Topic: Introduction

This material covers weeks 1-2 of the course.

Note that this material is subject to ongoing refinements and updates!

What is design?

“Design is to design a design to produce a design”

— John Heskett, design historian, in Toothpicks & Logos (2005, p. 3)

Yes, this is grammatically-correct! And not completely meaningless. Heskett demonstrates that the word design can mean:

1. A discipline or speciality
2. An action or process
3. A plan or proposal
4. An outcome or goal (a new product, service or method)

Heskett elaborates on what design means as a human activity:

“...Beyond all the confusion created by the froth and bubble of advertising and publicity, beyond the visual pyrotechnics of virtuoso designers... lies a simple truth. Design is one of the basic characteristics of what it is to be human, and an essential determinant of the quality of human life. It affects everyone in every detail of every aspect of what they do throughout each day” (Heskett, 2005, p. 2).

If you doubt the extent of Heskett's strong claim here, look around the room you are in right now. No doubt there are likely dozens, if not hundreds, of designed objects all around you: Your computer, its operating system and software, books, CDs, furniture, kitchenware, the room itself...

Design and art

Design has a complicated history and relationship to art. Much of its theory and many of its techniques have antecedents in art, particularly the applied and decorative arts.

According to the Brazilian philosopher Vilem Flusser (1920-1991):

design more or less indicates the site where art and technology... come together as equals, making a new form of culture possible”
— From About the Word Design (Flusser, 1990/2013).

To give further context to the meaning of design, it is worth considering the Japanese word kōgei (工芸), where kō (工) means engineering and gei (芸) means art. This word was used to describe arts and crafts before industrial design made its mark in Japan, bringing with it the word design. As the word kōgei suggests, design is in many ways an area between engineering (or science) and art (or humanities more broadly):

Figure 1: Design as a third culture (Original in Irwin, 2013)

What is communication design?

This first session introduces visual design culture and design research methods. Communication design is about making text and visuals play nicely together. We will look at typography in more detail, but one basic way to categorise type is serif and sans serif:

Figure 1: Serif and sans serif font categorisations

Imagery can be thought of on a continuum - from very real (i.e. photographs) to very abstract (e.g., icons). The realism continuum, courtesy of Professor Stuart Medley (2009):

Figure 2: The realism continuum, courtesy of Stuart Medley (2009)

It is common to hear the dichotomy of “form and function” in design, referring to how something looks and feels, but also what it does. This saying originates from the American architect Louis Sullivan, who stated in 1896 that “form follows function”. Artists, designers, architects and philosophers have been arguing about which should be given precedence ever since, and whether this is really a dichotomy at all. Nevertheless, designed artefacts require functionality or utility, and this is the feature which differentiates design objects from works of art.

The following video from Indian Institute of Art and Design helps to answer what communication design is and the areas of design that it encompasses:

Design research

Before you begin work on a design project, it is necessary to think carefully and critically about the project requirements. Designers gather a lot of information before starting the actual design stage. The questions in the reading (Hagen & Golombisky, 2017, Chapter 2) serve as a guide to how you can begin thinking about design research:

• What is the objective?
• Who is the audience?
• Does the design need to coordinate with other design work? *
• Who are the competitors, and what does their visual communication say? *
• How will the final product be delivered or distributed?
• What is the budget? *
• What about timing and turnaround?
• Who is providing content?
• Are there any other design or production considerations or constraints?

* These points aren’t so relevant to your assignment work, but are highly relevant if you work in industry!

Design is a planned activity

Design research is about ascertaining useful information and using this to inform your design prototyping. Design research broadly follows a basic pattern:
PLANNING → DESIGNING/PROTOTYPING → TESTING/EVALUATING.
This process can repeat multiple times if feasible or necessary.

It's common to hear the phrase "the design process". There isn’t really one single ‘design process’, but they all have a similar process to this model:

Figure 3: Original in Thinking Objects: Contemporary Approaches to Product Design (Parsons, 2019).

Design drawing

Drawing is relevant to design in a couple of ways:

1. As part of the design itself. Imagery in design often incorporates illustration and so on (remember the realism continuum).
2. As part of the design process—sketches and drafts.

Don’t worry if you aren’t comfortable drawing! For sketches, simple is best. Communicating the idea is the most important thing. The following video from Gareth David Studio explores whether designers need drawing skills:

Design history

The period of modernity, at least as it's referred to in the history of art and design, began around the 1860s, and went right up until the middle of the twentieth-century. There are several art and design movements from this period that led to design being where it is today. For example:

• The Arts and Crafts movement of the UK (c. 1860s-1910s). This movement was influential on the Japanese Mingei movement
• The Art Nouveau movement (c. 1890s-1910s)
• The Art Deco movement (c. 1920s-1930s)
• The Bauhaus school of design in Germany (1919-1933)
• The Ulm School, also from Germany (1953-1968)

... and many more, such as De Stijl, Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism. Several of these movements had a geometric sense to them, with machine-like rigid shapes. Contrast work from these movements like El Lissitzky's poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) or Wassily Kandinsky's Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), for example, with the work of Romanticists like JMW Turner (1775-1851), or Impressionists like Monet (1840-1926), or Van Gogh (1853-1890).

More notes on Arts and Crafts, Mingei, Bauhaus, and the Ulm School here.

Some useful videos on some of these art and design movements below.

The History of Graphic Design Styles - Part 1 - Bauhaus and Art Nouveau

The History of Graphic Design Styles - Part 2 - Swiss Design and Art Deco

How was it made? Block printing William Morris Wallpaper (Arts and Crafts movement)

Back to top | © Paul Haimes at Ritsumeikan University | View template on Github