Journal 01

  Although I have been passionate about design from my school years, Design 200 was my first opportunity to learn about design formally. In the last few classes, the most exciting has been modern history of design, and how design movement began as we know it. It was amazing to me how an architect would use his ideas of creativity and grand design in a small thing like chair or a logo for the company rather than design a huge building. However, even designing small things beautifully, as Deskey’s examples have shown, an architect/designer can potentially impact more people’s lives than creating a grand façade in a few places in the world.

I also liked the idea of looking at mundane and worldly arena of business and technology as a place where beauty and living creativity can thrive. Who knew that telephone could look or like or sound like coo coo clock, or later on took shapes that would resemble its surroundings. I liked the ideas of industrial design which impacts things like mass production, packaging and marketing of a product.

This influences people’s everyday lives and they develop a sense of beauty. I think the greatest achievement of a designer is to infuse and nurture an intuition and innate sense of beauty among fellow human beings. Although the classes didn’t say this out loud, this is what I felt what I learnt from the first few classes in Design 200.

One thing that intrigued me much was how popular modern “coffee shop creativity” affects my classmates. Most of them seem to come from well off backgrounds, and have beautiful living spaces, yet, they love to work whole day in a coffee shop. The modern coffee shop has the necessary ambience of warmth and wifi, instant gratification of caffeine in many stylish flavors, and a chic deco to go with it. The aspiring modern designer seem to fit in there perfectly.