Melodievb/dart391b

crazy artists…

I really enjoyed this assigned reading although I found it hypocrite in a certain manner. I focused in those following elements:

What is a need? When they say that designers are “centrally concerned about satisfying the needs of users” I wonder what kind of needs they are referring.

They say that a design “is evaluated according to how well it blends aesthetic beauty with an elegant functionality and ease of use. Then I reminded what Rhona told us about what is a good design and I thought about the example of a white porcelain dishes set ad the fact that plain neutral colors and pure lines were sustainable design because they will fashionably last forever.

In the passage where they define what ethnography is for, I wondered if to create “new product ideas that satisfy needs consumers did not know they had.” was not the roots of hyper-consumerism. 

Just after this paragraph, they talked about the use of design in functionality of daily things such as pull/push doors and I realized that it was much more important to me than anything else even though I want to specialize in graphic design area. Ironic, isn’t?

I also asked to myself a lot of questions about the impact of manufactured products on ornamentation and advertisement’s development. 

I also noted to myself that I should go to search on de Certeau’s work because it seems very interesting.

The approach of experimental psychology and participation design interested me a lot but my concern is still that it is meant to make people buy more instead of make them feel better and live better…

It is very shocking to see how the readings we have to do is directly relatable to the personal project I talked about. Actually, I took the entire day to work on it. I started to design a wallet instead of starting with a bag like I thought at first. I found the text I had to read a little bit abstract, though. But for sure, it was really interesting…

Starting to try to sell the textile works I make and thinking about the personal research I briefly talked about in my info page, I design this tag to send with my first official order. I thought it would be a good idea to name it simply “scarf made out of red wool”, without adding anything else than its own personality. I guess that branding strategies are ways to make people buy things for what they represent instead of what they truly are. Talking about how I made it, for whom, where, all this on a separate sheet of paper instead of sewing a tag  into the artifact, is the way I found to let the consumer’s appropriation takes all the space since I am done with it. Even though branding is a way to recognize our pairs into the mass, letting the product blank of any kind of tags is a way to leave the product’s esthetic and meaning talk for itself. To my opinion, a good design shouldn’t need any marketing trick to be recognized. Moreover, it brings people to talk to each other in order to be able to know where it is from instead of saying it with a tag.