What I’ve Got: Elastic Shoe Laces

Elastic shoe laces are desirable because they save time and allow for ease of taking on and off shoes. While not fashionable for all types of shoes, these have grown in popularity for running and gym shoes especially.

My Goal as a Designer:With each product or concept that I design, I strive to create a unique experience that pushes an individual to break out of the societal mold.  The societal mold has been constructed by people like ourselves who find comfort in following norms and not straying from the artificially created line of action. This causes people to adopt a preventative mindset, which promotes risk aversion and allows for a closed mindset in regards to any unique opportunities that may be uncomfortable because they deviate from the norm.  This preventative mindset also promotes mindlessness, because it instils fear to conform to the masses.  I want to design products that make people think twice about societal rules-products that promote a promotional mindset, and enable mindfulness.  I want my products to make people feel comfortable with deviating from the norm.   I tried to illustrate this goal with the photo above.  I typed "unlike the rest" into google images search, and the underlying picture of the green apples with the one red apple appeared.  Starting with this photo, I began to experiment with all the different tools on photoshop.  By keeping the red apple in focus, I blurred and swirled the green apples to represent the chaos in society, and how it can be hard to maintain the position of uniqueness through all the chaos. The color scheme of the entire picture is meaningful, as well.  For example, the color unlike any color in the photo is the red, which is in the middle. As you work your way out of the center, you reach the green from the surrounding green apples. This position in the green is very close to achieving differentiation, but has not quite reached optimal position.  As one moves away from the red and green, they hit white and silver.  These colors represent people who are content with where they are in their lives and who blindly accept societal norms.  I mixed the harsh colors of black and green together and placed them as a ring around the designed photo in order to capture and display aesthetically the pressure that society puts on people to conform and accept the norms.  Through all of this chaos and pressure, the optimal point is where the red apple is.  I tried to also appeal to Desmet and Hekkert’s article on design by creating an interesting aesthetic experience, which then transfers to a meaningful experience which elicits a strong emotional experience.  Challenges/What I’ve GotChallenge 0: My sphere full of multicolored paper clips touched on the idea of chaos mentioned above, but in regards to emotional experience.  There was also certain aesthetic experience through the touching and mingling of all the different colors inside the clear plastic sphere.Challenge Half:Disco Shower was meant to appeal to many different senses, therefore transforming a supposedly normal, every day activity into an unusual, yet extremely fun experience. Many people normally don’t think twice about showering-it is practical and necessary.  However, this product pushes people to question an action that they have been doing all their lives, in the same manner.  Disco Shower does have aesthetic appeal through the strobe lights of the shower head matching the beat of the music, but it mainly focuses on the emotional experience of transforming a typical daily event to an exciting activity.  Challenge One:Vertical Reality is a product that is desirable because of its mystique and its requirement of imagination.  We created a poster with a color scheme and photo that were aesthetically mysterious, yet exciting, and we only included the most vital pieces of information.  Vertical Reality plays on the common fear of getting stuck in an elevator, which created an emotional experience that allows for the interaction between cognition and behavior, a crucial aspect of design as mentioned by Desmet and Hekkert. Challenge Two:Age is Just a Number was designed closely aligned to my goal as a designer. We wanted to break the mold of stereotypical beliefs regarding the socially constructed limits of older individuals in their golden years, specifically, a woman past her fifties.  Through this television show, we are giving the audience an opportunity to question widely held beliefs regarding the constructed limits of older individuals, and to be mindful and realize that "nothing holds more power to the body than the beliefs of the mind" (quote taken from our movie trailer).  This idea is desirable because of the implicit motivational meaning behind the theme of this television show.  What I’ve Got:My favorite, and personally most desirable and most meaningful, ‘What I’ve Got’ was the Coca Cola logo on its classic glass bottle.  The reason why this product is my favorite is because I feel as though there some magic aura surrounding Coke’s classic scripted white logo, because people across the globe know and love their products, and have been enjoying their products for decades.  The aesthetic design of the logo is so simple, so sleek, and elicits a strong emotional experience and quite possibly nostalgia of drinking Coke with friends and family.  