Think and Make Reading One

            After reading through these pages, I think I have a better sense of how significant design is to everything around us. Design is all about making things that we experience in our everyday life the most beneficial and useful as possible. It is focused on making a person’s needs easier to achieve and creating something that will benefit people for a long time. Design is based on supplementing the quality of life for everybody. Design and the people behind that design has affected a great part of what we experience.

            When designing whatever it may be, the focus of the design should be centered on the solution, and not the problem that may be in the way. We have to learn from other past designs and our own designs to make further developments. Along with this, working with other people can expand upon certain views that can enhance the design. Placing certain goals and setting deadlines will support someone’s ideas and aspirations to create a more complete product that the designer might have had in mind originally.

Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design

From these ten principles from Dieter Rams, I have discovered various aspects that I haven’t necessarily realized before with design. Ultimately, design really just needs to make sense. There could be numerous amounts of thought that go into a design, or there could also be a more obvious answer that just seems to work well for the product itself. If possible, take out the complexities of a design to make all the components work together in a straightforward manner.

As an illustration and animation major, I think that all of these principles will be extremely beneficial to my work and how I make decisions and progress through a project. With these principles in mind, it will help me to focus on what is important when I am brainstorming ideas and shaping concepts that I am trying to build off of.

Right now, I could assuredly apply these principles to the current project we are working on. My product is a flash drive and it qualifies for many of the principles. The main ones that seem prominent in the design are the principles that relate to a product being useful, aesthetic, understandable, and unobtrusive. I think it applies for all of the principles in a way, but those are the main principles that seem to be dominant among the others. In any way, I think that these principles are truly beneficial when designing and making decisions on the various aspects of a product.

Don Norman: 3 ways good design makes you happy

From watching this video I was able to learn more about the effects of design on yourself and others. The main purpose of design is to make design fun, functional, and beautiful. This can help the design to spark emotion in a person from the product. When designing, another important aspect would be to be anxious or fearful when designing. When this is the case, the designer usually seems to think in a different way than normal causing more creativity to flow.

The three levels of design that make you happy are visceral, behavioral, and reflective. The visceral level of design is to focus on the beauty of design and the experience that is connected to that design. The behavioral way is a subconscious feeling of a sense of control. With this, the person using the product of design has an understanding of the product and has a connected emotion with it. The last level is reflective, and it is based on what is going on with the design and how it can affect someone or something.

These different levels of design that can initiate happiness can assist designers on focusing on the important aspects that people appreciate the most.