DCS2 Group Blog

Week 6 Reading notes: Siu, Kin Wai Michael, Users' Creative Responses and Designers' RolesDesign Issues, 2003, Vol.19(2), pp.64-73 Do you think the design of an object pops out of the designer's head? Obviously not, from the emergence of the design concept to the completion of the production , the designer or design team needs to do a lot of research in this process . The most important of these is to delve into the needs and preferences of users. Quite a few designers expect and believe that they can predict the user's operation mode and determine the user's likes and dislikes in advance, but the user's needs and desires are constantly changing, and it is difficult for designers to meet all the user's needs, especially the design for public use. Different products will be given different definitions and functions by different people, which is especially obvious in the design of public facilities and urban planning. For example, the footbridges in...

Week 5 Reading notes: Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, Semiotics in Product Design, 2002 Part one: Terminology A sign must have both a signifier and a signified; you cannot have a meaningless form or a meaningless concept, the two always go together. For example,the word ”table” is the signifier and it represents the concept table. It doesn’t necessarily refer to a real table, but a general concept of a table. A sign on a shop door that reads OPEN signifies that the shop is open. Product design can serve as a medium to reflect social reality. It gives the product its denotation and connotation. The two chairs in the picture (Figure 1). On the left, the chair designed by  Bruno Mattson in 1934 is comfortable, modern, ergonomic, elegant and practical. It reflects the integrity concept of modernism in Sweden at that time, and the masses recognized the democratic political environment at that time. But the other chair by Jonas Bohlin from 1987, made by using steel and concrete, is obvio...