Bas Leurs was quite thinking about design. This lecture was about the depths of design.
First of all, what is design? I’m glad that my vision was kinda met with what everyone came up with when the question was in the room. My keywords were actually human, actions and sense which I though where kinda plausible. We create for humanity and we try that by hitting the senses of the people to take certain actions.
But design has more than one definition and it varied over time. In 1962 it was some kind of uncertainty and punishment if you design. This was kinda something unexpected for me. I’m kinda glad that 4 years later the definition came to be “Imagination of the future” which is something that is still very fitting. In 2000 it became “Creating for humans” or simply “making life better”, which is what I earlier thought too.
What can we design? We’re already past “visual” in my terms, actually you can design everything. You can design a process, you can design a timesheet, you can design your free time. The key point might be that everything that brings change is a design. and I think to call ourself designers we should be aware of the effects of our designs. Else everyone could be a designer.
How do we design? This was an interesting part of the presentation because Bas had to admit that he’s teaching us ways of design which he doesn’t apply on his own designs. And everyone knew what he was talking about because we’re all trial and error designers. We’re swapping constantly between a problem space and a solution space to find our answer in a design.
Oh, and I’m someone who is clothed black.. most of the time.. but not at night!
Charlie Mulholland, the (quasi) gothfather of CMD, told us about the ethical choices we make in design. The lecture was in English so I have less trouble translating it now.
Different people have different views and it’s hard to give everyone that what they expect the most. So sometimes we have to design to guide the user to the right choice by showing why it’s the right choice, trick them into the right choice, or force the right choice on them. But with each approach, there is a certain amount of freedom the user has.That’s also why I like calling them the good, the bad and the ugly way of giving users the freedom to choose.
I think the best example fromt he lecture where those speedbumps. It’s the tricky one because, ofcourse, you can drive like 70km/h over them but your car won’t survive it, so you slow down automatically. The forced choice are those trafficsigns who tell you how hard to drive. I wonder if a suggestive choice is posible because driving is something where there are only seconds a human has to recognize what’s the situation and how can I survive it. There isn’t much time to present the choices a driver has and suggest him which is the best.
We as designers have to think about how we show the right path without taking away as much freedom as posible. I think that the most important part of the lecture.
Another students hosted workshop. This time we made bridges from Popsicle sticks. The presentation about the hows and whys was a little bit rushed so in the middle of the workshop I began thinking, what the heck am I doing here? What I’ve found behind that question was Teamwork. Not that I worked much, but my team worked and I just gave some directions whenever they wanted to listen to me. Oh and it was kinda about triangles, because triangles are durable.
This was also a competition against other teams, who builds the most durable bridge. The other parameters of the competition where somewhat not relevant because everyone lost count of the amount of popsicles used. The durability was tested with books. Heavy books. Our bridge had somewhat 13 books on it and than they came with the “Maya”-book (3D Design program learning, the hard and long road) ontop of it. Our bridge lasted about 20 seconds.
Some time back we had an by students hosted Bubbles Photography workshop. We made bubbles and had to take photos of the most interresting bubbles we could make. Which is hard, because bubbles pop when they are beautiful.
It was quite a fun workshop. We had a different room where the tables didn’t had electric sockets so we could soap the whole table. There were some interesting shots among the show but I all photos are currently with a collega which I can’t get hold of now. *sadface*
I had here my chance to try things with a professional camera, with shuttertime and size of diafragma. Most of the time I just take pictures with my mobile phone and that’s it, a professional camera can do so much more with all the settings and little tweaks.
I took a post on facebook and made a comic out of it. Actually I wanted to make two comics but could only make one in the given time D:
Source:
Failed to take a post with discussion into an comic. Would have been interesting.. maybe…
Not done yet but I’m keeping the pace up. Every 2 pages has one visual as a background. The green-blueish ones are the projects I worked on and are overlayed with a seethrough layer for the text.
Please scroll slowly that way and enjoy the ride >>