Design Reading Notes 1

Intro

Short story about a small theater in a small town that experienced a clever designed forced integration with in itself put on by a group of black college students. This is connected to the process of design. Design is about reshaping things for the better, making them right and is a corrective process.

What is Design?

·      full of incongruities

·      innumerable manifestations

·      lacks boundaries that give clarity and definition

·      generates vast quantities of material

·      dependent upon personal of taste

How can design be understood?

Bad design

·      inadequate lighting

·      not user friendly machines

·      badly formatted info

‘Design is to design a design to produce a design’

wide spectrum of design

·      craft

·      graphic

·      fashion

·      undustrial

·      commercial

·      engineering

·      product

·      interactive

Design- the human capacity to shape and make our environment in ways without precedent in nature to serve our needs and give meaning to life.

The human factor is present in decisions taken at all levels in design practice

Capacity to design- the very core of our existence as a species.

Enables us to construct our habitat in unique ways

Design is a defining characteristic of what it is to be human

Design is the practice and activity of creating forms

Design is applied creativity

Experiment

·      non designers – focused on understanding the problem

·      designers- focused on the solution given they were used to problems that didn’t lend analysis

the generation of possible solutions and their gradual improvement is the only way forward-that is design

design practice-

·      pose the problem

·       search for a solution

·      explore the consequences

·      choose

Design as learning

·      gather knowledge about the nature of the design problem

·      try different ways of looking at the problem

·      experimenting with various solution directions

·      propose, experiment, learn

·      improve

Design as evolution

·      initial ideas seen form the first primitive objects

·      problems hardly seen in the beginning

·      design problems are moving targets

·      developing and evolving the formulation of a problem and solution

·      involves a period of exploration

Design is a social process

·      rarely work alone

·      interact in groups for feedback

·      for success the design must perform well within different worlds

·      designers need to become skilled nigotiators

Design is a game

·      must use all our wits

·      experiment to master

·      choose line of attack early (gamble)

·      add personal goals (aim high)

·      highly addictive J