Fourth Year: The Haiku

I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t very good but at least I managed to get all the syllables right for the 5-7-5 structure we were told to have.

How are you today

Nighttime daytime ambience

Colour changes all

Fourth Year: Summarising Area with a Picture

On Monday we were asked to summarise our chosen area with an image along with a haiku. This was for the following day so we didn’t have long to do this. I enrolled the help of a friend studying at Abertay University to be in the photo.

It basically shows someone with a split personality and how colour can change someone.

#195 Objectified: Yes, Third Review In a Row

As the title of this post suggests, this is yet another review, but instead of a book this time, it is of the DVD Objectified. My book readings are on hold at the current moment in time due to waiting for a couple more to be delivered, and one of the books I have yet to read but have on hand at the moment looks very unappealing.

Objectified has been part of my relatively small DVD collection for about two years now. I preordered it in 2009 as it seemed like a very good watch and it was related to my course at university, which if you don’t already know, is product design. It’s director, Gary Hustwit, had previously made the documentary-film about the font Helvetica entitled Helvetica. Objectified is considered the second film in the series with Helvetica being the first and the yet to be released Urbanised being the third, and as far as I am aware, the last.

The number of times I have watched this film has been quite high regardless of it being a documentary rather than a fictional thing, but I like it. It is also one of the reasons that I liked Love the Beast so much, a documentary-film storytelling the relationship Australian actor, Eric Bana, has with his beloved 1970′s Ford Falcon Coupé.

The amount of information portrayed in little over an hour and a quarter is quite astonishing. This is enforced with interviewing many key product designers such as Dieter Rams of Braun, Jonathan Ive of Apple, Chris Bangle, Marc Newson, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby. There is no one person narrating, instead, it is told by the designers. The story being told is that of the relationship that people have with products, and the people behind them. Wonderful cinematography accompanies the interviews, often giving glimpses into how products are made, whether it be an injection moulding process of a chair, establishing shots that reinforce what the designer is talking about at that one time or a product being used.

In terms of usefulness towards my dissertation, upon watching this again today, it wasn’t as helpful as I thought it was going to be. It did feature a fair few designers that were included in the Designing Interactions book such as Jane Fulton Suri along with the books author, Bill Moggridge, but very little of the information was new to me in terms of what I could use or I had heard it all before from the book. I haven’t delved into the DVD that was included in Designing Interactions yet as I know it is portions of the interviews carried out with designers that were put into the book.

Back to Objectified, one of the parts I knew could have been wholeheartedly useful was the part with the then head of design at BMW, Chris Bangle. Instead of him talking about what I thought it would have been better to talk about he rambled on about something different and evidently my opinion of him continues to decline. I admired the big risk at what he took at the helm of design at BMW. He produced some of the most controversial automotive designs to date shaking the whole automotive design world. But I can’t help but feel that there would have been another car designer that would have been a better choice to have interviewed. Just my opinion.

In conclusion, I still consider this film to be very good and a strong alternative to any other film if I am sitting down to watch one, but in terms of using it for a source of information or analysis for my dissertation it was quite disappointing. In all the other sources I have used, I have managed to take away a different perspective of my topic, giving me greater depth for which I can think or write about, but this in a way seemed to barely scratch the surface. It is as though it was made for people who know little about the subject. Maybe I am being a little too harsh there, but it doesn’t mean it is a bad film.

#193 Designing Interactions: A Review of Sorts

My writing for my dissertation was done in a somewhat unorthodox manner and one which I know my adviser will not be too chuffed about to say the least, but I think it works. Instead of going straight into reading books and taking time to read through numerous ones before I put pen to paper, or in the case nowadays, fingers to keyboard, I took my proposal, which was already aiming straight and true in the direction that I was wanting to write about, took parts of it, and in a way, expanded them. Alongside, I would use all the internet based references found in the proposal along with others that I had bookmarked along the way, and wrote what I could call a first draft. Six thousand plus words in about a week, or if it is compressed into time of writing, about four days.

Now that the first draft is written using about fifty percent of the material I was hoping to use (alongside a rudimentary email based interview with a lecturer on Automotive design at Coventry University) I have started to read all the physical material that I hope to fully cement details and information in my writing. For most of the books, it is not the first time I have read them. For my proposal drafts, I read certain chapters of books in order to harvest the information I needed there and then, and it was more often than not, information regarding to the topic I was reading. Now, when I am going through the books again, I am reading it all, cover to cover, even if the information is not directly related to what I am writing about.

The first book that I have fully completed, and made basic notes about/from, is Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. It is not an easy book to start with either at almost eight hundred pages. It is a retrospective of interacting with computers from the early days of Douglas Engelbart working at the Stanford Research Institute where he invented the computer mouse, leading through the process in the eighties of the creation of the subject of Interaction Design, right up until modern day technology and beyond. It details many different designers and showcases a lot of varied pieces of work that have in one way or another influenced the face of interaction design and even design in general.

Whilst there were small mentions about vehicles scattered throughout the book, the parts which I found most interesting were in the early chapters of the book. The early days of humans interacting with machines. It was in these chapters that I ended up making most notes about. The notes were, I should point out, basically a page number, where on the page the piece of information was that I found interesting, and a quick note to jog my memory when I look through them. Even though these chapters do not relate directly to what I am writing about, or even relate at all, I can make comparisons. Comparisons using examples that people can relate to themselves was a hint that I was told would help make my final dissertation stand out against everyone else’s.

One of the chapters I found least influential as I read through the book, and this came as a surprise to me, as I was very tempted to skip this chapter completely was about the future interactions, or to give it the name in the book: Futures and Alternative Nows. I couldn’t really connect to the information that was written on the page. Some of the designers interviewed spoke about projects that I couldn’t find interesting even if I tried, and I am being honest there. Even though I know who they are, as in I have had exposure to some of their work previously, I couldn’t help fell that their work was, in my opinion, going in a direction that I didn’t believe in. I am saying this even though they were not designers who design products to go on sale, but instead, designers who produce things for the purpose of being in an exhibition and to get people thinking.

Reading this book highlights many problems that are wrong with so many products today in terms of user interfaces or physical design as a result. It lets you wonder what the future will be like without obviously pointing out that computers will be squeezed into everything. The thought crossed my mind many times as I read this, that the Product Design course I am on really should be an Interaction Design course or dare I say it, an electronics course. Looking back over my previous three years, it is clear that an emphasis has been on electronics and less about design. You will get marked down for electronics not working and not so much marked up for justifying design decisions made along the way.

To end on a positive, I feel that reading this book will evidently help me in my final year on my main project as well as my dissertation, not only by providing some insightful information about different products, their history and problems encountered, but just the sheer amount of knowledge it provides. It isn’t an encyclopaedia type book, or glossary so it isn’t quite one that you could just have on your shelf and look up when needed but it is useful nonetheless.