Final Thoughts |
20/04/19
As the end of the university year approaches it seems fitting to look back over all I have written and reflect on what I have learned about great design.
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Image: Women in car crashes are significantly more likely to be injured due to the use of male crash test dummies (A World Designed For Men)
To me the word great entails huge expectations. I found selecting examples of great design difficult. Perhaps I am too harsh, and the word became too valuable, but I feel like something has to be particularly special to be deserving of such a label. Sure, I know lots of examples of good design - I’ve read design books, magazines and blogs and can pick out items of interest. But I became unsure when it came to justifying them as great. Perhaps I need to be more assertive, but the problem is I always get caught up in how subjective it all is, and I don’t think great design should be subjective. I think it should be universal.
I started to explore this in A World Designed For Men. There were examples where design is great for men, but lethal for women. On a less dramatic level this definition of it being universal means something can’t be great as a result of aesthetics, because we all have different tastes - it wouldn’t be great to everyone. For example, people love to point out the classic Eames lounge chair as an important design, and I while can apricate it’s significance in design history I don’t particularly like it. On the other hand, I love the Walsh PB’s I wrote about in the post Great British Design, but they’re clearly only ever going to be appreciated by fell runners. Such specialist design is never going to be universally great. People want different things from design; some people find Martin Creeds work fascinating and some are left wondering What’s the Point?. Perhaps I’m making it more complex than it needs to be (I often do). I’m sure many would point out that “you can never please everyone”, but doubt played in the back of my mind throughout the posts, because maybe that’s exactly what great design should do.
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Images: 1. Me in Walsh PB's 2. Eames Lounge Chair 3. Does everything except go anywhere - Martin Creed's Ford Focus
I really enjoyed learning about the story behind a lot of the designs. I find people fascinating. While writing Punk, Icon, Activist I spent hours watching and reading Vivienne Westwood interviews, where she mainly speaks of activism rather than design. I admire her fearlessness, and I think it translates into her work. It became clear that design isn’t about a single object in one instant, but the result of a process. To me it was more interesting to explore a person or theme rather than a single product; this way I could try to understand where greatness comes from, rather than just pointing out that something is great. In Great Design Thinking I began to question whether conceptual design could still be classed as great. To me some of Rem Koolhaas’s unbuilt works, and the thinking behind them, are the most important. There’s a lot to be learnt from examining the way significant designers think. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was working years before the emergence of the design profession, but was using design thinking to create world changing innovations. He was Thinking Big – something which I believe modern day design could benefit from. Images: 1. Isamabard Kingdom Brunel 2. Vivienne Westwood 3. Rem Koolhaas
There are also themes which are important to me such as sustainability which resulted in posts such as The Rise of Veganism and Fairphone. I think that designers today have a bigger responsibility than ever to create sustainable and ethical solutions, and to me no modern design can be great without such considerations. However, as much as liked these products, I’m not sure they could be classed as great yet. Nothing instantly can be, it has to become established, to be tested by consumers, and stand the test of time.
The Casio F-91W is certainly an example of Timeless Design. It is remarkable that, in an age of planned obsolescence, a digital product has remained unchanged in 20 years. But what’s more interesting is the diversity of its wearers – from Obama, to Bin Laden, to the casual hipster, the watch has universal appeal. After 20 blog posts and lots of thinking I was still unsure on what my conclusions on great design would be. It took my final post, with pointers found in notes made by my 16-year-old self to organise my thoughts. Again, I came back to the idea of universal greatness. My blogs had included a lot of design I love, or think is important – but when considering great design personal taste shouldn’t come into play. I realised that I really appreciate the story and thought process behind a design, but a lot of people don’t consider how a design came into fruition. They interact with it at face value. By this reasoning, the best examples I’ve come across are the designs that people don’t notice. Products that we don’t even think of as being designed. As put by Dieter Rams, "as little design as possible".
In Great Design is Ignored I wrote that no one can question Margaret Curley’s road signs; they aren’t a certain style or for a certain sort of person. And in Simplicity I found further examples of everyday objects that have been meticulously designed to work so well that you never have to notice them. Paperclips and post-it notes are arguably some of the best examples I gave of successful design: they have stood the test of time, they were easily adopted by a vast majority of the population, and, as objects, they are so user-friendly that they disappear into our daily routine. It’s the complete opposite of design snobbery; no one thinks about the name behind these products, the manufacturing techniques used, or how valuable they are. |