Call and Response

(photo courtesy of http://tinyurl.com/2ddg8x5)

Protests are demonstrated as a public act of disagreement with another group of people (company, religion, etc). Often they are located on street sides or at important events. Sometimes protests have a leader, who calls out to the bigger group of protestors and the others respond. It could be a chant of repeating words that express how they feel or the leader could ask series of questions and have the protestors respond.

(video courtesy of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQj_5VGCPVg)

The protestors carry signs and usually make loud references to what they are doing at that protest. It is an example of call and response because protestors want the audience, which are bystanders, the public, or policymakers, to listen to their side of the problem and they do it by protesting.

(photo courtesy of http://tinyurl.com/2bcx46m)

To link this topic to design in society, if you think about the protest as being the design, you can see the idea, organization, production, and result that happens. People begin to strongly feel for a topic and communication then occurs to do something about making their stance important and known. They create a time, place, and send out this information to others to try to get as many people to join. The protestors will often make signs that can be easily read from a car or across the street. Then at the actual rally, their purpose is for people who don’t know or disagree about the subject to understand how they feel.

Designers do this with their art; they come up with an idea, they organize it, orchestrate it, make it, and show it, to get a response from their audience.

Wayne Thiebaud

(photo courtesy of http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/counting_on_art/img/img_thiebaud_frostedfractions_lg.jpg)

For painting pies and cakes, Wayne Thiebaud created a new era for pop art in the 1960s. I have seen some of his works before; at a friend’s house or at a local café. But I never really appreciated his work until I saw it up close and in person at the new Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I read that ­Thiebaud was raised in California and even dabbed a bit of his teaching career here at UC Davis. This made me more inclined to pay attention to his work and interact with it as an audience.

A lot of people would probably question his subject matter. Cakes? Pies? Lipstick? The objects of his paintings show the food culture of that time in a simplistic manner. The easy shapes of triangles and circles point viewers to the painting as a whole, the gestalt, of composition. For me, when I see that Thiebaud doesn’t fill up his pictures with painted stuff, the background becomes it’s own shape and lets me imagine my own scene of desserts.

When I stepped closer to look at the paintings, I noticed that with almost every piece that had a single color in the background with objects in the foreground, Thiebaud used his brush and outlined the figured with the background color. This technique struck me because I’m used to seeing paintings where the background was created first, then the foreground, that way the foreground overlaps the background. However, Thiebaud exaggerates this change by making the background strokes very straight and horizontal, then outlining cakes or human figures with the same paint.

Analyzing Thiebaud’s art at Crocker, I realized that artists make many intentional marks in their pieces that might not be known at first sight. Whether it’s simplifying the composition or minute details of brush strokes, it all is for a purpose and it is all a design that the artist chooses.

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To me, design in society translates to a tangible, physical, and purposely orchestrated thing that all people are frequently connected to in this day and age, even at this specific second. I thought about things that the average person in America would have.. homes, cars, clothes.. but everything seemed too vague and not a simple design that interests me. I narrowed my thoughts to something that my peers and I use very often, a laptop.

(photo courtesy of http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/06/dayintech_0623/)

Roughly 200 years ago, a man designed a layout for the alphabet that has now stayed on billions of computers worldwide. The QWERTY keyboard was first designed for the typewriter. When Christopher Sholes invented the first modern typewriter, he originally configured the keys in alphabetical order. But as he used the typewriter, the "mechanical bars which struck the paper consistently jammed." (http://www.nndb.com/people/360/000162871/) Because of this jam, Sholes dived in and rearranged the letters so that the ones that jammed the most frequent were furthest apart from each other. This is when the layout of the keyboard that we use today was deemed the layout for mechanical typewriters.

(photo courtesy of http://www.vhxn.com/transparent-keyboard-made-of-glasses/)

Everyone who designs something has a purpose, whether it’s to help with convenience, looks, or to fix a keyboard jam, it’s important to know why and how the original designer intended things to be. Often we overlook the simple objects that we use every day, and if we just “googled” why things look or work the way they do, everyone would have a little more knowledge about the design and designer behind it.

Creativity from Without

(photo courtesy of http://moldychum.typepad.com/moldy_chum/fish_sculpture/)

(photo courtesy of http://www.ndigallery.com/virtuemart-5.html)

Creativity from without is a theme that describes the inspiration of a design that stems from the outside environment. This includes materials, nature, or society as a whole. An artist who demonstrates using creativity from without is Joe Pogan. Pogan takes metal spoons, dog tags, tools, combination locks, screws, anything made from metal and welds extraordinary pieces. His expertise is in making birds but he also makes special order animals like fish.

The things that Pogan makes are very well done with pristine details and reflect the true animal he is depicting. His birds look like they have just landed from a short flight and will take off again any second. The life-like feathers and eyes give Pogan's art attention because he can realistically show an animal and it's natural form. Not only does Pogan compose his sculptures to make them look believable and real, he also has the skill of an experienced welder to make his sculptures. Ndigallery describes that Pogan's "welding ability combined with an innate artistic talent gave him the skill to create his highly original animal sculptures using a variety of 'found' objects."

What Pogan creates and what he creates with is a paradox that speaks loudly to what I think his message is. The materials he uses are man-made items that are easily found and often discarded. We as humans make so much waste with the lifestyle we live and we are blinded by our daily tasks to see the things we throw away. It takes someone like Pogan to step back from everyday motions and see the products that humans make and abandon too frequently. Sure, not all of us have the talent of metal welding, but we could learn from what Pogan creates to think about our natural world butting heads with the world of small and insignificant products. If there was any way to bring the two together, Pogan has done it.

(photo courtesy of http://www.eyeofidaho.com/jopogan.html)

Stone Soup

Rubber gloves + shoebox + paper clips + tissue paper + dictionary = an artful, interesting, and cohesive design?

Put eight design students together and give them one hour to make something with a mosh-pit of materials and objects. This assignment gave our group a chance to get to know one another and to collaborate a piece by using a different assortment of materials.

Our group thought about what topic or main idea to focus our piece on and we thought it would be fitting to relate it to Davis. Inspiration was found on one of our group member's t-shirt, and we all eventually agreed on creating an octopus to represent Davis' KDVS radio station.

We started putting some materials together and let the materials fit together in different placements. At first, we started with an almost exact plan for what we wanted to do. However, we realized that we should think less about the actual figure we were trying to portray, and just place things here and there, where each of us thought it would look good. This let us all have a part in what went on with the project and it helped let our art piece speak out more as a depiction of what we used to make it. The project became less about using the materials to make the form of something, but letting the supplies or “ingredients” speak for themselves.

The story Stone Soup, by Maria Brown, reflected a sense of coming together with different parts and making something that is totally unique.

(all photos courtesy of Perry Sanesanong)

My Antonius laundry bag was $12.99

I visited the West Sacramento Ikea this weekend. While exploring the different furniture sections and walking through the showrooms, I asked myself: Why do so many people come to shop at this store? Aside from the products itself, is there something about the design of this store that gives such a positive response from its customers?

I pondered about these questions and found that even though I couldn’t answer them for others, I could ask myself: Why do I want to go to Ikea to shop for things for my apartment?

Along with easy to follow instructions and $4 Swedish meatballs, Ikea hits affordability on the mark. The store definitely provides a range of products that are priced fairly low and inexpensive, even for the college students. This allows a great variance of people, especially me, to shop here. Because of this, I feel like more people have opened up to shopping for their homes and start to enjoy it, as if it were a simple Sunday family activity. For me, going to Ikea opened up the world of interior decorating as an interest of study in college.

Since so many people like the same products from the same store, it would make sense that a large amount of those people would purchase those products to furnish or decorate their homes. But no, I don’t want to have the same couch, table, desk, and bed as everyone else. I like showing my individuality through what I put in my room and I wouldn’t be pleased if I saw similar stuff in someone else’s room. That wouldn’t make me or my tastes of style unique. The store doesn’t promote the same furniture for everyone, but it provides the sense of individuality by building a base (i.e. a black coffee table) and then adorning it with your own touches (i.e. coasters, flowers, magazines). This is what makes your style and Ikea provides a step stool for making your space yours.

The concept I’ve tried to touch upon is the fact that this store was made by our own human minds and creativity. When you walk into Ikea, you want the same feeling every time you walk into your own home. Not everyone has the same tastes or likes the same decorations or style, but Ikea is an affordable way to provide a sense of self-creation in one’s space.

Artchitecture

What do we ask design to do? Actually, what do we ask designers to do?

Inspire us. Make us comfortable. Shelter our bodies. Hold our precious items. Secure our loved ones. Some of these things we take for granted.

One of those taken for granted, for example, is architecture. When discussing the architecture of ancient civilizations in history classes, we appreciate the strength and intelligence that it took to build the great pyramids of Egypt and the vast Buddha monuments in Asia. We see that as a style of buildings, rather than a place of worship or marketplace or living areas. We now value the effort it took for those people to build those structures, but how many decades did it take to see those places as design? Why don’t we view the structures we now live in, the cities we drive through, the schools we attend, as being pleasant and artful architecture?

Someone, a designer, had to have come up with an idea to put a big structure with walls, doors, windows, and a roof in a certain place. That sounds easy enough, but as people progressed into the society we have now, everything became more complicated. Designer architects answer many more questions for their projects like wheelchair ramps, wall and floor samples, lighting fixtures, environmentally friendly materials, fixtures, floor plans, etc. As we keep advancing, the options for building pieces become more and more endless. Does this still mean that what architects do is still considered design?

Yes, in fact, I believe that one of the basic answers that stems from the question “What is design?” is that it is an idea that someone has, who then creates its and produces something that is able to be seen visually.

Bic 0.7mm

“Wow, this is such a cool pencil.”

My childhood wouldn’t have been complete without this simple black and white Bic 0.7 mechanical lead pencil (with the clear encasing on the outside, of course):

I remember first obtaining my own mechanical pencil when I was about 7 or 8. And at school I would be jealous of other kids who had pencils with the side clicker like these:

Or the ones where lead came out by shaking the pencil like these:

This writing utensil changed the way I did any type of writing or drawing at home and school. I no longer had lines that were constantly varying in width because this pencil let out the exact same line every time. While I would study Chinese, writing complicated characters would be a lot easier since the pencil was always sharp and precise.

Sharpeners and pencil shavings were a thing of the past. With this awesome device, all I needed to do was put two pieces of lead inside and my pencil was loaded for the whole week. How convenient was that! Because of its easiness by clicking the top and having the perfect amount of lead come out, I was able to focus more on my homework, writing, drawing, etc, instead of worrying about continuously getting up to sharpen my pencil.

The endless amount of color ways and designs that mechanical pencils came in allowed me to match the mood I was in or to make a spelling test more fun to take. I believe that this is important for a young student because children are attracted to fun, colorful, individual tools for school and a mechanical pencil fulfills that learning experience.