Thesis Proposal.

For my thesis I wanted to focus on a specific relationship between Industrial and digital media. After reading my assigned reading ‘The Ecstacy Of Communication’ I began thinking that the relationship between Industrial and Digital Media Design could be well examined through the idea of the product. More specifically how the digital technology has changed how we give for and meaning to objects as designers.

The miniaturization of the components that product designers traditionally house to make products surely must have an effect on the identity of these products. In the future we may not even need to follow any particular component parameters at all due to miniaturization of internal parts due to microchips etc. Does this loss of required mechanical and electrical parameters have a positive or negative effect on the identity of products? On one hand it gives the freedom to produce whatever identity we wish a certain product to have, giving the opportunity for designers to freely re-invent them, effectively throwing their pre-digital counterpart out the window such as the typewriter to the personal computer. On the other hand this might seem like a lost, unprecedented way to approach the design of products which could result in products with no preconceived cultural significance to guide us in their use. Because of this, it seems arguable that the aesthetic of digital products will always need to be translated through that of pre existing products which share a similar function and purpose, such as the typewriter to the personal computer. Because of this it is also arguable that the idea form follows function can never apply to digital products but is replaced with something like: precedent’s form follows function. Because of this it now seems arguable that the modernist love for the machine becomes somewhat irrelevant in the digital age, due to the machine no longer being an honest, pure and neutral aesthetic but rather having no aesthetic to source from. The digital machine is not necessarily seen as true and pure as the machine when we are able to “condense, contain and organise our lives” with it among other things forcing humanity upon it, are they tainted compared to the modernist machine?

Arguably, there are many arguments to be had.

Bibiliography:
Product Design Now
Jean Baudrilliard - "The Ecstacy Of Communication."