Wherever an orthodox approach seems self-evident, there are always radical new perspectives that can challenge this.
This weeks reading, Design meet Disability, was quite the interesting piece. I found myself thinking about terminology, how the words we use advise how we envision a product or concept, which then dictates how that thing develops, and finally how it appears to the public.
The example of eye-wear was informative, for sure. I still remember glasses being 'nerdy' (think Steve Urkel) as a kid. Over the last two decades, however, they have become a highly fashionable item - in large part thanks to the changing approach manufacturers had with them - moving them out of the 'purely medical' field into the world of fashion, and style.
But moving from a dry field to a colorful one presents both opportunities and pitfalls - not everyone wants brightly colored lenses. As is always true in my opinion, good design is long lasting style, rather than fleeting fashion. Like fitted jeans vs. bellbottoms.
Moving on, I found it interesting the bit about the prosthetics and free climbing. A man loses his limbs, rebuilds new limbs even better than his previous ones, and his support moves from sympathy to frustration as he witness calls for ejection from his competitors due to his ‘unfair advantage.’ In one sense what he did was the most human thing he could do - turn a problem into a benefit. In another sense he is now on a wholly different playing field than everyone else. I did write about this in an ethics class I took in undergrad, that to be mechanically superior to a natural, or unmodified human presents certain imbalances. Again, in my opinion, these imbalances are only to become more rapid and larger in the coming century.
So what does this mean for me and my cohorts producing stuff at ITP - it means
DO NOT PRETEND TO IMITATE SOMETHING
DO SOMETHING PURPOSEFUL, CLEAR, AND POWERFUL
If the climber had tried to recreate a human hand as he knows it, he would likely still be toiling away with prototypes. If the medical eye wear companies had kept trying to make subtle indistinct eye wear, portraying sight issues as 'bad' and 'something to be ashamed of' we wouldn't have a massive eye wear fashion industry, and billions of people happily wearing glasses. If Steve Jobs had said 'Let's make sure our music players and phones look like all the rest,' we would not have the iPod, or iPhone.
Speaking of those devices, this quote bubbles up - '"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Simple things are not necessarily easy to design.’ Exactly.
What this all means to me is attitudes are not homogeneous. Even within the smallest communities, there is a perpetual fluidity. As I like to say the only thing that never changes is change itself, or the more bizarre: change is the only true constant.
So, just like the quote to begin this post, there is always room for improvement, for change, for both specificity and generality to be added for the benefit of your project. It just needs to be asked: what purpose does this fulfill? Is it an improvement? What can I remove?
Because it's important to be able to design a piece that can be used without thought, however, that is rarely if ever easily done.