+ 20.02.2014

GOOD DESIGN

What is bad design? Is there bad design? An article from Sevra Davis (link) brings out that bad design takes many forms and in its worst, it can exacerbate a problem rather than solve it. She also questions if that can even be called design? Bad design can be found everywhere. Specially in amateur electronic design tools, which breeds quantity more than quality; it adds to the complexity and abundance of our world, rather than producing clarity.  The author is questioning if there are principles of bad design that we could learn from, to improve good design, and if bad design is a necessary part of the development of good design (in try and try again principle). Today's designer have the responsibility to promote good design. The professional designer needs to not only increase access to design tools, but also champion good design and raise the overall quality of design.

So what is good design?
Many design-related authors and organizations have been working to answer that question, and quite often made a list of principles good design has to have. Here are some main points that have turned up:

• Innovation
• Useful, functional, ease of use
• Aesthetically pleasing, beautiful
• Understandable, self-explanatory quality
• Discreet
• Honest, sincere
• Long-lasting, durable, enduring
• Thought through to the last detail
• Environmentally friendly, sustainable
• The least design possible
• Accessible
• Well made
• Emotionally resonant
• Positive emotions, narrative, symbols
• Socially beneficial
• Ergonomic
• Affordable
• Formal quality
• Symbolic and emotional content
• Product periphery
• Shape
• Colour
• Fun
• Convenient
• Enriching
• Brighter future for humanity
• Ethics
• Adequate in context
• Originality, surprising, impact
• etc.

For me, I believe, in a row of importance, the list would be following:
1) Functionality, useful, ease of use
I think the most important quality of a product is its usefulness. If a product can't perform what it's supposed to, it has no value. It's just a piece of material.

2) Innovative, degree of innovation
Even when a piece does what it's supposed to, good design would develop a way to improve the functionality. It might be to improve current way of use, or even work out even better way how to do something. Something new about the product is essential to make it good.

3) Aesthetically pleasing
The looks are essential. To have an object which does a good job and in a better way is good, but if I want to hide the object right after I have finished using that, it's not a good design.

4) Positive emotions, narrative, symbols
I believe after good looks, it's important that the product emits positive emotions, and makes the user enjoy and feel happy. Having a fun moment while doing everyday tasks lightens the day, which should be considered more while developing designs.

5) Long-lasting, durable, enduring, high-quality
In this world where so much products have a really short life-cycle, but the resources of Earth are decreasing, the designers have the responsibility to develop products that would serve the user for a long time, in good case for a lifetime or more.

6) Environmentally friendly, sustainable
On the other side, if the peculiarity of the product doesn't allow long life-cycle, the designers should be directed towards environmentally friendly materials and production methods.

7) Understandable, self-explanatory quality
The product has to be understandable. As Don Norman has said, it's OK to learn how to use the product once, maybe twice, but after that the use has to be understandable and logical.

+ 13.02.2014

DESIGN NOIR

Design Noir is part of critical design. It came to life through the book named Design Noir, by Anthony Dunne. The products of Design Noir create existential dilemmas. It bases on psychological dimension and expanding experiences which we get through the use of electronic products. The products of Design Noir are conceptual, pushing complex narratives into everyday lives. The user of Design Noir is a co-producer of narrative experiences. A mental interface between the individual and the product is where the experience begins. 

Placebo project

It's an experiment in taking conceptual design beyond the gallery and into everyday life. The authors (Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby) made 8 furniture pieces with aim to investigate peoples' attitudes and experiences with electromagnetic fields in the home. The pieces were made of MDF and usually one other material.

Once the objects are placed in homes, they develop their own life. Usually we don't interfere with these, until something breaks or we need to replace. The project was not interested in if the stories people believe in are scientifically true or not, but rather in the narratives people develop to explain and relate to electronic technologies.

The potential adopters filled out application forms detailing any unusual experiences with electronic products; after the adoption time was over, they were interviewed and taken photographs of with the objects, accentuating the details revealed during the period.

Designers can't solve the problems of electromagnetic networks, but they can change the perception of people. The objects in the project don't really remove or counter the cause of concern, but provide psychological comfort.

Though the volunteers who accepted to participate in the adoption process were certainly exceptional, they were still real people, not part of fiction.

The products were never meant for production, but rather just rentable products for short period of time.

The products:

 - 1) Parasite light - a lamp that only works when it's placed near an electronic product. It doesn't really feed off EM fields, but is battery powered. Instead, this and the nipple chair uses an electric field sensor to relate to the strength of field and releasing corresponding amount of light.

 - 2) Compass table - the table has 25 compasses set into its surface, which would spin when electronic objects are places on it.

 - 3) Nipple chair - when the chair is put into electromagnetic field, the two nipples set into the back of the seat start to vibrate and the sitter is made aware of the waves penetrating his torso. As the wiring for electricity is also in the floors, the sitter can put his legs on footrests higher from the ground.

 - 4) Electro-draught excluder - wall with pyramidal spikes meant to be put between an electric object and a person. The wall does not really absorb radiation.

 - 5) Loft - a lead-clad box on top of a ladder to store precious magnetic mementoes like answerphone messages, audio cassettes or floppy discs away from dangerous EM fields. Accessing the loft might become part of a ritual.

 - 6) Electricity drain - Some people collect electric voltage into their bodies, and release it by wrapping wire around their finger and connecting it to earth line. The chair claimably does the same: you plug it in and sit naked on the stainless steel plate. Where would people keep this object?

 - 7) GPS table - works fine only when sees the satellites perfectly. The owner should have an observatory, or at least a garden where to take the chair sometimes. The designers like the idea that people might feel a little cruel to keep the chair indoors.

 - 8) Phone table - a way to domesticate the phone. When person comes home, he puts the phone in the table's drawer. When someone calls, the table will emit soft light. It's much easier not to answer the soft glow than persistant ringing.

   One interview published was about the electricity drain. The user didn't sit on it to de-static herself, but had the object plugged into wall all the time, imagining that it would drain the electricity from around the room. She also said that while making phonecalls, usually her fillings hurt, but if she put a hand on the object, she could have longer conversations. She kept the object in the living room.

   Even after she was told that the object is a placebo object, she kept telling that she believes the object works, though the influence is very small. She also used the object to place clothes after ironing to de-static them. She said the electricity drain is a psychologically good product.

Link to the pdf, where you can also see pictures of all the objects


The Book Review: Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Regine Debatty

The reviewer chose to read the book because she didn't know about Design Noir. After finishing it, she recommends others to read it, as well, because:
 - Design Noir won't be a book about technology that will be outdated fast
 - Design Noir narratives the challenge of conformity in our everyday life

+ 6.02.2014

CRITICAL DESIGN

   Critical Design is using conceptual design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions and preconceptions about the role products play in everyday life. It's more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method. A lot of people practice that without even knowing to call it Critical Design, and they certainly have their own way of describing what they do. Giving it a name simply draws more activity and attention to the debates related to it.

   Design as critique has many roots, for example Italian Radical Design in the 1970's, which was highly critical of prevailing social values and design ideologies. During the 1990's there was a general move towards conceptual design and noncommercial forms of design like critical design found it easier to exist, though the shift happened mainly in furniture world, and product design is still closely attached to mass market.

   The term of Critical Design origins from Anthony Dunne's book Hertzian Tales (1999). The main practitioners are Dunne, Raby and their graduate students from Royal College of Arts, though there are also other designers who work the similar way.

   The aim of Critical Design is to make us think, but also to raise awareness, expose assumptions, provoke action, spark debate, even entertain in an intellectual way.

   The world where we live in today has become incredibly complex, our relations, desires, fantasies, hopes and fears are very different from those at the beginning of the 20th century, but many ground ideas of design come from the early 20th century. The world has changed, but design has not; Critical Design is one of many movements stemming from changes in design, for it to stay relevant to our complex lives.

   Critical Design also can be humorous, though it's often misused. The goal should be satire, but often parody or pastiche are achieved, which reduce the effectiveness of the message provided. The viewer should experience a dilemma - is this serious or not? Is it real or not? Making up your mind is one part of the process, which can engage the audience in a more constructive way by appealing to its imagination as well as engaging the intellect. Deadpan and black humour work best.

   The biggest misonceptions about Critical Design could be that it's negative and anti-everything; that it's only commentary and cannot change anything; that it's jokey; that it's not concerned with aesthetics; that it's against mass-production; that it's pessimistic; that it's not real; that it's art. To comment the last, Dunne has said that it borrows heavily from art in terms of methods and approaches, but it's not art. Critical design is too close to everyday to be shocking like art is expected to be. It has to be "a bit weird" - too weird and it's considered art, too normal and it will be effortlessly assimilated. If Critical Design is regarded as art, it will be easier to deal with it; as design, it's more disturbing.

   Critical Design is a bit dark, but that's not some goal to achieve. Dark, complex emotions are ignored in design, where people are viewed as obedient and predictable users and consumers. One area Critical Design is questioning is the limited range of emotional and psychological experiences offered through designed products. Design is assumed to make things nice, and that limits us from fully engaging with a designing for the complexities of human nature. The negative is used to draw attention to a scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale.