"They say industrial design is one of the most disappointing professions in the world. After all, 21st century designers have the best computer programs and applications at their fingertips, using technology that would have been limited to science fiction novels just five years ago, and working with new materials possessing incredible properties, with the mass media eagerly anticipating new products, and with budgets that are usually extremely generous.(what?) Yet they remain far, very far from realizing their dreams"
-From Product Design Now, Intro. Link
Product Design now is a mainstream consumer driven design catalog sort of thing containing conceptual products designs and some realized ones as well, they are mostly driven by the next the newest technology or anticipations of ones to come. Regarding the electronic product, these days there seems to be no time to sit back and reflect on the current state of it all, because it's constantly changing. Compared to other kinds of industrial design which are more interested in changing styles, electronic product design seems to be wrapped up in technology, almost as if it's becoming the new car design, or already is.
Electronic product design is very much commercially based, that's why the book Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne interested me.
"As New technical developments alter the object and make it 'intelligent', they also set the object on a plane with no prior cultural references... although the physical aspects of these objects are still within the worlds of materials, their operation and their very state of being is well beyond the manipulation of matter and has more to do with information exchange than with form.
E. MANZINI The Material Of Invention.
Most designers of electronic objects have responded to this challange by accepting a role as a semiotician, a companion of packaging designers and marketeers, creating semiotic skins for incomprehensible technologies"
Page 16, Hertzian Tales.
Hertzian Tales seems to highlight the problems with the commercialization of electronic products: We want to use these new technologies to sell our products, we don't mind that they are unprecedented with no 'cultural references.' We begin to turn these technologies into imagery rather than objects, but represent them as objects. We use the power of novelty to sell them as well.
I need to research 'Product Semantics' also.
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1 comment:
Good post.
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