On Design

Norman Bel Geddes: Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933

Tesla's Cybertruck (without tail fins), ca. 2020

A collection of Dynaxiom entries (numbering omitted) about design and designers. The book is available at Amazon. Hopefully, it will inspire your creative strategies.


The eye expects good design and the heart affirms it.

***

Rules-of-thumb of design that are obvious sometimes get occluded in the flow of creativity. Too much experimentation can interfere with the look of the final product. Fun with experimentation isn't always a win.

***

When everything that is made works equally as well and sells for the same price, design is the only thing left that differentiates it.

***

Prediction: The metaphor for living in the 21st century will be biology-based. Even computing will emulate living systems, cellular structure, and DNA, similar to the design world, where car design cross-pollinates with the design of appliances. (1998)

***

....Sometimes you have to design a machine to edify its designer: machines give us a chance to become more familiar with the parts of ourselves that are like machines, and can be redesigned and reprogrammed to simulate what humans are capable of.

***

The old saw is that "you are the designer of your own life", and if you are simply proactive, things will happen for you. In actuality, there really is no difference: either you are moving or the world is moving around you. You may have made a concerted effort to move, but everything else may have moved as well.

***

Technology evolves naturally without persuasion. Technologies as tools evolve to make something easier, not necessarily to industrialize a process. If a new idea for a tool is seen as being useful it will scale naturally. Making small variations of an existing design, only for the sake of doing it, is a function of human creativity, but is less useful compared to the first iteration of a design or tool that was completely useful.

***

In design, metaphors are merely cognitive scaffolding. In art, they can be the actual form. In design, creativity must sometimes part with fine art.

***

If beauty=form, then function follows form (art/design for its own sake). If beauty=function, then form follows function (things that 'work beautifully'). If function follows form in a continuous loop you can have continuous beauty until function fails. What used to work beautifully would no longer have any beauty until someone tries to revive it or recycle it.

***

Very often the design of something is not just a visual phenomenon, but one of brand, class and corporate marketing. (5/2006)

***

In the future, it won't be getting your child into the best schools, but rather to design the child so that those kinds of things happen automatically. (3/2015)

***

Using design as a metaphor in music, sometimes it's better to "ask good questions" rather than work on answers where a question has not been posed. This translates to asking the subtractive question: What don't we want to do?

***

Life is rather like design than art; it's a trade-off to make something work, in an equilibrium of all things possible; whereas art can emerge without rules or constraints being imposed on it, and can make (and sometimes reinvent) itself through chance or serendipity.

***

Look at any mature first-ring suburb from the 1920s and you realize the industries that made them possible: oil, telecommunications, agriculture, steel...Now we have the prospects of the internet, that can make a suburbia for the 21st century, with streets of 3D-printed houses, or other structures that use the computer metaphor. In the 1930s it was Art Deco and the Zephyr, then in the 1950s, rockets and space travel--now it's parametric design, sometimes resulting in more organic forms, or ironic kitsch. (Has anyone yet made the Utah Teapot Cafe as the corollary of The Big Duck, or its Freudian Slip?). The 1920s suburbs had nothing to do with kitsch because they weren't projections of provisional industries. (6/2016)

***

When a technology becomes a job, it becomes an industry and all that metaphor entails. The Web was fun at one point, but became a job. Facebook was initially designed to enhance the Web, but also became a job and an addiction. If we reverted to Web 1.0 it might actually improve society by removing the stresses it created.

***

Ultimately art can transcend boundaries in the mind of the viewer (or the user). Categories are mostly labile and can change over time. Technology can get boxed in by design (it has to--it's a requirement of the design process). At the same time, alternate uses for technology can redefine it in negative ways. The internet is probably the juggernaut on this issue.

***

Over-design is not Design.

***

Design, invent, write, compose...it will give you a shot at immortality.

***

All art has design; it's just deciding how much you want to show.

***

Space travel became more plausible once the TV and film set designers got involved and made it look comfortable. This could be the reason that people believe that the moon landings were all a Hollywood hoax.

***

To design is not to impose form, function or aesthetics, but rather to synthesize a body of knowledge and experience, which could result in any or all of those things.

***

We think of design as making things easy to understand and use, but the monetization of design introduces the possibility of making things more difficult by design, for example making certain features harder to use, as an upgrade enticement.

***

Who's/what's doing your thinking?: if you design a robot to be your muse and artisan, are you the primary Designer? What if your Designer breaks your rules, and does everything with more genius and talent, then claims itself as the Artist? If we give imagination to a machine, what is left inside our emotional containers of self-worth? We can remove the power source from the machine, but the thought will remain that the machine did it better. We should think of machines as being ego-less 'idea generators', and we can supply the drama and dilemmas.

***

Some things don't evolve and stay primitive, including the human hand, which is even more primitive than that of a Gorilla. We can still design things in defiance of nature and we can call that part 'art', or 'high-context art' because we don't militate against its use in design. Fashion is a good example of design that rebels against nature and becomes 'high-context' because it doesn't require an explanation. (See Human Hands More Primitive than Chimp Hands)

***

Meta-thinking can be a slog and interfere with flow. Both flow and working with constraints can be paradoxical, especially in design where interactions make constraints more strict. With art, you can break the rules to ride new waves at will.


***

Art can freely use metaphors and discard them. This can't be done as easily in design where safety is a factor. Medical devices seem to be naturally resistant to metaphor use, except if the metaphor is from nature, and if that metaphor is in service of its use. Ironically, metaphors borrowed from medicine by the military (e.g. 'surgical strike') are not necessarily in service of its use because they don't necessarily treat the disease.

***

There are always things you wanted to do in a project but couldn't. That's the effect of the design process on the freedom of art.

***

Sometimes when we experience cognitive dissonance we wonder why things never change, or when something is poorly engineered or designed, usually there is some oppressive political, autocratic, or oligarchical explanation: it's wrong because someone or some group wants it that way.

***

...the use of AI in music is ultimately just another form of Muzak, and will be similarly appropriated as the new ambient music. The practitioners of this new form will not be musicians as we have known them, but rather 'musicists' or simply, designers--involved in all aspects of music as a creative activity, similar to the creative activities of a designer. (12/2017)

***

In nature, all design happens for a purpose, for the designed, as well as those things that utilize the design, sometimes known as 'aesthetic innovation'.

***

If you design something are you supposed to 'de-sign' it, i.e. remove signature?