Week 12 : Objectified

Week 12 reading notes

Mcdonagh, D, Formosa, D, Kohlbacher, F & Herstatt, C 2011, ‘Designing for Everyone, One Person at a Time’, in The Silver Market Phenomenon: Marketing and Innovation in the Aging Society, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 91–100.

The need for designers to focus on the diversity of each consumer is a difficult but realistic challenge. The goal of a designer is not to design something that works for everyone, but to design products, technologies and services that everyone can use. At the same time, the needs of some special groups, such as the disabled, should also be considered. We also have to design for real people, not a fictional person or group. When designing a product for a specific group of people, such as a syringe-self-injection, at home, for rheumatoid patients, the design team needs to get real and effective test feedback from real patients so that the product can be improved and finally be suitable for patients. 

The final step is to prototype. Make a model according to the design and give it to real users to test whether the designer's design is good enough to meet the user's needs.

 

Figure 1 Traditional syringe and the Cimzia prefilled syringe 

Sharp corners and projections on plastic parts are especially unfriendly to people with rheumatoid arthritis,this group can have greatly reduced strength and can be extremely sensitive to pressure in the finger joints – especially on a “bad arthritis day.” （Mcdonagh, D, Formosa, D, Kohlbacher, F & Herstatt, C 2011)

Andrew Week 12 Lecture notes:

Objectified

The world we live in today is full of designed objects. Most people don’t realise that from the moment they wake up, almost everything that they touch has been designed. Henry Ford once said, “Every object tells a story, if you know how to read it.” These objects speak of who put them there and as the human built environment is a designed world, the focus of the film Objectified explores our complex relationship with manufactured objects and the people who designed them.

 

By putting great design into everyday things, we improve people’s lives. To paraphrase Naoto Fukasawa, People don’t think about the tools they use until they are using them, so intuition needs to be inherent in design. Human behaviour using good design falls on a subconscious mind, actions carried out without focused thought. This design is plugged into our natural human behaviour and falls more on understanding what people need, such as questions of ergonomics and how to organise their space, where the central goal is to make people feel good. To this sometimes the hardest part of design may be to remove bit by bit anything that is unnecessary to the outcome, so by putting great thought into the things around us the manmade objects that we live with intuitively speak naturally to us.

Dieter Rams continues this further with his famous ten principles of good design:

Good design must be innovative

Good design should make a product useful

Good design is aesthetic design

Good design will make a product understandable

Good design is honest

Good design is unconstructive

Good design is long lived

Good design is consistent in every detail

Good design is environmentally friendly

Good design is as little design as possible

 

Dieter goes on to say that designers also need to be business people and not completely swept up in the stylistic artistic-ness of design, many great and beautiful ideas never make it to market so a business will benefit when it takes design seriously. But something that is designed well should not necessarily cost more, arguably it could cost less but design has become a way for companies to ‘add’ value because they are selling you something marketed as ‘designed’. This is where the idea of elitism and design have merged and good design is something that you want and distinguishes you as progressive, showing good taste. But as Paola Antonelli says, “There is design that costs more and design that costs less, some of it is good and some of it is bad.”

 

Jony Ive explains that the way you look at the world defines who you are as a designer. A lot of great design is getting design out of the way, so it becomes refined to an extent that it feels inevitable and it feels un-designed, almost like, why wouldn’t it be any other way. By making things less conspicuous and less obvious, experimenting with the design process to a point where it becomes not about designing a physical thing but understanding the many ‘non-obvious’ elements that make up the object.

 

The microchip gave birth to a design world that moved from tangible and material to the intangible and an immaterial and we now have less relation to the form of an object and more to the function of the design. Interaction design has moved to encompass the digital and not the physical aspects of the objects we use and we are now engrossed and depend on the relationship between what’s happening inside the object and not so much about the object itself.

 

Through association, many meaningless objects can become meaningful to us but sadly this is a small percent of what we use. What is not cherished or valued is vulnerable to being obsolete or thrown away. Sustainability is the biggest challenge facing design now and although many designers believe emotionally in sustainability, they work in a field deeply entrenched in a linear approach to the lifecycle of their products. Most of what is designed will end up in landfill and designers now have to be conscious of this. Designers can be the cultural generators and the intellectuals of the future and we can use design thinking in ways to be innovative with how we source our materials, how we use them and what happens to them once we no longer require them. 

Shu Yun Week 12 Tutorial notes:

The discussion this week is about themes from the documentary: Objectified (Less is better, sustainability, and democratisation of design)

Designer’s approach sustainability in different ways: Marc Newson makes long lasting furniture (that is not available for the public) while Hella Jongerius uses recycled waste fabric in her designs. Democratisation of design is triggered by the economy, where everyone can now access good design because it is cheaper (eg. Ikea). This is said to educate the public about good design but in reality people do not care, and they just want a cool piece of furniture in their house that is cheap and throw them away after it broke just a few months later. The idea of democratising design is flawed because of the lack of sustainability and lack of respect for the value of ideas, and it only benefits the big companies that rip off other designer’s work and sell replicas. There is still much work to do in moving forward the IP laws in Australia to be strict enough to protect the local design makers that sell handmade products, and also people in other creative fields like music and writing. Ultimately it is up to people’s moral and ethic values to do the right thing to not steal and make money out of other people’s ideas.

Group Reflection and Discussion:

There are very different ways of approaching design and there is no right or wrong in design but there is a goal to develop better experience. Better experience with our world and the relationships that we have with objects and spaces. But it all stems from research and the collection of data to make good design that is doing better, better for our world and everyone in it.