Hello World: Where Design Meets Life

Another tension inherent in design aesthetics is that such judgements are always subjective. After all, there may be some people who like the London 2012 logo and possibly the colour of the Post-it Note.

But design has also been trivialized, misunderstood and misused. It is routinely confused with styling, and with expensive, uncomfortable chairs or silly shoes with vertiginously high heels.

For a long time, beauty was deemed indispensable to good design, just like functionality. William Morris affirmed this in his 1880 lecture, and over half a century later, ‘excellent appearance’ and ‘progressive performance’ were chosen as the key criteria for inclusion in the first of the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Good Design’ exhibitions.17 But Goog... See more

For as long as there is no clear consensus on what design represents, it will be prey to more muddles and clichés.

I would say no on both counts. Firstly, design always has a designated function, regardless of whether it is determined by the commercial objectives of a corporate client or by the designer’s intellectual curiosity. Nor does that function necessarily need to have a practical purpose or to be of commercial value; it could be to communicate a politic... See more

The resulting rifle was accurate, often more so than the AK-47, but flawed in other respects. Critically, it was prone to jamming after being fired, and when that happened, removing the empty shell was cumbersome and time-consuming. This posed grave problems for US servicemen in Vietnam as they fought the North Vietnamese and Vietcong armies, both ... See more

Not only was this the time at which Dieter Lubs had calculated that the clock faces looked most attractive, the consistent positions of the fingers made the images more memorable, even to people who had glanced at them fleetingly.

Pirates had deployed flags as part of their terror tactics for centuries, but had done so individually.

‘We don’t really talk about design a lot around here, we talk about how things work,’ he said a year after the iPod’s debut. ‘Most people think it is how they look, but it is not really how they look it is how they work.’

Whenever human beings sought to change their way of life or their surroundings, by barricading a prehistoric cave against predators or modifying the head of a spear, they acted as designers, but did so instinctively.