Design

15 Feb 2010 2133H

Perhaps this is a bit mean to say, but

Look.
If all design is merely form giving, then can you really complain about the people who are working at the tail end of the design process, primarily aestheticians — alright — decorators — who are tasked with the job of making something look good, that is, what Viktor Papanek called “shroud design”, rather than [...]

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13 Feb 2010 1318H

The Ah Ha moment

just arrived. This morning, doggedly pursuing leads on the internet in my pursuit of my new intellectual project, the history of design in East Asia, I ran across this article by Matthew Turner, a professor at Edinburgh Napier University. In this journal he writes (forgive me for quoting wholesale here):
For some time, now, Occam’s razor [...]

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12 Feb 2010 1948H

Let’s just call design what it is

From my private study, from all the reading I have done and the observations I have made, I think it is now safe to declare design what I really think it is. Design as we know it today really is a western way of looking, thinking, and shaping, that flows from many very long aesthetic [...]

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28 Jan 2010 0022H

Another year, another Apple event

Or was it? I’ve been saying this in various places, but, I think we saw a game changer of an event today. Technologically nothing has changed. But because it addresses emerging markets and unmet user needs, the iPad will change computing as we know it, really make it part of our contemporary everyday experience, almost [...]

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24 Jan 2010 1115H

Example of excise

With apologies to the author, although it’s a brilliant test exercise in coding functionality, this is a perfect example of excise. It seems stuck in beginner mode: if you don’t know the names of months, how many there are, days in a week, hours in a day, minutes in an hour, so on, or what [...]

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24 Jan 2010 0913H

Recent thoughts on Chinese design

Is it possible to talk about Chinese design when all Chinese designers have been taught about ways of looking, thinking, and form giving by Westerners? That the very value of design comes to Chinese design because of its engagement in the global late capitalist market flows of goods and services? A priori, I draw on [...]

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20 Jan 2010 1645H

On design thinking and public policy

Given the tremendous quantities of crap not just in products but in experiences that have been rendered unto the public by designers, and the industry’s collective failure to own up to its responsibility for that, design thinking or no, I think it would be not only premature but overly optimistic at best to turn the [...]

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19 Apr 2009 0724H

from “Beijing Modern”

‘‘Too often contemporary Chinese art is rooted in Western traditions,’’ he says. ‘‘Even my education was Western.’’ (Shao’s parents, acclaimed painters, began giving him painting lessons when he was 3.) ‘‘True contemporary Chinese art must evolve from Chinese traditions,’’ he says. ‘‘It must have a Chinese soul.’’
Link

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12 Jan 2009 2317H

Notes on “Designing Design,” by Kenya Hara

Today we have absolutely no means available to realistically imagine the extent of the brutality of the cultural revolution called the Meiji restoration (1867), which managed to transform completely the purely Japanese “Edo Culture” into a Westernized one. However, people in those days probably expended a stupendous amount of energy on information gathering and study [...]

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12 Jan 2009 1913H

In praise of the Pre

Congrats to Matias Duarte, Wes Yun, and the team who worked on making the Palm Pre’s debut such a success. (If you haven’t seen the launch keynote, check it out.) Backtrack a little over 13, 14 months to a conversation I had with Wes and Matias about working for a project that they could not [...]

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