Lost in Design

Last year during Winter Session, I took a Landscape Architecture course, called “Poetic Chemistry.” It was a very conceptual and open-ended course, and each student had to decide on a field of interest, define their own problems through a series of research, interpret and represent them in whatever way they wished to. It was an interesting experience for me, as it was during this course that I came to realize that I was no longer able to think in a free, fine artist-like way, but in a practical, designer-like way.

Coming from the first semester in the Industrial Design department, during which I was trained to think practically and to solve problems, all I could think of was practicality, sustainability, and the users. On the other hand, there was a student, called Emily, from the Painting department, and her work was all about her own imagination and philosophy – her own interpretation of the world. She had such a free but concrete perspective on life, and I was amazed at her unrestricted and poetic way of thinking. Simultaneously, I was surprised by my own designer-like way of thinking, which was all about the reality, the user experience, and the environmental issues.

Now, what is “design?” We are surrounded by all kinds of “design”: the buildings that we live in, the Internet, clothes, businesses, signs on the streets – everything – including this very computer that I am using to write this essay right now. I mentioned a few words earlier to describe “design,” but those terms are far from sufficient to truly explain what design means.

When I think of the word design, many words come to my mind: style, practicality, functionality, ergonomics, sensitivity, sustainability, beauty, balance, affordability, experience, emotion, psychology, society, and so on. If anyone asked me to define what “design” means, I would probably go in circles, trying to decide within myself what it means to me.

Design, to me, is like a religion – not in the sense that I believe in it and worship it as if it was a religion, but in the sense that it is so broad that it confuses me and I cannot define it in one sentence. I consider myself not religious, and this is because I am confused. I do not know which philosophy to follow amongst the many religions that exist in our society, or, if I want to follow one at all. I classify myself as agnostic, and same could be applied to design; there are so many aspects of design that I am not sure which one to pursue.

What does “design” mean? I do not think that design is solely about functionality and practicality. Every industrial designer would probably have heard of this humorous and a bit stereotypical anecdote about the difference between designers and engineers: the designers will spend days and nights designing a stylized product with carefully considered radius, but when the product goes into production, it comes out hideous, without any of its radius that used to be there, because the engineers sought the functional aspect only. The engineers do consider the aesthetics, too, but the difference is that they focus more on the functionality and the manufacturability of the product, rather than its style and the psychology. If all that mattered in a product were functionality and practicality, then everything would look like bricks and boxes. Cheap and unattractive products that worked okay would be the best sellers. The world would lose its creativity. However, the truth is that people do tend to be attracted to objects that are visually pleasing and inspiring, that work well (meaning, easy to use and durable.)

Oftentimes, beautiful designs do tend to work well, too – a good design means a better experience for the user. For example, Apple’s iPods are very delicately designed, with meticulous attentions to the details. The iPods were, and still are, extremely popular, not just because of their appealing form, but also their interface. The iconic Click Wheel not just adds to the overall style of the object, but it also greatly enhances the user experience; it is an innovative design that makes the navigation through lists and series of data easier.

However, it seems like good experience is usually accompanied by high costs. The iPods are well-designed objects, but they are very costly. Another example is the Herman Miller Aeron Chair. The Aeron Chair has the reputation that it is one of the most comfortable and elegant office chairs in the market, but one chair costs over $1,000. It is almost ridiculous how much the chair costs, yet the Aeron chairs are in high demand, as the concept of ergonomics is in trend these days.

Contrarily, on the other end of the spectrum, there are Ikea chairs, which cost less than a tenth of the Aeron Chairs. These chairs may be less durable and less comfortable, but they work perfectly fine as chairs. Affordability is an important factor in design these days, and the balance between quality and expense – like the Aeron Chair and the Ikea Chair – is a difficult and sensitive problem.

How do we balance affordability and quality? How do we balance aesthetics and functions? Balancing the different elements in design is a very difficult task. It is like finding the right balance between sugar and salt in cooking, or between work and life. This is where each designer’s values and the contexts come in to play. There is never a wrong design; there could be a better design; but there is never a perfect design.

Design is perhaps about creating an experience – it could be the actual physical experience, an emotional or psychological experience, or a socio-cultural experience. The experience will change depending on the balance among function, aesthetics, quality, and affordability. For example, if a stool is designed with more attention to its aesthetics rather than its function, then the user may have a less comfortable experience sitting on the stool, but he or she will have a more visually and psychologically pleasant experience. If a stool is made really cheap but it is bound to break after a year, then a lot of users will be able to own the chair, but they will have to go through the trouble of repairing them and buying more chairs after a year.

I, personally, would like to pursue quality and aesthetics through my design. However, this does not mean that I want to be designing luxury products. I certainly believe that affordability is an important aspect, but greater affordability usually means lower quality. When a product becomes too cheap, then the quality drops drastically, which means it will probably break more easily and quickly. The object will be thrown out, and this will do even more damage to the already-suffering environment. Plus, if the object is too cheap, then the user will hesitate less to throw it out, which does not help the situation. If the quality of a product could be raised so that it lasts longer by raising the price a little bit, it will be better for the environment, which in turn will benefit the humanity.

Sustainability has become such an enormous issue nowadays, and it seems like it is going to be the next subject to drive the design momentum. (Or it already is, perhaps.) Until recently, designers sought balance among creativity, functionality, style, quality, affordability, and manufacturability. Sustainability will be a new category that will have to be balanced with the others. I myself believe that sustainability is one of the most crucial factors in design, and this balance is going to impact the world, in one way or the other, which will in turn lead to a different future and experience.

There are so many aspects in design that I find it almost impossible to really define what design is. There are certain factors that I consider more important than the others, but I still do not have a definition for the word “design.” As our lives and mind change, design will change along with it. It is like a religion, which keeps changing slightly as the society and the culture change. It is a continuous evolution.

Design evolves.

Seating and Functionalism

Functionalism is a movement that developed in the 20th century, which focused on the product’s function and style/aesthetics derived from the function. There are several key factors to functionalism: simplicity, honesty of material, manufacturability, directness, etc. Among these factors, I chose to follow the history of functionalism through materials, as I believe materials had one of the most significant roles in driving the functionalist movement in the way it did.

What does material mean to an object, and how does it affect the object’s function and its form? How does one derive a “style” from materials?

In this project, I examined the relationship between materials and functionalism and its style through five chairs that were produced during the 19th and the 20th centuries.

The Thonet No. 14 was designed by Michael Thonet in 1859. This chair marks the big jump in the bentwood technology during the 19th century. The Thonet brothers developed a method of steaming wood to make it pliable, and this method was later patented in Vienna. This chair is focused on its function as a seating unit and its economy, so it is designed to require only a few similar or identical components. Its design is very standardized, without any excessive ornaments, and is thus suited for mass production, reducing the price as a result. The Thonet No. 14 is still being manufactured today, and is probably one of the world’s most successful commercial products. It is estimated that fifty million units of this chair had been made by 1930. Wood had been used to make chairs for a long time prior to this creation, but the different use of wood in the Thonet No. 14 makes the chair special. The beauty of this chair comes from the wood’s pattern and its elegant curvilinear form, as well as its economy and efficiency.

The next important stage in the development of functionalism is noted by Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair, built in 1925. Along with the rise of functionalism in the 20th century, unconventional materials started being used to make products, including chairs. The Wassily Chair consists of tubular steel bars and black canvas pieces – materials that hadn’t been used to build chairs before. The steel bars create the overall rectilinear, architectural style. The chair has a very simplistic design language, and is without any ornaments. The chair is constructed as if it were a piece of architecture, giving itself the overall industrial look. The materials – the harmony between the shiny steel bars and black canvas pieces helps the chair define its simple and honest “functionalistic” style.

The Chair Universale was the first all-plastic, injection molded chair in history. It was designed by Joe Colombo in 1965, and it is significant in fact that it is made out of plastic – another unconventional material. In the early 1900s, plastic became an increasingly popular material used in consumer goods. Joe Colombo decided to explore plastic as a chair material, and he ended up with a simple, modular, modern, and practical plastic chair. These plastic chairs were minimal, light, stackable, and cheap; they were perfect for mass production; these characteristics were made possible because they were made out of plastic. Nowadays, plastic chairs with different forms, colors, textures, weight, etc. are produced – plastic chairs are everywhere. Joe Colombo’s choice to use plastic for his chair opened up a new world of manufacturing.


Bean bag chairs became popular during the 1960s and they are still popular. A bean bag chair is basically fabric bag filled with small chunks of Styrofoam, PVC pellets, or shredded polyurethane foam. The interaction between the materials (the fillings) and the human body (the user) results in a unique form of the chair each time. I find this particular type of chair very interesting, because it highlights how material exploration can influence the form of an object. It may not seem to fit into the category of functionalism in a strict sense. However, I believe it does as bean bag chairs do provide a rather comfortable seating experience. Also, they are simple, modular, and easy to manufacture.


The Herman Miller Aeron Chair, designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf in 1994, is one of the most iconic chairs in terms of ergonomic design. The concept of ergonomics became popular in the 1970s. Various materials and forms were explored to seek ergonomics, and this exploration had an impact on the style of chairs. Like the Wassily Chair, produced during the active functionalist era, the materials used in this chair are left bare to add to the overall aesthetics. These Aeron Chairs are designed so that they could be manufactured efficiently, but without compromising quality and the seating experience. These chairs are actually quite expensive (costing around $1,000), and they may seem to go against the concept of functionalism that the object has to be reasonably priced. Nonetheless, the fact that they are such high quality, well-fabricated chairs let them last longer than buying a cheaper chair that will fall quickly, and in turn, they help you save money and resources.
Chairs – they have been around in our history for a long time. Their main goal has always been the same, and will probably remain the same, which is to provide us with convenient and comfortable seating experience. However, they seem to have evolved slightly, and now they embrace a completely new important aspect, which is the ergonomics.

How do we find the balance between functionalism and ergonomics? Ideally, neither one should be sacrificed, but in reality, the two aspects need to come to a compromise. Finding the right balance is an extremely difficult task, and I believe it is the job of us, the designers. Through design, we should find the ideal balance between economy and quality (including ergonomics,) and enhance the experience of the users.

Sources:

Bürdek, Bernhard E. - Design: History, Theory and Practice of Product Design
Birkhäuser, 2005

http://www.consumersearch.com/office-chairs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_bag

http://www.designboom.com/history/joecolombo_chair.html

http://www.knoll.com/products/product.jsp?prod_id=65

http://www.patricktaylor.com/thonet-bentwood-chair

Lighting for Entertainment

Keeping Time

I took a rather conceptual approach to the subject of “past.” I asked myself a series of questions: what does “past” mean, and how do we define it?; “past” is defined by “time”; then, what is “time” and how do we define it?

“Time” is defined and kept by the human invention called the “clock.”

I believe that the concepts of "time" and “time-keeping” are something unique to humans. There definitely is a flow of life cycles in the nature, and all organisms and natural elements on Earth follow this biological and environmental factor. Humans are not an exception to this flow, and we follow this cycle of life as well. However, with the invention of clocks, we have created a system of time-keeping, which is convenient but potentially restricting at the same time. Nowadays, our lives almost completely revolve around the clocks and the time they show. How did clocks come to become what they are now, and how did our lives become to depend on clocks so much?

The ancient Egyptians’ invention of the Obelisk could be considered as the very beginning of the human’s time-keeping history. The Obelisk was invented in 3500BC, and the ancient Egyptians used it to divide the daytime into two parts, by indicating noon. The ancient Egyptians placed these obelisks in strategic locations so that the shadows that these monuments casted would indicate noon, plus the year’s longest and shortest days. (They basically worked like the sundial.) The division of time was still vague, but these Obelisks were what really triggered the development of systematic time-keeping methods.


The next significant step in the history of time-keeping device is when Su Sung, a Chinese engineer, developed a Water Clock in AD1090. As the name of the clock indicates, the water clock uses water as its source of power and regulator. The water is fed to the scoops on the water-wheel at a constant rate, and when the scoop gets full, it causes the water-wheel to rotate till a new scoop comes in position. This clock was one of the first mechanical clocks in history; before then, people had to figure out the time by tracking the movement of the sun and the stars. This mechanism was not perfect, so there were lots of errors, but it still brought the time-keeping system to a whole new level, as people were now utilizing a man-made mechanism to define time, instead of relying on the natural elements.

People attempted to keep time through many different systems. This is a Chinese Incense Seal from around AD1329. This complicated pattern is actually a single continuous groove carved on wood. The groove was filled with incense of several different aromas, and they would let the incense burn from one end to the other, which took approximately 12 hours. People would determine the time by the location of the area that is burning, or by the scent of different aromas. This system did not work so perfectly either, because it was vulnerable to external factors, such as water. But I find this time-keeping device extremely fascinating, as it is such a different way of thinking, and the object that has a cultural and aesthetic value to it, besides its functional aspect. Plus, the incense aromas have their own functional value, too. It is also interesting that the pattern is in a circular shape, just like the modern clocks.

People since antiquity used the sun and the stars as a reference to tell time. When the sun is up in the sky, people would trace the movement of the sun to keep track of time. When the sun is not available after the sunset, people would rely on the stars to determine time.
The image on the top is a Korean sundial, which was created by a Korean scientist Jang Yeong Sil during the fifteenth century. By then, the sundials had become much more systematic and accurate, compared to the Obelisks from several thousand years ago. This sundial has 13 meters to indicate time, with 7 lines going across the meters to compensate for seasonal changes of the course of the sun.
The image on the bottom is a nocturnal from the 16th century, and this device uses the stars (the zodiacs) as indicators. Nocturnal had existed prior to the 16th century, but the older ones were much simpler and less accurate.
At this point in history, people were still using the sun and the stars to keep time. However the devices were much more elaborate and “time” was divided into much more and smaller “segments.” This indicates that the concept of “time” had become much more important to people’s lives.


The 18th and the 19th centuries were all about improving the mechanical clocks. Various sources of errors were analyzed in parts like the escapement mechanism, the balance wheel, and the pendulum, and the accuracy of clocks was improved immensely. As long-distance travel became more common, the role of “time” became very important. “Time” started serving as a promise between people, and it became a crucial part in everyday lives, enhancing efficiency and communication. In the international treaties of 1883 and 1884, the world agreed to establish a system called “time zones.” Nowadays, the world moves on with a standardized measurement of time. We have divided up a day into 24 hours with 60 minutes and smaller units.

Defining and keeping track of time do enhance the efficiency and communication in social activities, but they put huge restrictions on our lives. There is an official moment when the day ends and begins, and there are official hours and minutes that we need to follow. Every “present” moment passes by, and “past” is created every second as the second hand ticks. We’re captivated in our own system of time keeping.

Sources:

Richards E.G. - Mapping time : the calendar and its history
New York : Oxford University Press, 1999.

http://www.beaglesoft.com/maintimehistory.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_watches

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jang_Young_Sil