture to map the path of a fly which was used as the basis for the lamp shade. The design suggests the interaction between a fly and an exposed bulb.

85 Lamps by Rody Graumans uses the essential elements of a light and multiplies 85 times to create an opulent chandelier.

Birdie from Ingo Maurer gives personality and life to the bulbs. The wings and the bendable wire chandelier give the illusion of flight to the still bulbs.

Holonzki by Ingo Maurer features the holographic image of the iconic incandescent bulb and is lit from afar. The chandelier plays with the idea of lighting and the light bulb.

Even though there have been recent technological advances in compact fluorescents and LEDs for indoor lighting, the incandescent bulb stand strong as an icon for light, and will serve as inspiration for designers for years to come.

Obsolescence