After reading the “Framework of Product Experience” I feel that I attribute a lot of weight to aesthetic experience and experience of meaning in designs. So far in my posts, I’ve outlined various aspects of art-making in design and particularly branding, color, and other aesthetic choices. I’m interested in how these aesthetic experiences meld with the experience of meaning as well as emotional experience for the viewer and user on both conscious and subconscious levels. The Margiela cut-out heels that I wrote about exemplify well how I’m interested in how a simple aesthetic change might affect a person’s perception of brand, object, and self. I believe that all of our design choices, in what we choose to interact with or purchase, are reflections of qualities we see in ourselves and I think that comes across in what I’ve paid attention to in the design challenges. In each, I have tried to cultivate an attention to the meaning a user would ascribe to the usage of a design and tried to make them encouraging, exciting, supportive, or just novel. Particularly I enjoyed thinking of wearable storytelling and designing for social signalling.
Desirable design to me is a design that pushes the boundary of both design and art in novel aesthetic and functional experience. Great design strikes a balance between being new and also being accessible and comprehensible. I find it important to make design compassionate in that way but I wouldn’t settle for anything that is purely functional even if functional in a novel and niche manner. Aesthetic beauty and attention is an extremely important part of my definition of desirable design and it is aesthetics that influences mainly the meaning that we derive from designs and drives the appraisals that we might experience in our interactions with a design.
Q: What is your opinion on the interaction between art and design?
Q: How much of good design do you think is instinct and taste versus research and iteration?
Q: Is it better to be safe and understandable in design (i.e. maintaining existing design frameworks) or to push the boundaries in a way you find beneficial?
