my DESiGN for now

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep." -- Scott Adams

I realize I limit my creativity of fear to make mistakes. I think, imagine, brainstorm, and calculate the newly formed ideas in my head, before I decide to execute them through physical practice. I’m not a sculptor who can produce forms from simple explorations. I don’t connect with specific materials nor enjoy experimenting their limits not knowing where it would become applicable to my work. But through this semester, allowing myself to learn and evaluate the past to present design work, more so the design intentions, I found myself accumulated with different aspects to understand what designing really means, for me.

Creating timelines for evolution of music technology, lighting, and chairs, I familiarized myself with the histories of specific industrial design fields. They all seemed inarguable and fixed lessons, dealing with the values derived from the past. However from the week of Saving the World Soul by Soul talk with Dr. Bruce Beck, I started to see a new side of industrial design that I had missed before. The responsibilities and the power that came along as being an industrial designer were far limitless and serious. Our interests and efforts, as well as our skills, had the power to impact and change the world, bigger than I as a small individual could have intended to. The following week’s focus on Cradle to Cradle as well the discussions inspired by the A Better World by Design conference enhanced my perspective of design to higher potentials ever so more. The environment I used to find myself in interest for typical needs for convenience for American user groups seemed now as a luxury and secondary concern compared to the primary life-threatening needs of the surrounding world outside. I felt many designers including myself had knowingly and unknowingly kept themselves ignorant towards solving the real, small problems happening nearby.

Besides the consideration of green, nature friendly materials, I started to lose importance for investing on the outer shell of products. The outside pattern and form studies seemed overly unnecessary and wasteful as mere decoration purpose. However, I was struck again once more, through the final week’s discussion on Art & Design. Influenced by the class topic as through researching industrial designs derived from inspirational art, I realize a presence of a simple object, if designed with strong emotional connection and comfort, can too impact the user and satisfy their needs just as effectively. Exemplifying design groups such as FORM US WITH LOVE currently practices design work with considerations not just of beautiful aesthetics, but sharing their knowledge and inspirations from outside of the usual design themes. If ergonomics was the first, then the aesthetics the second component of design, incorporating other subjects such as nature or medicine that many users can easily relate with the design objects adds a third function of design.

I assume there will be even more opportunities and lessons that will shape and alter to my next meaning of design. But as far as I’ve come as of now, I am happy to be settled on a vague, but applicable definition of design, for industrial design.