Art | Design

art n.
1 The creation of something beautiful and expressive; paintings and sculptures.
2 (arts) subjects other than sciences; creative activites (e.g. painting, music, writing).
3 a skill.

design n.
1 a drawing that shows how a thing is to be made; a general form or arrangement; a decorative pattern.
2 an intention; planning.

v. prepare a design for; plan, intend.

-Oxford English Dictionary

These four sub-categories can be a way of organizing opinions. The high-end design world may seem out of reach and unreasonable but sometimes it’s inspiring, refreshing and candy for the senses. These two opposite opinions call for an exploration of what lies in between.

Art & Design

Capitalizing the letters A and D somehow gives designers a space with a license to do anything. For example, Max Lamb’s turned concrete cylinders have received much acclaim for reasons that are not in line with my beliefs. I don’t see how its inefficient use of material was worth exploring such repetitive and mundane forms for the sake of him directly being part of the manufacturing process. Nevertheless, he pursues his philosophy like we all want to see our visions materialize. That’s what it means to design. Individuals wanting to make a statement initiated this A&D scene. In comparison, here we are, individuals gaining tools through education and stacking them until we will feel comfortable enough to stand alone (or in a team) to make an impact in the world. I think that part of what makes the Design scene feel like an ant intruding a city of skyscrapers are the Big Names. A student graduates from a design school, armed with her portfolio, and builds her identity to present to manufacturers or firms so she can be represented by them. These include manufacturing companies like Vitra, Herman Miller, and Ligne Roset. French designer Inge Sempé, for example, has her work with Ligne Roset. Ligne Roset is a family-run company manufacturing furniture and brainstorms possible (new) ways to make the product or alter designs with the designer. It’s a cool place to be. You have one-on-ones with the Big Names. You become an in-house designer. You’re linked in or in the loop, however you want to see it.

art and design

Strip away the pretention, white backgrounds and head-to-toe black clothing and look at the sketchbooks. What happens when art inspires design? When a functional design draws inspiration from fine arts or the process of fine art making the results can be very harmonious and subtle. The journey does not have to be about climbing the ladder instead understanding the ground you stand on. Some designers will choose to make products in a limited series. That scarcity may mean that demand and prices will increase but it also means that more thought and care is put into the making of objects.

Art vs. Design

Why do we make what we make? This is a question seen too frequently but not answered quite as well since we make a lot of junk. Is it for Art’s sake? Is Many designers on the ID history blog use scarce materials freely, to make a statement, provoke a thought or just make you laugh like Blendie. Emotions are triggered while holding a glowing jar or while sitting and knitting in a deep, plush, high-backed chair. It’s a similar interaction with paintings and the associations you make with objects (refer to my Meaning vs. Saying essay). This differs greatly from the utilitarian designs that serve a function and a function only. Think of Velcro and match sticks that are in the same category of industrially designed objects. Art vs. Design even a debate worth watching? Maybe art feeds or inspires design. In the Laws of Simplicity John Maeda mentions that ‘simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful’. Similarly, many featured designers from our last class, like Tobias Wong, have removed or repurposed obvious functions from objects and use them as symbols to carry their meanings.

Art of Design(ing)

What is my intention? What will my plan be to make it happen? In the process of designing my second chair I recognise a familiar pattern in the way I start. It is frustrating to see myself fall into the same potholes but I know that recognising that I do that is already a step closer to understanding my design process. I slowly establish my methods and values in my design process. With that set, I can look at Max Lamb and know that I don’t like his work. Having a consistent opinion is a weapon in the Design World. Since design and intention are synonymous, your art of design matters a lot: but first ask WHY you design before re-evaluating how you design. During the Better World by Design conference a speaker said that architecture is a political act because buildings are placed on this planet. The same weight of accountability applies to designers who make things that are extracted from the earth, made and used on the earth then left on or in the earth. Understanding why you do things and supporting other designers sharing the same beliefs as yours may dictate what the next big design scene will be.

Janine Benyus: Teaching us to learn from the natural world

“Biomimicry is the practice of developing sustainable technologies inspired by ideas from nature.” Janine Benyus is a biologist, writer, professor, conservationist and student. In 1997 when her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature came out it to inspired not just other biologists but engineers and designers as well. Filled enthusiasm for this topic Benyus could not fit everything she wanted to say on her TED talk yet was still very articulate and convincing.

To inspire us to follow nature’s footsteps, her TED talk in September 2005 disseminates the questions: How does life makes things? What should we ask (in the next ten years)? How does life make the most of things? and How does life make things disappear into systems? Construction, raw material extraction, processing, maximising material potential, energy efficiency and disposal are the design challenges that are faced in the development of a product. All these steps of product development link to the questions she asked.

Janine Benyus also shares a few big ideas from biology. These may be some things I can look back to when I run through my check-list when I’m in need of ideas or idea catalysts. The first idea is self-assembly. Look at how the mother of pearl is assembled. It is forming in sea water and is tougher than our ceramics. Imagine, she says, making ceramics in room temperature, dipping it into and out of a liquid and having it harden by evaporation. What if all our hard materials were made in the same process as crystallization? Carbon dioxide as feedstock is another idea using a resource that is abundant. We treat CO2 like its the plague but plants eat it up and make all kinds of great things out of it. They don’t see it as a risk as we do. We should find ways to use the garbage that we placed in the atmosphere. Solar transformation is another idea that Janine Benyus highly values from nature. It too is a way of harvesting the infinite amount of clean solar energy there is (in the day time). The power of shape is relevant whenever designers do form studies. Just go to the Nature Lab. Go to the Nature Lab. GO TO THE Nature Lab. The bumps along a whale’s flippers facilitate the way a whale maneuvers him or herself by minimising resistance underwater. If the same principle was applied to airplane wings, fuel can be saved and this could increase a plane’s efficiency by 32 percent. Shape on the surface of feathers in thin film creates colour without pigment. Lotus leaves are self-cleaning because of the texture on their surface. Lotusan is a company that makes paint that dries with a similar texture so that rainwater picks up dirt as it rolls off. Timed degradation is a distant dream we all have for the products that we make so lets look at how nature does it. Detritivors or decomposers digest and return dead matter to the soil. This is essentially a humble community of various mushrooms and earthworms. Benyus asks us to look at the threads that attach mussel shells to rocks and compares it with the potential of our packaging design. The threads start to dissolve after exactly two years after being formed.

The greatest lesson nature can teach us is that it takes care of the place our offspring will inhabit once we are gone. This is worth striving for so I will end with a quote from Okala:

We’re not inheriting this land from our ancestors
but borrowing it from our children

– Native American proverb

L!ST o' L!NKS

If you're into...

Disaster Relief



CHECK OUT

Architecture for Humanity
Cameron Sinclair, Co-Founder of AFH

• Video for Young Global Leaders 2008
• TED Talk video
  
• Cameron Sinclair's also on facebook (omg)
  

Solar Cookers












CHECK OUT

Solar Cookers International

The Solar Cooking Archive


Nature inspiring Design



seriously CHECK these sites OUT

Biomimicry Institute
Janine Benyus on TED Talks


...brb...

Lets not be cars on a freeway

This weekend I attended the Better World by Design conference held here between Brown and RISD. Since Friday I have had the privilege to listen to many influential people in the field of humanitarian design. What am I left with at the end of this conference? I’m left with: a canvas bag, programme, map, orange water bottle, name tag on a lanyard and notes in my sketchbook. Now that the three-day conference is over we can think about it a little more, digest the discussions and put it in a drawer for a while and do the studio work that was suspended this weekend. This is one of the most frustrating times of a conference because the longevity of its impact is uncertain. The closing speech we got from RISD ID's senior, Mike Eng, was uplifting and gave me the sense of closure I needed which was really a push out of my seat. He showed us a photo of all these cars in a traffic jam on a freeway. In that image he saw people who were alone. Each car was independent of each other. Rather than working like that he beautifully used Transformers as a metaphor of how we should work and collaborate and keep in contact with each other after this conference. So if I pinch the pages that I filled from this conference it would be a quarter of an inch thick but what really surfaces the sketchbook are what three speakers said about creating the sense of ownership amongst disaster survivors, biomimicry, and decentralization. These three topics I will take add to the list of things that I gathered from the conference and hopefully remember them when I work.

Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, spoke to us about how people need to feel the need of ownership. He blushed slightly and said thank you when people thanked him for speaking and inspiring them. AFH seeks architecture and design solutions to humanitarian crises. When asked about why AFH does not have any signage by another architect, Sinclair’s response blew me away. He said that the greatest moment for architects is when the community forgets to thank. The members of the communities that have had this reaction to AFH’s help are so happy and back on their feet. They are empowered with the ability to generate their own income, support their families and live again. The humility of AFH is admirable. At the same time, this is an organization that surpasses donation and really touches on what is appropriate like what our class’s guest speaker, Bruce Becker, mentioned. We can all die hard trying but not when people’s lives depend on it. yes, we should do nothing because it might be wrong. Please, design students, think about what you do. It is inappropriate to have less emphasis on research. Like Cameron Sinclair mentioned, disaster relief volunteers and design students cannot be testing ideas on people who need solutions. People who live on the border of survival don’t need students testing out ideas on them so they can go home and write about how they ‘helped’ victims. Sinclair also mentioned that the moment you call somebody a victim, you victimize them. This field calls for so much sensitivity and preparation before entering.

Denise DeLuca spoke to us about biomimicry which I hope will serve as inspiration when we design products, systems or services. She is the outreach director of Biomimicry Institute which is where innovation is inspired by nature. She enthusiastically gave examples where human beings use nature's design. Even if the auditorium was dark, I could see her eyes beam while talking about how corrugation is inspired by shells to get more strength out of a material and how leaves inspired the creation of photovoltaic cells. Biologist and founder, Janine Benyus, said that biomimicry is the conscious emulation of nature’s genius. DeLuca asked us to ask nature how to. How can buildings be like trees or cities function like forests? Nature’s principles are exactly the same as Sustainable Design Principles.

Life adapts and evolves

• Locally attuned and responsive
• Has cyclical processes
• Resilient

Life creates conditions conducive to life

• Optimises rather than maximises
• Interdependent
• Uses benign manufacturing techniques
  Nature’s wisdom makes me weak and to have an entire institute dedicated to emulating its systems is such a huge service to humanity. We have to humble ourselves before the world.

Iqbal Quadir was the keynote speaker at the end of the conference and left us with the idea of decentralised prosperity. In his introduction, he thanked us for taking the time to be there rather than spending the beautiful day outside. Much like in nature, prosperity should be dispersed evenly. Organisms are not lining up for their turn instead the distribution of energy is happening simultaneously from different places. This main formula for productivity was connectivity. Quadir’s development of the GrameenPhone enabled millions of people in Bangladesh to have a cellular phone. This facilitated people’s ability to start businesses and grow. In this case, communication helps income to be generated simultaneously from different places. Quadir noticed similar patterns between Europe’s progress from the dark ages to the renaissance period and those of developing countries enabling him to predict what is to come. He was very adamant about the devolution of authority and the empowerment of citizens. The story of progress, he says, is the distortion of power. The same goes for the food crisis. There is no shortage but a mismanagement of distribution, absence of food preservation technology and political hurdles. That is why his next point about accountability is so important. A doctor will not risk anything because there is a whole group of people who have the power to hold them accountable by suing them. People in developing countries on the other hand, have no power to hold economists or government officials accountable for the negligence of their systems or so called solutions. This is why empowering citizens is so important. Repeating what I learned from Sinclair, we should not do anything even if we think it’s wrong. If we as designers have the urge to help and do something, we are responsible to make sure it is appropriate.

Remembering the people you’re designing for, asking nature and finding ways for things not to be systematically centralised are the three main ideas that I want to study and cultivate over time as I design. Through all this I hope to also be able to learn, digest and be able to tell it all. With the handful of my friends who were also a part of this conference I hope to be able to grow with them and still be able to return to them as we are all searching for ways to better the world by design. Hopefully we will remember when Bernard Amadei of Engineers Without Borders challenged us to write our mission statement on this planet. I challenge you to do the same. They always talk about them and they- filling the hall with his volume, sick of those words, he said, “I cannot stand those words! Who are We?” The human part of humanitarian design reminds me of who I interact with everyday and that the design starts there. Amadei also said, in his loud and passionate French accent, “if you do not bring smiles, it is useless”. Part of humanitarian design is personally being of service to humanity. Dream big but act small. We will experience, seek information and come across stories. Armed with all these we will become advocates, be able to tell the stories and through that inspire others.

Meaning vs. Saying

When I began designing my chair I thought about what people do while they sat. They eat. They study. They wonder. They poo. She pees. They drink. They drink tea. They relax. They’re in a conference. They negotiate. They’re serious. They’re in the principal’s office. They have coffee. They laugh. They procrastinate. They rest their knees. They shift. They (do not want to) get up. They chew and swallow. They wait. They read. They write. They reach. They stand on them. They put them in a circle. They take one out. They stack them. They arrange them in rows. They curl up. So now I know that people do different things in chairs. What are the different ways people sit in chairs? How do certain seats make people sit differently? The chair I was designing was going to answer these questions. These questions are what inserted meaning in the chair for me.

The inputs of a meaning into a product by the designer will either be completely lost, be altered through experience, emotional associations created by the user and environmental context much like the stiletto heel. The medical experts probably did not think they would impact women’s sexuality at a cultural level when designing the vibrator that was a device that simply saved them time and trouble. In the case of making my chair, meaning was being implanted by me as the designer through all those questions I wanted the chair to answer. I wanted to make a chair that offered the sitter an array of positions to sit in. The chair also arranged people’s postures when they sat in it because of the asymmetrically placed foot and arm rests. Whoever sits on the chair will also insert their own meaning into the experience they get from sitting in it. Certain elements like the feeling of cork against your arms and the solid wood beneath your finger tips will be associated with the user’s memories. These sensations highly affect whether or not they will like the chair. My intention as a designer was not to evoke emotions through materials. (Structure and aesthetic determined my material palette choices) The materials to the user became an emotional catalyst, something I did not include in my plan at all.

We design products or services imagining the user group and base things around the context in which it will be used and anything that is experience beyond our plans is coincidental and benign. This makes me think about what something means versus what something says. Meaning in products has associations with the designer’s intention. Products can also say things or be received in a certain way by users and this is happening one-way, from the product to the user. Compare meaning reception to the subjectivity of two-dimensional art like painting. Deriving meaning from a row of colour swatches on the wall would yield infinitely subjective responses. There is no one certain meaning. There is, however, certainty in what it says to the viewer. The red, orange, amber and cobalt blue certainly say autumn to me when I see that combination.

In this way being a designer is very much like setting up a sandwich bar. The entire bar is the product or service we are designing. Each filling are different meanings and the users make their own sandwiches. They pick up on things we put there on purpose but sometimes they don’t. Every user will make a different sandwich which will taste differently. We can put as much or as little meaning into something. For example, we can put out only white bread, slices of ham, cheese and humus and all the users can only choose between those options but not all will take them. Not all meaning comes through your design as you intended. This is frustrating when you want to affect change through your design and your meaning is lost and users are only eating slices of cheese. Your power is lost as a designer. Time, favouritism, emotional and physical associations, social and environmental influences will affect the user’s reception of anything. Anything. That is why we research and do tests and trials.