Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek (great reference)
Class Discussion
- Does the process diagram reflect your own practice to date?
- What is play?
- How do you think you can make space to be creative?
- Do you listen to music while you draw or make things?
- How much effect does external stimulation have on your own creative process?
- Do you ever try to do something and feel “rusty” or “out of practice”?
- What is a “creative block” and how can you overcome it?
- What is curiosity?
- Creative focus? The need to work to earn a living. How does this affect creativity.
- Think about the concept of the "creative leap" and try to redefine this term in your own words?
- Does the concept of "design intuition" ring true or is this perhaps about experience?
‘You cannot hold a design in your hand. It is not a thing. It is a system, a process, a way of thinking.’
- Resolve ill-defined problems
- Adopt solution focussed strategy rather than problem-focused strategy
- Through employing adductive reasons
- Abductive reasoning means we develop a set of possible solutions and propose which might be most suitable. It’s “maybe”.
- Different form deduction where something “must be” and induction where something “is” operative.
- We use nonverbal, graphic, spatial modelling media to communicate solutions for production
- What action is desired? What do I want the audience to do or how do I want them to respond?
- What does the audience need to know to respond in the desired way?
- What is the best way to facilitate desired response?
- What will it say? What will it be? What will it look like?
‘The quality of … design effort profoundly affects our quality of life. The ability of … designers to produce effective, efficient, imaginative and stimulating design is therefore important to all of us.’ Cross, 2011 p4
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Chris Thornton Lecture
Design thinking and process
Professional problem solvers, interpreters, and purposeful creators for human beings
– Nigel Cross, 2011 p4
Objects design us as we design then.
Design = object?
Design is not a thing. Design is the process of creation by addressing an image.
Design = Process
Action, doing, thinking. A process of responding to a problem. A set of parameters for a specific process. How they interact, learn, think and do.
What is design process?
Process diagram.
BUT this is not a linear process from start to finish. It involves exploration.
Design Process attempts to
Transformation
“a skilled professional communicator who mediates between an expert and the audience. The transformers job is to put the experts message in a form the reader can understand, and to look after the reader’s interest in general.”
Gather message > designer mediates message > audience receives message though this is never so clearly defined. Every individual audience member will interpret the message differently. The designer must understand both perspectives to ensure clear understanding.
Questions
It is a process. A system. A way of thinking.
What tools do we use? Design must draw on all other fields and disciplines all the time in order to discover new things. Critical reflective thinking and creativity are imperative.
What is a “creative leap”?
Does the “creative leap” exist?
No, its a skill that can be taught and developed. And, if you treat design as a working process that you understand it can help to generate new ideas and solutions based on experience to problems which feel difficult or hard to get your head around. In other words, with a strong process and with enough work a designer should be able to come up with new and interesting solutions to pre-existing problems.
Hard work is involved in design proposals.
Less of a creative leap and more like a bridge, or a tipping point which requires enough load to find the correct perspective.
What is playfulness? How have you heard it described? What role does “play” have in a society?
Design Intelligence (active decision making)
– arrange furniture
– get dressed
– combine ingredients when cooking, a personal take on a recipe
Craft based societies design was not separate from the development itself. Both beautiful and functional. “No sketch or plan” with information passed on with master and apprentice relationship. Although you could argue that this prior knowledge is perhaps a sketch of the object ,though a mental one.
Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills
This is a narrow interpretation of intelligence
Gardner suggests music, linguistic, bodily kinaesthetic, logical mathematical, spatial, interpersonal, interpersonal, naturalist, existential. Perhaps design, then creativity.
Phillippe Stark (rough transcript with emphasis added)
You have to be a little sick, a little artist, and dream a lot, and if you’re lucky you can dream how you serve to exists, and you can dream how you can serve your society, then its just work to produce more to produce less. And to figure out where you’re useful. Its about generosity. How do I help my friends to have a better life. Its about the effect about the project and its effect ton the society. How can I speak about the future, equality, better quality and cheaper. Help my friends is what I do. A hotel, rocket, plane, lemon squeezer. All the same things.
(If I reflect on photography, I see many meaningless and unfulfilling images int he world. Think about scrawling through Instagram—what images do you stop on, what's most relevant, what teaches you something, what do you empathise with, what is most important to you personally and professionally? Are you filled with love for the things you see or do they spark jealousy? You either need to shift your mindset or shift your personal approach to using the media. As Lou said, "why do you follow them if they make you sad? Just unfollow them. Make Instagram a happy place.")
Does the project bring something new or disruptive. (Here, he's looking for something that will change a culture. Think on Jonathon Baldwin 'Culture: The Theory' where he discusses mainstream culture, sub-culture and popular culture. All of Stark's discussions point that he has a desire to make change for the good of all people by subverting what we understand of our present society. "We need to invent the next society.") Evolution garbage. This will stop when the sun will explode. Life is framed across 8 million years. We might not meet the end. Nobody needs to be a genius but everybody must work on the scenario of evolution. We have a duty to bring anything we can to that. Design doesn’t save life but it might help life. But its obsolete. But I try to make the best possible I can do. And I want to push the limit of the job with honesty, creativity and truth and not the needs created by marketing and advertising. We need to invent the next society.
Our work is obsolete. Some people will die during this interview. They have no water, bad water, too much water. We have the object to save life immediately. But I cannot save life. And I feel bad about that. My job has changed. I’m not stupid. I take my tool, my job and turn it to make it better, more respectable, more important.
All work was done with respect which gives it longevity. Which is why the projects succeed 20 or 30 years ago. But we need to make products today which are not within my tools. (This is an interesting statement—he actively acknowledges that what he knows and understands is not the finished product. Perhaps he's discussing new materials, new techniques, new psychology, perhaps an advocate for people from other fields to join the creative profession in order to make positive change.)
Multi-sickness. Creativity is management of concentration. (Reiterating here Csikszentmihalyi (1996) that "how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty. In too many cases, attention is restricted by external necessity" and his discussion of the flow state.) But you must pay the price. You must live like a monk. Don’t watch television. You must be alone with yourself. I can make my job, dreaming, 12–13 hours a day. This is the only way to bring disruptive, to bring fresh ideas. But if you're around others you’ll always repeat what you’ve seen and heard. When you try to understand you see all the issues around you. Everyday there is a new questions and perhaps I can try to understand it.
(Again thinking on Csikszentmihalyi "... often the obstacles are internal. In a person concerned with protecting his or her self, the practically all the attention is invested in monitoring threats to the ego." — which reminds me of Ian Anderson of the The Design Republic's discussion last night (7 march 2017 at Mercury Cinema) in which he discusses "Kill Your Self" t-shirt campaign. He said it wasn't meant in a negative light but that rather instead of preening and primping oneself to make sure we "look our best" in front of the mirror, instead we get over it and move on with more important things in life. We kill the ego in order to gain control of our lives.")
First you have to know that you need to manage your concentration. You must agree to pay the price. You live in your project and in abstraction but not your life. You live in a great cloud. Perhaps there is a different structure of the brain which gives more possibility for creativity. I see people working and working well, they build a structure, they go from A to B to C. And they have good researcher. I am not able to go from A to B to C to D. It’s impossible. My brain explode. I try to describe process only. If this person can go from A to B to C to D I go from A to Z completely without in between and maybe this is just me.
I know very few people who have the same process. I know one or two but they have their own projects. But no, I work with the least people possible and only with people I love. The respect of love is the key to everything. Because I hope to love and love us. The love is the permanent magic K. I love my wife. I speak 98% and the others I speak because I love.
I don’t know a lot of designer. I’m sure there are lots of nice people. But maybe lichen stein, gaudi, plato. All philosophers.
2 types of creativity. Idea of yourself. And idea of question. Different process. Creativity needs organisation. A lot in your life and in your brain. A lot of work to receive the idea, then to check the idea. To check if its the right idea. I might get the idea in 2 minutes, or 5 hours, or 2 days. But then I might spend 7 years to check the idea. I know immediately what I want but then I have to go through the process to check.
Why not dancing thinking, design thinking, creative thinking. Its so structural as part of human being. We exist to create, with our creativity.
Here lies one who tried to help.
First, I don’t deserve more. The system is beautiful. But I am just a small part of it. I am not a genius. I am a below.
———
Seung Chan Lim
No background in art. First assignment to properly fold paper. Go fold something. She didn’t know what to fold so she just started trying to see what would happen. He lacked humility. Humility required to work through the process and to not let anyone let you know you’re crazy. Acting is having the courage to tell your story. The experience which lies at the foundation of your performance is your experience, though the character and the story might not be yours. Develop empathy with your materials or an imaginary character.
———
Csiksgentmihalyi (1996)
“how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty.”
“There are real limits to how many thing sa person can attend to at the same time, and when survival needs require all of one’s attention, none is left over for being creative.”
“Curiosity is like a constant beam that highlights and invests with interest anything within range.” You could argue that curiosity also helps keep us young and fresh and inquisitive such as learning something new and becoming excited about it into old age.
“Creativity within a domain often goes hand in hand with conformity in the rest of life.” In other words, the older we get and the more time poor we are the less time we have to invest in things which we find interesting, or the less time to explore unique opportunities. OR perhaps we invest too much energy in places where we’re unable to create or which sap us of creative energy.
For example, I used to play video games but I realised that for lal the playing and the experience I was having I washable to convert that inspiration into activity because I would keep playing and lose the spark to develop.
There’s also another issue with time in that the things I love doing, creating, drawing, painting, dancing, etc. prohibit me from running my business or at least I FEEL they prohibit me from running my business. This in turn means the things I love to do for passion are set aside for things which might earn me a living. BUT in practice the opposite is true—the more I explore things I love, share them and act passionately the more work I find in those areas and I’m able to survive off the things I love—until my passions change and shift of course!
try to be surprised by something every day
cultivate a flow state in everyday life
issues with instant gratification and consumption
anything to keep our mind from wandering to negative thoughts
However, if we learn to enjoy our latent creativity or harness it we’re able to avoid depression and increase our capacity to relate to the world.
wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to
if you do it well it becomes enjoyable
once you enjoy something you need to increase its complexity and mastery. how deep can you learn to enjoy the act of something?
develop a sense of community
take charge of your schedule
make time for reflection and relaxation (if I don’t have enough work I haven’t been out of the house enough)
shape your space
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