TED talks
My supervisor distributed an email with a TED talk about “the value of intangible utility” by Roy Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man.
After watching this talk, I realized that there are tons of interesting TED talks that are worth watching such as, for instance, Don Norman’s Design and Emotion, John Maeda’s Journey in Design, Paola Antonelli’s Design and Elastic Minds, Yves Behar’s Designing Objects that Tell Stories, etc…
Food shaped product
There are many products whose actual functions are not consistent with how they look. Examples include the donut shaped tape made by 3M, the burger shaped/fries shaped/coke shaped USB memory stick promoted by Burger King, and chocolate shaped mirror promoted by Meiji, a Japanese chocolate company. After discussing why they have shapes of food, my Japanese friend pointed me a website in which a Japanese designer keeps posting his/her design prototypes (Prototype 1000). Worth a visit.
Do consumers like a product when they find a gap from a product between its actual function and its function inferred from its design? Or, do consumers simply want to be different from others by carrying those unique products?
Harmony
My observation suggests that some consumers, sometimes, do not make a good design decision. They buy fake paintings, choose unsophisticated wines, strange interior products, and ugly clothes. I might be one of them. I wonder if education or training could improve their tastes or their ability to identify better-designed products. Psychologists (Reber, Schwartz, and Winkielman 2004) suggest that when people are exposed to many objects, they are better able to distinguish good and bad products. Sometimes, I want to test if a critical skill is to appreciate the (positive-negative) value of an interaction between more than two components within an object. For instance, they must know whether a diamond shape goes well with a triangle shape in a painting, whether bitterness goes well with sweetness of a wine, and whether a red button goes well with brown boots.
Indeed, people evaluate a product highly when it has a positive interaction. For instance, when consumers buy a stereo, they consider whether it goes with other interior products that consumers previously purchased (Bell, Holbrook, and Solomon 1991; Holbrook and Anand 1992). Consumers also prefer a product when its form features are matched each other (Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998).
Then, how do we test whether consumers distinguish between a good interaction (harmony) and a bad interaction, and how do we train them to distinguish them?
Designer salary
Coroflot released its annual report about designer salary (See the coroflot’s 2009 designer salary survey). Although the sample size is small, it shows that academic research does not seem to be a smart choice, at least, financially. However, it is also true that more academic approach is needed for design. Please see below someone’s comment (I am sorry to forget who posted this note) on the PhD design mailing list.
“Teaching by showing is normal; teaching by explaining the way of thinking is the next step forward. An excellent designer with superimposed doctoral training can be a real treasure. It is a pity that so many good designers do not actualize themselves to their full potential both as designers and as professors just because they hate that bookish staff. It is high time that design academia rethink their way of creating new professors.”
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