Reflection Blog 08
Today’s class of design and the human condition was focused on the digital image that followed the evolution of design from a manual to a digital medium. Being a graphic design student, I was intrigued by the way digital typography was addressed as an interactive medium whereas manual typography blatantly exists as a flat text on paper. I believe that the digitalization of typography, not only changed the platform, it rather manipulated its form and related it to other elements of design such as dynamism. While we were discussing this, I wondered how while reading or researching; links and certain words easily transmit us to other related pedagogical sources over the digital world and we can surf through all the relevant information within less time whereas the manual sources seem to bound us to a certain article. Therefore, digital typography, hence digital medium; seems to act as a catalyst towards our working process. Certain other interesting examples include the E-books and E-mails that are perceived affordances and can afford more interactions than a traditional source. Human-computer interaction is a mode of communication between users and machines, both speaking different languages.
As discussed during the session; in 1984, Apple launched its first consumer-based computer. The creation of this consumer-based computer was a unique concept back then and held a great influence for the upcoming design innovations. This part of the conversation led me to the term ‘User-Centered Design’. It was first introduced 30 years ago in the book “User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction” written by Donald Norman and Stephen Draper. In this book, the authors speculate about central issues and questions involving designers, creators, and users, when developing software. User-Centered Design refers to when the users are the center of a design. Therefore, a designer works to create a design for the users that is seamless and acts all-natural according to the user’s requirements and facilities. This point took me back to our previous session where we discussed good design is invisible to the user. Therefore, today this term holds great significance for the designers that strive to create designs for benefitting their users in this consumer-oriented design world.
Another important thing we discussed today was ‘inter-disciplinary design’. Since the beginning of the 18th century, with the industrial revolution; design existed as an artistic aesthetic fused with the form and functionality of an object. Later after World War 2, design development became a social responsibility. As discussed in our previous sessions, today, design exists as a problem solver instead of an expression of personal sentiments, unlike art.
Therefore, interdisciplinary design is used to solve problems from a broader perspective of domain boundaries and cultural diversities. It can be comprehended as a framework of a designer to develop design solutions that generate in two or more disciplines. The process of figuring out problems with design should not be confined to a single area, such as painting, graphic design, or architecture. It is in this combination of design and technologies from other fields, in which we can see the origin of interdisciplinary design. Consequently, the interdisciplinary design is what happens when design thinking is applied to the multilateral society; it also embodies the interaction between people and the world.
