Melodievb/dart391b

Even though my interests are going out of design’s world, I must admit that my design classes are involving me in many different ways. Because I am trained to questioning other’s practice, it gives me the opportunity to asked myself about both my actual and future professional design and market practices. I am constantly wondering how I would market my crafts, how could I expect to use my ability to be at the same time, successful enough to avoiding money concerns while I will be working in a responsible manner. I guess that at that point, it is a normal questioning that I share with most of my collegues but I think mine is probably deeper than theirs because of my motherhood conscience and the fact I am planning to have a polyvalent art practice. I just started Klein’s book called No logo and I am pretty sure I’ll find some potential answer to the concerns I am talking about here. I strongly think than being a francophone student in a anglophone context of learning is enhancing my capacity to take as much as I can since it is putting me in a complete and overwhelming state of learning. Seeing the world through those stranger’s eyes are putting me out of my comfort zone which is always useful when you want to go further. I deeply feel that this state of mind is forcing me to find my own way to approach art and design and to define myself as a student, a person, a consumer, a designer, an artist. It really makes me feel alive these days…

I am taking a Sociology class this term which is called Sociology through films and I am amazed to see how Sociology and Design are linked. Actually, I am studying many concept who could be useful to see in our design classes. Last class, we saw a part of the documentary called “the corporation” and I decide to rent it in order to have a chance to see it entirely. I was really shocked to discover that kind of information which is concerning directly consumption, marketing, production and so on, through a Sociology class which is a free elective. Of course, we talk about sustainability and socially responsible products but I think we should have courses that talk directly of those issues, the real ones… Theory is good but to my opinion, waiting for the marketplace to find out about all these bad practices that our future employers do use to gain power and money. I really think we should have courses like Ethics in Design, Deontology in Design, Environmental implications in Design… Some of the real stuff, something more concrete.

Through this film, I heard about a woman called Klein and one of her project called No Logo. I am planning to look for more information because it may be related to my plastic bags projects in a certain way.

Yesterday morning like every Tuesday morning almost, I was sat at the table of a coffee shop called Le Placard on Mont-Royal avenue. This place is very interesting because of its concept: they serve food, delicious fair trade coffee and the whole place is filled with used clothing they sale and plastic mannequins. The ambiance is great and not too noisy even though many people is passing by or stay for a while. I used to take few minutes to listen to what the old men that come almost every morning are saying about actuality. It is always interesting to see places on the Plateau who still have both trendy and simple people as clientele. Anyway, yesterday I listen to a conversation between the owner of the place and a neighbor. They were talking about how difficult it is to get an outside bench installed from the city. There are asking them for 4 years but nothing happen. He was talking about the 3 brand new benches just few meters to the East of there businesses, just in front of the car concessioner. They were also talking about how the city’s employees are incompetent and slow to get the job done. Then, I wondered if Designers shouldn’t be hired by the cities to help to resolve those kinds of problems…

What I keep in mind:

User oriented approach is not successful because research is not done seriously

This paper is based upon the idea of “reader-response” + empirical examples of user-modified designs

This technique allow more flexibility and opportunity for users to actualize designs and participate in decision process

Le Corbusier’s way of thinking about design = My task is to establish people in conditions of harmony… He sees experts as the only ones who can provide true order in cities, he builds on the base of his own point of view

———-My questions about it: Did Le Corbusier ever think about people in wheel chairs, mothers with strollers, etc.

———-Later on in the text, it says that user needs and wants continuously change. I am not sure to agree with this idea. I think that the mass production event created that need and will but it was not in the nature of ancient consumer. The texts we are assigned to read always have those little shocking sentences and ideas and it bothers me a lot, actually. Designers, even if in the text, they are talking about the benefits responsible design, don’t take enough blames on their back. They are the one who created the bad habits about consumerism and they too easily forgot to mention it, in my opinion.

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.