"Good Designs for a Better Life!" ds106's Week 6-Reflection

For week 6 in ds106, we learned that "Design is everywhere! Anything we create or manufacture has key design elements." Everything in our environment has design potential and possibility. We can design to invent what never existed or breathe new life and purpose into an existing object for people to have new behaviors. We can even design objects that tell stories. Ultimately our designs are meant to meet needs and affect behavior. We can repurpose and re-imagine a second life for materials because human ingenuity, resourcefulness and perseverance is always seeking solutions to cope with our changing needs and behaviors brought about by our changing environment. In a TED Talk, titled Treat Design as Art, Paola Antonelli, design curator at NY's MoMA's speaks about how designers are our biggest synthesizers. 

         

"What they do best is make a synthesis of human needs, current conditions in economy, in materials, in sustainability issues, and then what they do at the end -- if they are good -- is much more than the sum of its parts. So, designers sometimes don't do things that are immediately functional, but they're functional to our understanding of issues.

"Designers do need to be mavericks, because the best way to design a successful object -- and also an object that we were missing before -- is to pretend that either it never existed or that people will be able to have a new behavior with it." 

A crisis of any sort provides the impetus for human beings to design and create for protection, survival and self-expression. Necessity is the mother of invention. Humanity becomes more creative when we face adversity, and we design to cope with change, to adapt as our needs and behaviors change. This is how we all have the ability to be artists as we heard Tim Owens tell us this week. During this week, I also thought about the subjectivity of some types of designs, two societies in particular who design for survival and and how we are partnering with nature to make more sustainable designs.  

The story of so many Cuban rafters who design makeshift rafts to escape Fidel Castro's communist regime came to mind during design week. These individuals find inspiration in the world around them. Although that world may be in a state of decay, they see possibilities to repurpose what is old, broken, or useless to manufacture their own freedom from an oppressive existence. These are regular people with the ingenuity to design seaworthy vessels using remnants of whatever materials they can get their hands on, including 1950s American cars left on the island pre-Castro. They take what is ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary! By designing and building these makeshift rafts, these individuals know their lives are at risk if their designs are discovered before they are able to escape. Once they're out at sea, they hope their designs withstand the voyage to reach freedom on American shores. In Paola Antonelli's TED talk, she explores the concept of "design from a sense of economy" and shares more about how the Cuban people recycle materials to design toys and items they need to survive day to day.  In this society, good design is not about aesthetics, but about function that guarantees survival.   

The children of The Landfill Harmonic- also take what is ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary! The Landfill Harmonic is made up of children who refuse to believe the lie that they were not born creative because they live in one of the poorest villages in Paraguay that sits atop a landfill. The landfill serves as the main form of subsistence for the residents of this village. However, one day, a child garbage picker found a piece of trash that looked like a violin. He took it to the neighborhood musician who had the brilliant idea to design and construct a violin made from other found items in the landfill. Repurposing these items together, the child and the town's musician designed and built several instruments out of trash, including violins, cellos, flutes, and drums. Their ingenious designs led them to envision and create an orchestra where the children of Cateura, Paraguay learn to play these instruments made from other people's trash.  

This story disproves that creativity is inherited.  Although these individuals were born into this inhumane environment, living among a heap of trash, these children and their teacher make more than just beautiful music. Their creative spirit proves that even under the harshest living conditions, human beings figure out how to innovate and redesign their world to fight adversity, so beauty prevails! (Unfortunately for these individuals, it is true, we are more creative when we are uncomfortable.) 
  

             

And of course, we need not look much further than nature's beauty to recognize there is also "no better design partner than nature." Bio-mimicry 3.8 came to mind as well as I thought about design this week. Biomimicry seeks to take something complex and make it simple." Biomimicry seeks to answer the question designers ask themselves, "What in the natural world already does what I'm trying to do?" How can biologists and designers work together to "emulate nature's best ideas to solve human problems"?  Biomimicry 3.8 is an organization that believes we should seek to teach "how nature can help people create more sustainable designs. When we see how much the natural world can teach us about designing for a healthier, more sustainable planet, their awe and respect for the natural world increases in ways that will last a lifetime."  

            

Finally, I stumbled upon an article about the depiction of disabled people in the media. It made me think about the psychology behind design. Does what the media propagate as beautiful always represent what beauty means to each of us as individuals? This is a photography project for people to see and think about how ads for companies like American Apparel influence our perception of beauty, and how print ads are not designed to show the beauty or sexuality of a disabled person. Our designs shape and are beholden to societal expectations.

Good designers both influence and intuit what people think they want or need and design accordingly manipulating color, typography, shape, form, etc. to engage and move us to act. Good designers understand human behavior. (Essentially, designers should be psychologists who can draw.) Certain colors, layouts, fonts, etc. are known to attract certain audiences and only used in certain contexts. (For example, the design elements used to build a low income community will not compare to those used when designing an upscale one. There are different sets of needs and expectations and design is meant to both shape and reinforce those needs and expectations.) Geography and time periods also determine what designs look and feel like, and even shape and express expectations. Designs convey status, help us form associations, and subtly, even insidiously, designs spread ideas which create culture, values and norms. Our cultural narratives are shaped and reinforced by the ideas and messages behind the designs which permeate our society at a given time period. Design involves careful consideration about what we want to make people believe, think, feel, want, see, and do. 

During week 6 we were also challenged to redesign a World War II propaganda poster. A careful look at the design elements on these posters shows how the fonts, images, colors, symbol, message, etc. were used to affect behavior and influence thinking. 

Production Process: I have not had time to learn GIMP, so I improvised. I selected this poster because of its red background and used picmonkey to overlay the original poster onto an image of a plain red background. I erased the words on the original, and then added my own, selecting fonts to closely match the original. 















When designing digital stories, how will our designs evoke as many of the five senses as possible to engage and maintain an audience's attention? How will we deliberately design stories using imagery through our choice of colors, images, music, fonts, metaphors, etc. to set a tone and mood that engages the audience and creates a relatable and unforgettable experience for them?     

We were also asked to go on a design safari and blog about the design elements of the photos we took.  My safari was cut short, and I plan on taking more pictures as I encounter examples of good and bad design. (I noted the design elements on each picture.) 

                   
Created with flickr slideshow. Again, I think that good design is aesthetically pleasing and has a practical function, but both aesthetics and function can be subjective. What works visually and is immediately functional for one person may not work for another. Yes, there are standards based on what the human mind prefers to see and feel, but from what I have seen in my brief study of design this week, standards of good design change over time as our environment changes what we need, how we think and behave.  Sometimes a good design is not aesthetically appealing at all, but functions perfectly to create a better life.   

Suited for Subversion is a project to create a suit that protects the wearer at large-scale street protests. The suit also monitors the wearer's pulse and projects an amplified heartbeat out of a speaker