The Language of Drawing, by Helmut Germer

As the week 3 reading, I read The Language of Drawing, by Helmut Germer. It focuses on less of Design and Design Thinking, but more on drawing and sketching, and how it is to be applied by designers like us. The reading was divided into parts: why we draw, the meaning of drawing, the requirements for drawing, motives to draw, making drawings, the analytical drawing, intuitive drawing, talking about drawings, and drawing in terms.

Prior to reading this article, I would never have thought that drawing was so important to any kind of designer. Sure, it’s important to be able to draw in order to design, but I’ve always seen drawing as a mere tool on the sidelines. I think drawing has become such a part of a designer’s everyday life that we’re not coherently aware of it anymore. It “is fundamentally rooted in our need to express ourselves in a tangible and identifiable manner.” It wasn’t until this reading that I learnt that “drawing is one of the few disciplines in visual design that inherently allows for this means of expression to be realised in such a direct manner.” No wonder everyone draws.

I learnt that “Drawing is always fundamentally associated with an intense analysis of perception: the personal drawing trains his/her perception skills and ability to evaluate at an advanced level.” I personally am pursuing a photographic career, which I though would require very little need of drawing or sketching (except to draft out ideas and such), but this article really brought it home, since “even careers that seem to have little to do with drawing can gain from these consciously experienced processes on a long-term basis.” I also saw sketches as a very sidelined tool for jotting down ideas or concepts, but “sketches serve as precursors to solutions to graphic problems that deal with complex design tasks, or even the direct and impartial search for ideas, visualising the feasibility or potential of a thought in a quick and direct manner. Because sketches can document internal ideas and design visions, they become accessible notations that can be further developed on a fundamental level. Moreover, they serve to communicate thoughts, like design ideas, to co-workers, business partners, customers, and so on.”

Although there wasn’t much in the article that was completely new to me, I appreciated the reminders of drawing that it presented. An example of this is the fact that drawing doesn’t have to be on white paper, nor does it have to be done with a pen or pencil.  What was new to me were the reasons and contents of drawing. The 3 main reasons: To reproduce and object, to depict a fascination, and to visualize a state. The contents: An object/situation, an internal image/memory, an idea/fiction/fact/feeling, the analysis of drawing as a process.

I will have to completely agree with the fact that drawing is essential for any type of design, whether it involves drawing or not.

Get me off the Island! [STORY]

Cockatoo Island was anything but beautiful. Thanks, false advertising. The four stood, a little way off the pier, looking miserably in the opposite direction. The supposedly brilliant blue sky was a dull grey, with the odd cluster of clouds lining the day. The cobalt sea was a sickly black, accompanied by the churning forth. The green in the flyer was just non-existant in real life.

“We’re only here for 3 days,” Vanessa’s voice rung out, trying to lighten the mood, “only 3 days.”

“3 days in a tent,” Aye moaned.

“It’s not too bad a place for an interesting photo-shoot,” Rachel said, her mind far away from the rest of the group.

“Well, Karl just left,” Buster said flatly.

The other 3 turned to the pier, alarmed.

There, on the museum ferry, was their tutor, holding up a sign:  GET OFF THE ISLAND

“Oh no..” Vanessa mumbled, “are we in danger or something?”

Buster looked across the Quay warily, “it seems like we haven’t been paying attention, it’s our task.”

Other kids were milling around in their groups, some looking as if they wanted to cry, others already coming together to formulate plans.

As the crowd dispersed into the island, mostly heading to the shipping docks where all the wood and equipment to build a boat were, the four could hear snippets of their conversations. Something about restoring the ships, swimming, and something about cross-breeding giant cockatoos to fly everyone off.

Rachel reached out onto the dock notice board to pluck out a copy of the museum ferry timetable. Rolling her eyes, she studied it.

“45 minutes,” she said, settling down on the ground against a rock.

Get me off the Island!

GET ME OFF THE ISLAND! BRIEF

Fantastical/Imaginative
Breed giant cockatoos fo fly us off the island

• A lot of cockatoos
• A lab
• Lab equipment
• Nuclear source
• Saddles
• Training equipment
• Safety

 

Practical/Pragmatic
Restore the shipping docks to build a ship/boat off the island

• Restoring of shipping dock
• Wood
• Machinery
• A crew
• Instruction Manual

Simple/basic/minimal
Take the Biennale Museum ferry back onto land 

• Ferry timetable
• Island map
• $3.50

Design and the Play Instinct, by Paul Rand

For week 3, I read Design and the Play Instinct, by Paul Rand. My my tutor said that Paul Rand might be a little difficult to read, and I agree completely. The whole thing was a bit of a nightmare to read, and it took forever to get into the nitty gritty. However, a few important things that did get through to me did impact my way of thinking of design.

Design can be seen as a game to play, with rules and limits. This makes designing less open ended. “The best Renaissance teachers, instead of beating their pupils, spurred them on by a number of appeals to the play-principle.” This can be seen as Design Thinking, solving the problem of learning through a balance of creativity and intellect. For example, Montaigne was taught Greek through a card game invented by his father. Essentially, by making learning a game, designers are able to combine everyday mundane topics to create fun through design thinking.

Design Thinking isn’t about breaking the boundaries, but understanding the limits and designing within them. As Braque says, “limited means begot new forms, invite creation, make the style. Progress in art does not lie in extending it’s limits, but knowing them better.” Therefore, it can be said that the limits of Design Thinking help create interesting art/challenges. The Tangram helps to “Sharpen the powers of observation through the discovery of resemblances between geometric and natural forms.” This allows for imagination through design with shapes, unlike the crossword, which allows for no imagination at all. Japanese Artist Ryori Hayashinan uses squares/geometric shapes as a guide to draw certain birds. Although both the Tangram and his squares are geometric shapes, the Tangram uses squares to indicate forms, whereas Hayashinan uses them as a guide/clue for illustration. Similarly, chinese characters are designed within a “ninefold” grid, but the squares are used to fill space, not to produce a geoetric pattern. Also using grids as a form of limitations are the Modulor and Architect’s Plans. The Modulor can be seen as a fixed system, based on one specific concept of proportion, and can be applied to any drawing. Conversely, the architect’s plans have no overall template, and there must be a unique grid system for each design/plan. Both still use limitations, but in different ways.

Another limiting grid system is the simple design for a booklet/leaflet. Although there are rectangular limits to divide a page into columns, the designer is able to pay with pictures, type, paper, ink, color, texture, scale, size and contrast within the grid. This idea reiterates the concept of understanding the boundaries and designing within them. Having the gride-rules, the designer is freed from having to deal with dimensions, and can design within a perfectly good template (another example being the Modulator). However, the grids themselves are not design, but tools for designing. In the end, rules actually help bring a polished, relevant piece into being.

I don’t quite agree with the idea that only by limiting the boundaries of design can one produce true art. I believe that open ended design can produce equally good results, as it allows the designer to think for themselves and design whatever they want. However I do agree that having limits help with creating interesting art/challenges, as well as helping students design within the boundaries as it is what the industry will demand of us. Although I agree that design thinking is creating within the boundaries, I believe that art (new art) is about breaking the boundaries and being avant-garde.

I found it very interesting that Rand decided the relate design to a game, with rules and boundaries for it to be considered design, and it has given me a new approach to design thinking.

Beauty-in-Use, by Cameron Tonkinwise [QUADRANTS]

Stuff I understand

• Everything comes down to beauty
• Beauty ensures the care that it is due from humans
• Beauty pushes away artifice, because of its natural aesthetics
• In designing something that is meant for use, the train of thought tends to veer to beauty

Stuff I don’t

• The Intro, it’s too dense.
• The opening quite and how it relates
• Some big words
• Why the paragraph about Philippe Lacoue-Labarth was necessary/relative.

Key Ideas/Words

• Beauty is the aesthetic that overrules artifice
• Care of a product comes from the beauty of an object
• Beauty is what inspires us to turn away from the vita activa of everyday life.
• “One way of designing care relationships between users and what they use is: beauty”
• “Beauty-in-use” Beauty as a function, use in both design and practicality.

Questions/Research

• Makes me want to create a cup towards this brief
• What will a cup like this be like?
• The PAPER CUP has been in use for 100 years

Change by Design, by Tim Brown

In preparation for Week 2’s Design Thinking, I read the introduction to Change by Design by Tim Brown (with Barry Katz). The book itself is about “how design thinking transforms organisations and inspires innovation”. Although it was merely the introduction of a whole book about Design Thinking, the article was informative and helped me get an even better grasp of what Design Thinking is.

The article mentioned concepts that were brought up in Week 1’s lecture and tutorial, such as the idea of designers sharing perspectives to generate breakthrough ideas through an unconventional approach of design thinking (innovation), as well as the fact that Designers need to have an interest in all fields of society in order to understand their clients, as we will be “approaching the world from a set of operating principles that was different from theirs.” Another very strong motif that ran through the lecture, the tutorial and the article is that Design Thinking will place design thinkers in a very uncomfortable position, but it allows for new possibilities and new approaches to solve the problems that we face.

However, I was able to learn about new concepts from the article, and they are as follows:
– The world needs new choices and ideas that will cater to the new technologies. With new discoveries, the old paradigm of dealing with world problems is close to useless. New ideas and products from designers that will “balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole”.
– Design Thinkers integrate “what is desirable… what is technologically feasible and economically viable” through a new approach of problem solving to produce lasting and innovative results that benefit society.
– Like many inspirational designers such as Isambard Brunel, Thomas Edison and Andy Goldsworthy , design thinkers must have a “human centered” worldview as opposed to a technology-centered one. This way they are able to “engage their viewers in an experience” that will make them part of the artwork. This has allowed me to think that perhaps the client is the subject to focus on when designing for them.
A few quotes that I can definitely take out of the article to guide me through the Design Thinking course will be “Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognise patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols”, which can be described as “a set of principles that can be applied to diverse people to a wide range of problems”. Design Thinking is also “all about exploring different possibilities”.

 

After reading this article, and being able to apply it to the knowledge gained from Week 1’s lecture and tutorial, I am able to form a more solid idea of Design Thinking. However, as a Design Thinker in training, I must be open minded and be ready to be thrown into discomfort because of design thinking, as the “design thinker is in a position to tackle more complex problems” to come.

Expectations of Design Thinking

Design Thinking and Interdisciplinary Design was explained to me today. First in a Lecture and then expanded in a Tutorial.

In a nutshell for me:
Design Thinking is an experimental paradigm that does not limit what design should/should not be by letting Designers be open-ended, refuse the status quo, and move into uncomfortable spaces of the paradigm to share experiences with other designers, and feel happy in that zone of discomfort.

Keeping this in mind, I expect to proceed through Design Thinking feeling quite lost, uncomfortable and unsure of what is to be expected. However, I do expect to rear from this course feeling happy in this uncomfortable way of thinking, having interacted with other types of designers who are not of my field.

I expect to come out a designer who is more aware of the more irregular way of thinking, to take an ill structured approach to the world that is difficult to understand. I hope to learn ways in which I can become a designer that utilises this Design Thinking, who is able to imagine the future, and by doing so creating it through Design.

The Drift

Windows.
Large windows.
Large Clear Windows.
Windows lined the boundaries of where to go, where not to go.
Windows loomed from the ceiling, and glared up from the ground.

We’re going on a coffee hunt.
We’re going to find a vendor.
It’s such new building.
We’re not scared…

Uh oh. Windows. Large clear Windows.
We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it.
Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!
Step, step bonk- OW!

The Windows aren’t safe.
The glass is clear and transparent.
Windows are dangerous.
Glass is dangerous.

Patterns on the glass save lives.

Let’s walk through the door instead.