week 11

Please bring your visual diary


Studio: Today I want you all to work on your projects today and show me any issues you have getting it finalised for presentations.
Design Project. Students work on their projects with guidance from Lecturer.
Presentations/Submission: Research Presentation in class for assessment (2nd group).

“Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked. If one brings up an idiosyncratic question, the answer he gives will necessarily be unique as well.” – Kenya Hara, Designing Design.
Consider this statement:
 The Western approach of doing rather than thinking can lead to truly tragic conclusions. Perhaps instead, thinkers like Hara can teach us that we should spend more time in contemplation of our environment rather than relentlessly pursuing maximalism and excess.

Tutorial: Last week I gave you a photocopy of a chapter from "Designing Design" Kenya Hara. I expect you to have read it and made notes for a discussion today about it. I'm particularly interested in the way he embeds meaning in his objects and the way he thinks about design in a different way. He sees design as "philosophy of living" Take a look at the following excepts form a book review about it by Robert Blinn.

"By actively thinking about the process and ethos of design as much as the end product itself, Hara has created a work that reads more like a mandate for ethical product design than as an indulgent graphic design book destined to rest on yet another modern coffee table."...............

"Hara's most compelling projects are those where graphics, paper and signage break into three dimensions. His work for the Umeda Hospital of pediatrics and obstetrics typifies this success. Using white cloth and fabric for signage, he uses the delicacy of fabric and paper as subliminal cues for the cleanliness of the building. Even in such trivial details, Hara is able to subconsciously convey to patients that the sheets must be sterile because even the wall signs are spotless."..............

"his central thesis that to engage in the act of design our man-made environment must also be examined, felt and understood. Kaoru Mende's matches, for example, directly reference their environmental precursors, with a phosphorescent head applied directly on top of a twig. While few of these projects are likely to provide any direct benefit to our wracked environment, they do stand ably as a sort of product design couture, not necessarily to be worn or used, but certainly provoking thought and examination on the part of their users. To naive Western eyes, like my own, Hara's introspective and holistic approach to design thinking (as well as his work) seems nearly impossible to talk about without resorting to cliched terms like Zen."

http://www.core77.com/blog/book_reviews/book_review_designing_design_by_kenya_hara_8133.asp 

He deals with Post Modernism with this pithy couple of paragraphs:

“On the brink of the explosive spread of personal computers, we were bound to head into the infancy of yet another new economic culture, but on the eve of that birth, for just a bit, design strayed into a bizarre labyrinth.

“[P]ostmodernism cannot be seen as a turning point in design history. It was just a fleeting commotion that occurred during the hand-off of the concept of modernism from one generation to the next. If we look carefully, we can even see postmodernism as an event symbolizing the aging of the generation of designers that sustained modernism.

“From the trends in the plastic arts, it is clear that postmodernism was a small, manipulated system of icons and something of a fad. Photos of people in old-fashioned clothes of any past era make us laugh because of the strangeness of an entire society’s participation in this empty agreement called fashion. Viewed from the 21st century, postmodernism makes us laugh for the same reason.”