August 23,2012
Responding to the Don Normal Video: I actually thought this video was pretty catchy. Don was pretty funny and right about the aspects that map a good design. People want to like something that catches their interest and makes them feel good. People want a good design that is going to work and be user friendly. I liked the part about the ping pong table where someone designed the projector to ripple the water as the ball hit the table and there were fish there. That was a pretty cool design. The visceral, behavioral, and reflective experiences make a personal object so neat and are what attract someone to that object. It amazed me how right Don was and how people think about what they like. I had never looked at it like that before.
Responding to Dieter Rams Ten Principles for good design: I liked this quote that "A good design cannot be measured in a finite way." I thought that was pretty interesting and true. His principles really helped me understand the project as a whole. Because we had to pick an object that we thought was a good design, his principles helped me eliminate and pick an object that I thought mostly covered most of those principles. From reading this I now believe that a good design always offers new opportunities and room for improvement, it needs to be user friendly and has to be able to allow people to use self expression. A good design is understandable and is beautiful in its own way. It could be complex or very simple. ten principles for good design
Response to Reading #1: I picked out a couple quotes that really stuck out to me. "Design is appropriate to our most significant human activities, and belongs to them." "Design is a process for making things right." At first reading this story I had no idea what it even had to do with design and at the end it said "what had him was design." At first I was like what? Really? How? Reading further and asking the same questions as what was in the text it all started to make sense. As I was reading the story through the part where it was talking about how the black intermixed with the white and the white intermixed with the black, it reminded me of the equality and similarity principles of Gestalt. How each human body looks the same and even though they were made up of different colors they looked similar. In the What is Design reading I liked the quote, "Design is to design a design to produce a design." reading this passage did really make me think of how everything in this world has some sort of design element to it. Design is a mix of creativity and and analytical reasoning. Design really is finding a problem and coming up with ideas and then solving it. It almost seems like a math problem to me. Reading #1
