Project 1 Comments

http://snailmina.blogspot.com/2010/09/ides1031-project-1-experience.html

http://guyuliang1990.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment.html

http://jharleydesign.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment_20.html

http://lilynguyen1506.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment.html

http://mycollectionsofmisdirections.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment-appearance-model.html

Project 1

The beer opener I designed is for men aged 25 to 35 most of whom are leaders in their groups. This kind of people are independent, they do everything themselves even little things in daily life, and they have fun doing them. Also, as a leader, they want everything under their control. They like simple, unique products and make decisions fast because they are always busy, but once they are free, they’d like enjoy their life. This group of men got high grade of personal tastes and they pay attention on their quality of life.

According to the target market I’ve chosen, I design this simple beer opener. It got a quite modern and streamlining shape, like a fast shuttle. Once seen it, people feel the speed and efficiency of this simple tool. Shinning metallic surface shows it is made of steel so that is quite tough and can easily open beer. As we know, mostly men have big hands, so this extra-long handle can fit, and comfortable grip make people feel the full control of this product. In you a physical view, the longer the handle is, the less strength it needs to open beer, that means people can open the bottle much easier. Moreover, it can be treated as a decoration on table due to the modern appearance.



In one word, this product perfectly fits its target market with the unique simple shape and comfortable under-controlled handling.



Vedio Reflection- The Objectified

I’ve learnt a lot of stuff for my future design career after watching the film the Objectified. This is a good documentary film that covered such a huge and complex topic, and it is a useful introduction of industrial design for people like me who just started learning this.




One good concept the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design for Apple, Jonathan Ive made is that a big definition of who you are is a designer is the way you look the world. Designers often try to draw too much attention to a feature simply to force the user to look at their clever design contribution, instead, a good design is able to demonstrate its function by itself, and some functions should only be there when it’s performing, like the indicator light on Macbook pro.



When we design a product, we have to look into the attribute of the product, some may be the material, the form connecting to people and how you physically connect to your product. There are three phases of a modern design, one of the phases is looking at a design in a formal relationship, formal logic of the product. The second way to look at it is the symbolism and the content of what you are dealing with. The third phase is to look at design in a contexture scenes and a much bigger picture. It’s looking at the ecological context for that object and human-object relationship. And design is search for form, what form should an object take.



As David Kelly said, bad design is where the customer thinks it’s their fault that something doesn’t work…People should demand more from the things they own. They need to demand that things work. Oppositely, a good design is innovative and should make a product useful, it should be a aesthetic design and will make a product understandable, it should be honest, unobtrusive, and long-lived, it is consistent in every detail and it is environmentally friendly. Also, it should be as little design as possible.



I would like to end with a quote of Marc Newson’s words in the film, “I wish people would be more critical of design, and of designers, who are responsible for designing some pretty nasty stuff.”

Task5 Design Confusion

Video Rflection- The Story of Stuff

Before watching the video: The Story of Stuff, I thought the procedure we get the products is just four steps: from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal as the text book told. However, there were a lot of important things missing between them.




One important thing missing was that this system is a linear system, so there is no comeback, as the planet we living on has limited resources, once used up, they are gone and will never come back. So this kind of system will lead to a bad end. The system actually exists in our daily life, it is related to societies, cultures, economies, the environment. It also related to we people, which is missing in the system. Government is one of the most important kind of people, thought they spend lots of money on military, they still got the value taking care of us, they are of the people, by the people, for the people. Then along came the corporation, which is more powerful than government, that lead the consequence that government cares more about the corporation than citizens.



There are other things missing in the picture. In the extraction part, people exploring and getting resources from the earth, they chop down trees, they blow up mountains to get the metals inside, they use up all the water and they wipe out the animals. In one word, we are ruing the planet and running out of resources. And in the production part, we use power to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products. So what we got will be danger to our later life. And we don’t know the influence on the entire environment that we are living in. Not only in the products, but even more leave as by-products, or pollution. And it’s a lot of pollution.



Consumption is the heart of the system, the engine that drives it. We have become a nation of consumers. Our primary identity has become that of being consumers, the primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated. So people keep buying things to show their value, and the products we bought before became trash. As a matter of fact, a lot of products are designed for the dump, so stuff will become useless quickly after buying it, so people will buy another one. Factories make more money in this way.



However, the dumped products becomes trash, all of this garbage either gets dumped in a landfill, or burned. Either way, both pollute the air, land, water and the climate. Also, the toxics get out from burning goes back in the production stage. So one way to deal with it is recycle, though it doesn’t help a lot, because it is hard for people to separate trash.



It’s necessary for people start doing something to prevent the earth, like saving forests and clean production and conscious consuming and blocking landfills and incinerators. The most important thing is to taking back our government, so it is really is by the people and for the people. We should build a system that doesn’t waste resources or people.

Video Rflection- Don Norman: Emotional Design

In the video Emotional Design, Don Norman showed us how important emotion is in a product, people like product that can actually make them happy when using it. And it is necessary for designer to understand what beauty is about and pretty and emotions, to design products beautiful and functional.




Don started with two examples, one is the Google search thing, people may feel pleasant with the “o” down the bottom when doing search but don’t know why, he explained it as human subconscious, that is the design affect users’ emotion. The other one is the Mini Cooper, Times magazine commented on this car that it has lots of faults but buy it anyway for it is so much fun to drive. Don said when a person is happy, they are more susceptible to interruption, which makes the person think outside the box, that is when you’re happy, you are more creative. So we can see how important to design products that make people feel happy and fun.



Talking about the visceral level of design, it’s not about the function, it’s all about the outside appearance like visual, hearing or smell. As the example shown in the video, people buy the bottle of water for the beautiful bottle that can be regarded as a decoration at home.



The behavioral level of a design is important, people may be more satisfied with a product that is more than they can use it as been told, they want to control the product so they can use it the way they want. This makes me thinking about a product I bought recently- ipad, as the advertisement said, you don’t need to change yourself to fit the product, it fits you automatically. So is the example shown in the video, the global knife, it makes user feel can control it. That is exactly what we designers aiming for.



The third level of design is called reflective. If you like something, your brain has no control of what you do, the sense doesn’t control the muscle, it looks over, there is a little voice watching and saying that is good or bad. For example, an expensive watch is to impress people, it reflected to the design.

Task4: Poster