TODAY I LOVE:

My tin mug, the colour of a mossy lawn, Daft Punk's Around the World music video, wooden cutlery, encouraging the rise of the conscious consumer, my oxfam purchase 1 pint glass jelly mould and the terrible first jelly i made in it.

TODAY I LOVE:

i nearly blew off a hill top today, and i like that. i also love Russian Dolls, Argyle Jumpers and the notion of growing vegetables to help the war effort. I like the thought of finding treasure and of having a trained pet butterfly. I love print screen, online printable graph paper and sticking photos to the wall with a frame of tape.

THE GREAT DESIGN DEBATE: Design is NOT a problem solving activity ?

Mitchell and Webb Look- Toothbrush company; watch and learn.

In essence this is consumerism – The media tells us we have a problem and provides the answer/solution. [try not to hurl] but think of Lakeland ltd. 

We now live in a world where our value is measured by how much we shop, and designs are fuelling this by pumping out needless commodities under the guise of solving some kind of problem. 

 Design without social responsibility is fuelling our relentless consumerist culture which is destroying the planet and lets face it,  negatively affecting our quality of life.  

In the Design Council Annual Review they state that “80% of  environmental impact of product services and infrastructures is determined at the design stage.”  So as designers, we clearly have a responsibility to be questioning, and critical in our approach to all aspects of the design process, not to create unreal problems just for the sake of it.

Consider how many products are not in use six months after being manufactured, we have designed obsolesce, real and perceived. Manufactures design into the product the point at which it will break. This time limit is carefully calculated to be just long enough that the consumer still has faith in the brand and will buy an new one.

Furthermore, our world is becoming extremely automated, we are designing machines to do jobs that lives used to be centred around,  creates unemployment, losing livelihood, dependence on robotics.  is faster better ? Is this the direction that we want our world to progress in? Are humans a problem that needs to be solved?

To quote Bill Buxton: “To be effective we must shift our focus from the techno-centric to the human centric”

Eevn Technological evolution is self-perpetuating – we're  merely exploring the potential of technology, the current example being the  prevalence of the touch-screen. We laud it up without even thinking is this holistic to the way we live and is it really the best thing? surely we shouldn't ever have to drastically change our lifestyles and learn entirely new behaviours to suit these technologies?

How are these emerging technologies going to mess with our social, moral, political, economical conventions?  how will we manage their life cycles ?- Connected appliances, smart materials, pervasive computing. 

Having argued that design is a problem CREATING activity, it needs to be said that design is also so much more than a problem solving activity in the first instance. 

Design is Aesthetic –  Henry Ford once said that: “We demand beauty with our utility, beauty with out amusement, beauty with the things with which we live.”. If design was merely problem solving, there would be no variation 

 

Design is  Identity, Culture and Expression: the ‘freedom’ to choose how you look and behave, how you externally present yourself to others.

Design Communicates Ideas: projecting your ideas into the world through objects

Design is Questioning and provocative: an example being ‘Buildings of Disaster’ by Boym,:  a collection of souvenirs devoted to tragedy, such as 9/11 and the Oklahoma City Bombing (Another example being Ted Noten’s Lady K gun handbags for Prada where a handgun is shown through the side of a bag)

Design Creates meaning and shapes relationships: communicating something intangible such as wind or time. 

Design is Conceptual: conveys new futures, ideologies and possibilities 

 Design is Critical: it can engage and comment on the current state of design itself

Design is a Tool for exploration and research: it investigates the world we live in and it’s complexities to reveal the nature of what exists from what is observed. 

Design is Experimentation: it experiments with what is variable and what could be changed,  it creates possibilities that nobody has thought of and would have considered without rhetorical interventions.

design is daily : everyone designs for their own personal efficiency, through creating routines and creating new uses for existing objects.

Design is Accidental: Cornflakes were created by mistake!

Design is Fun and entertainment: design can be purely for enjoyment, such as the novelty, gaming industry, theme parks, casinos, sex,

Design is Art.- Do we dare go there?

Design is Social mobility ?

Design is Activism ?

Design is Pollution ?

DESIGN MEANS: Dominic Wilcox

"Dominic Wilcox is an artist who works within the territory of the 'everyday'. Everyday objects, environments, buildings, human interaction, no area of normality is out of reach. His work, which is usually layered with an ultra dry wit,  places a spotlight on the banal, always adding a new, alternative perspective on things we take for granted. His work has been published and exhibited extensively around the world and he continues to develop his work in all fields of creativity."

cute.  His ideas were frustrating, they remained "dry wit" they are a social comment on the everyday but don't seem to provide a vehicle to distribute this commentary.  His intent was disappointing; the context of creating an "alternative perspective for things we take for granted" seemingly came from giving something his full attention and playing with it until it melted or performed in an unusual way. He portrayed a very backward way of designing. 'i decided to do this and now i see that it means x'. This visual output came across as an end satisfactory end point for him, yet there seemed to be so much potential in his projects i was brimming with questions and development. His pebble project had never been tried, did the stones actually skim? did the gold stay on?  although its interesting to note that by coating a stone in gold and not using it he abstracted the function of the stone and made it obsolete and less valuable than the stone was when with prime skimming potential. 

patchwork

I've been exploring patchwork in nature and process, and have discovered that although craft maybe scrutinised as twee and focused on handmade, there's a real beauty in it ethos. I think that translating craft principles and applying them to a design process would be an interesting and insightful design project. 

Patchwork is the most collaborative of all craft, large communities and community activities are traditionally embedded into its production. Patchwork can be traced back to the Egyptians but its social story began when the world experienced a cold spell in 15c and people took small pieces from any textile possession they owned to combine and sew together to make extra quilts for their beds. There is wonderful poetry in taking a material from lots of existing items that wouldn't suffer from the loss and creating an entire new entity.  It becomes collection of narratives, a picture of worth and a illustration of displacement of matter. I think this idea is quite exiting and begins to discuss relationships between craft and thrift and our conceptions of materiality. 

time capture

A celebration of a special occasion is held in our memory on a scale of personal significance. We record our memories and experiences with cameras, and the images [no matter how disillusioned] are an important reminder of our past. They allow us to trace our past and frame who we've become. Without a camera what defines the things we remember about places, spaces, people, times and events?

Occasions are momentous but not physical, I think that celebrations certify an event that would otherwise pass us by. I remember by Birthdays by the spectacularity of my cake, but when we get older; and a candle for each year would look like an inferno and the thought of being sung to makes you wince, the birthday celebration get replaced with a 'Birthday Drink'.