Without a thought
From Mod Mania
People always like to modify the use of existing design around. The reason behind is basically help them to find a way of using things to meet their objective. As the world is full of different things, system, space to fulfil our work, there still have some gaps between it. As a designer, we are designing things to have a better condition. However, designer often finds that is hard to find inspiration to design a new object that helps people. If you just look around you, you can find plenty of things to inspire you. People always think that the inspiring events must be something that memorable, little act of kindness or thoughtfulness can also act as the key things in your life. Simple things other than actions can also do the habit, you just have to simply look about to find them out.
Let’s say life is composite by different spaces. The buildings represent those days are full of exciting moment. However, many of us find that there are lots empty space existed in our previous life. We work in a same way everyday, do the same things everyday. We go to work and do what we needed. This leads to a loss of enthusiasm for life. To gain inspiration, we have to pay attention into the detail part of our life. As a designer, we should take a step back. Mark each detail of how people handle with things. As people work with object is normally an intuitive action, they do not really have a deep thought before pick up a pen to write, or pulling a door by holding the handle. The action people take is just without a thought. ¬¬
There’s a Japanese industrial design called Naoto Fukasawa. He is success because he combine his unique design philosophy with obvious sensitivity. His philosophy of design is “Without thought “.
Here’s an interview with Naoto Fukasawa about his design philosophy. Could you tell us more about your ‘without thought’ philosophy of design?
“People shouldn’t really have to think about an object when they are using it. Not having to think about it makes the relationship between a person and an object run more smoothly. Finding ideas in people’s spontaneous behavior and realizing these ideas in design is what Without Thought is about.” By understand Naoto philosophy, observation of daily life is obviously a key element for inspiration. To design a thing that give people’s right signal, in order to let the people taking the right action on the object, affordance is the thing we have to think about.
‘Affordance’ refers to properties of the real world that provide us with potential ‘meaning’ or ‘values’. A chair on which one can sit, for instance, or a flat floor that allows you to stand, maybe said to possess ‘affordance’ for sitting and standing.
To understand to affordance of object around, observation is an aid. Observation helps designers configure material elements and qualities into intuitively recognizable and understandable forms. Usually we want products, spaces, and services to communicate their purpose and how we can engage effectively with them. As a designer, we usually intend to provide signal that people understand, so that people will realized intuitively “I’ m supposed to press the button before pushing the door,” or ‘I’ll walk slower when I’m going through a automatically door.” So it is important to understand the features, forms, spaces, materials and colours that suggest use in particular way.
The psychologist James J. Gibson, in his book entitled The Ecologic Approach to Visual Perception, invented the term “affordance” to explain his theory that we perceive the environment in terms of its possibilities for action-in other words, what objects or spaces “afford”. Therefore, we see the possibilities for sitting, nesting, throwing, containing, etc.
Applying this concept, in the Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman discusses how “perceived affordance” cause us to respond intuitively to features of objects and environment. It is always a goal to ensure that people’s intuitive responses are “right” and helpful. However, sometimes the feature might mislead us. Everyone had the frustrating experience of trying to pull a “push” door or twist off a “pull” handle. This is happens when perceives affordance are misleading or not clear enough.
Observation enables us to clarify people respond to particular arrangements and elements; we notices what people already do intuitively. IT will help us make batter predictions about how people will perceive and interact with the things that we design; therefore we can easily get the response we aim.
To figure out why people always modify the use of the object around, we learned to to design a better things to improve our life. Through observe how people interact with different things, we understand they they sometimes perceived the affordace of the same object different. To mod our life, we can start with design a tidy thing around us, it might influence a lot.
References
1. Antony Gormley, Naoto Fukasawa, (London; New York, 2007) 2. Dwell magazine, Naoto Fukasawa: Without thought, (Dwell magazine, 2006) 3. Donald A. Norman, the design of everyday things ( new York: Basic Books, 1988)
Mod Mania 2nd Sem 2008. Chan Tsz Man, Jasmine S3121886
