Design Museum Walkthrough Pt.1: How Good is Good Design?
"Designer, Maker, User". This slogan is everywhere in the museum. The idea is simple: the everyday product we used are first designed by designers, made by makers and lastly used by users.
The new Design Museum has a lot products that were produced back in the days, at it is interesting to see how everyday-products had evolved to the present designs. Few of the legendary designs work well such as the london roundel sign inspired by London's Underground Logo. It stood the test of time, it's effective and it's a good design.
Here's a talk on TED talk by Don Norman on how good design works and stood the test of time, one of it goes to the Philippe Starck's lemon squeezer.
How Good is Good Design?
There comes the questions: does a good design has to evoke expression? Or is a good design has to focus on usability? Or a well-designed product is a well-decorated product?
There will never have an answer and should not have an answer because the term / definition of "good design" kept on evolving over the time. Ironically, from John Ruskin's period of "Art for art's sake" to the Bauhaus / Swiss Style modern period which eliminates all kind of decorative and just focus on usability. Good design doesn't seem to found a peace among designers.
However, if one day you see someone selling umbrellas with holes, that's a bad design.
Click to enlarge image(s)
Designed to kill and heal, these two products are the byproduct of human's greed. Although the sniper is so easy to use even a 10 years old kid could hold it during the WWII and "make country proud", one question that arose from consumers is do good products have to be ethical?
Good design is so hard to define that even I have problem writing this post, but it is a tough question that got me thinking since I entered design school. But two years of freelance told me that a good design is a design that meets the design brief and makes my client happy. Do I really have to care about usability, aesthetic, ethics and emotion? Yes, but not really...
I'll end this post with a quote I've read recently from a book that I had bought from Design Museum:
"The idea that a designer was an artiste first and communicator second (or third) was quaint at the outset but has offered diminished returns over the long term. Although personality routinely plays a key role in visual communication, it must be the result, not the goal, of solving design problems."
Steven Heller, "The Me Too Generation," in The Graphic Design Reader (2002).
