Blog 2:
Design as a craft or a way of thinking.
BRIEF:
Read the 2016 article The Future of Design by Donald Norman.
1. Write a summary of the main points of Norman’s article – keep it to 300 words. Use appropriate images to illustrate your blog post.
2. Then, distil your summary into a single sentence, and use that as the headline to the post. Where possible find relevant visual examples to illustrate your post.
For a long time in the past, design has been regarded as a craft. It is used to create or optimize an object with emotional value. Users pay more attention to external representation, while craftspeople pay more attention to their experience. However, with the rapid development of human technology, design is no longer just a craft, but will also become a people-oriented and diversified way of thinking. Its role is not only to enhance emotional value, but also to revolutionize all social activities of human beings.
01
Traditional design which is based on craft mainly cultivates craftsmen’s craft skills, while little contact with knowledge of social science, natural science, basic science and related engineering fields are involved. Traditional design with craft is effective enough to deal with a relatively simple-single problem, but with the promotion of technology, more and more complex comprehensive problems need to be solved, that traditional craft can hardly complete this mission. Solving this kind of problem requires more knowledge, more research and a comprehensive way of thinking. Then people found a new design route in the future: Design as a way of thinking.
Designing as a way of thinking is based on evidence. Such a design is usually not simply oriented toward objects, but the interaction between human and the system, which requires designers to master the scientific knowledge of the field related to the particular system, study the psychological characteristics and behavior patterns of the population, and effectively combine these two, so as to solve complex system problems.
02
Correspondingly, the capacity of that design as a way of thing will be fostered by series of smaller offerings of individual courses and workshops in the education system of all disciplines. Take university education for example: Designers are trained in a variety of professional fields, not just in design schools with certificate of design.
If designers would determine to whether design as a traditional craft or a way of thinking, they could adapt to the new tools, new material and new method on the basis to improve technology, also they could learn the fields wider and deeper, research system interface, or to combine the traditional craft to the new design thinking, represent themselves with both external ways and internal ways.
Reference List:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.07.003
The internet’s source of freely-usable images.