BlueScreenOfDeath

FINAL THESIS!

2008-06-08T21:15:00.000-07:00

Industrial Design + The Digital Object.

Much like the industrial revolution, the new digital revolution of late has radically changed our world of objects, taking the field of industrial design beyond its traditional focus on aesthetics and function. The introduction of the digital object (being the new physical objects which help to engage us with the realm of digital technology. These objects are generally personal computers, cell phones and other digital gadgetry.) into industrial design and other digital design related disciplines has introduced many crucial new focal points in the design process, having a profound effect on the design of the object. Factors such as the interface, communication and miniaturization play a progressively stronger role upon the design of the object in contemporary product design.

In some ways however, through the introduction of the digital object, objects are losing their traditional focus upon aesthetics and function all together.

The miniaturization and digitalisation of the components that make up products allows us to abandon the physical parameters that made up these objects in the first place. Previously, an object’s form was heavily derived by the required technical components that came together to attain the objects purpose. The product took these components and housed them in what was more or less a package. This package was usually made of moulded plastics with ribs and other features on the interior and exterior to help contain the technical components of the object and hold the package together. Previously, the size of the technical components would have had an influence upon the exterior of this package through their size and mechanical requirements. Now, with the miniaturization of these technical components, they have far less or even in some cases no influence upon the exterior of the package. Now that the package has no influence from the inside out, objects become almost two dimensional in their lack of depth and understanding. Through the digitalisation and as a result, the miniaturization of the technical components in the package, the dominance of the component’s physical parameters has obviously decreased. This offers a greater freedom of form for the object now since it no longer needs to conform to the strict parameters set out by it’s large, heavy mechanical components of the past. Debatably, the loss of these larger, heavier components in some cases has caused many digital objects to loose their previous unique identities.

The idea of function is also lost as a key player in design through the introduction of the digital object, or at least distorted from its original meaning:

“The first aim of all modern objects is manipulatability (‘manipulatible’ being virtually synonymous with ‘functional’). But just what is the nature of the ‘hand which thus determines the forms of these objects? Certainly no longer the prehensible organ that focuses effort: rather, nothing more than the abstract sign of manipulability, to which buttons, handles and so on are all the better suited in that operation concerned no longer calls for manual labour and, indeed, takes place elsewhere. Here we rediscover (though now on the morphological plane) the myth of naturalness of which we spoke above: the human body delegates no more than the signs of its presence to objects whose functioning, in any case, is independent from now on. At the very most it delegates its ‘extremities’, while objects for their part, are ‘contoured’ in accordance with an abstract morphological meaning. There is a collusion of forms here, which no longer refers to man save by way of allusion. It is in this sense only that the object’s form ‘weds’ the hand, that Airbborne’s armchair (of which more later) ‘weds’ the shape of your body: one form adapts to another. The traditional object or tool, by contrast, was not in any way ‘wedded’ to human forms; what it was wedded was the human physical effort and human gestures – indeed, Today the human body would seem to be present only as the abstract justification for the finished form of the functional object. Functionality is thus no longer the imposition of a real task, but simply the adaptation of one form to another (as of handle to hand) and the consequent supersession or omission of the actual process of work.” (Baudrillard, the System of Objects, pg52-53)

Functionalization now separates itself from the idea of rationality. Design of the electronic object is guided more design by emotion than rational thought, but still manages to maintain its functional attitude.

“This radical change in the landscape of consumption is due to the digital revolution. In the design of micro-electronic black boxes, the form can no longer be determined by the function. Rational form criteria no longer exist. At this point, we can therefore provide the first interim result: Emotional Design suppresses form in the sense of `form follows function’. We no longer believe that form follows function but we develop a more flexible and more discriminating concept: design is the entity of the difference between form and function. The design of the immaterial can no longer be developed `materially’.” – The meaning of surface.” (Bolz, The Meaning of Surface.)

Function in the digital object is no longer about defining its form in order to produce optimal results in its own personal operation, separated from the whole family of digital objects. This is due to the fact that through digital miniaturisation, mechanical and electric principles are not what governs the way in which the digital object is operated by its user. Functionalization now enters a new unprecedented territory. The digital object is designed to blend smoothly into its species, forced to be operated in a similar manner to that of other digital objects, this generally being a screen, button interface. This homogenisation of the general system of digital objects helps to give the user an understanding of the electronic object – a depthless, two-dimensional understanding separated from the concrete material reality of the digital object. An almost paradoxical situation exists where the most seemingly concrete aspect of the digital object becomes its screen and interface and its most alien aspect of the digital object becomes the material, which it is made up from.

“- As early as 1888 the Kodak company used as an advertisement: You press the button – we do the rest! Since then taking photographs has meant nothing more than `clicking’. You look through the viewfinder and press the button – that is how easy it is. Only a few specialists actually know what is happening in this apparatus.

- We have 25 driving lessons and then we can drive a car. Yet, the car remains a black box; what is happening under the car bonnet is a mystery to most of us. And if the car suddenly stops on the motorway, we call the automobile club.
- The personal computer, which we reluctantly purchased a few years ago, is a mysterious box, which we should better leave closed. To be opened only by an expert! Is often to be read on the back of electronic equipment. We merely press the power on button and then follow the software instructions. Only freaks dare to enter the inside of the black box armed with screwdriver and soldering iron.” (Bolz, The Meaning of Surface.)

This homogenisation of the digital object into a predictable two dimensional user interface seems to have partly emerged as a reaction to the modernist formal ideologies which glorified the industrial revolution and the factory, we are now immersed in the digital revolution, hence the design strategies surrounding modernist design no longer have such a significant influence upon design. For example, Louis Sullivan’s famous “Form Ever Follows Function” now seems to lack useful application, “Form Ever Follows Function” however, always displayed the problem it shows when applied to product design, however when applied to the design of the electronic object the problem becomes amplified: “Form Follows Function” is too objective, with not enough relation to the subject. The adoption of “Form Ever Follows Function” by the Bauhaus in the early 20th helped to produce many well functioning objects, however many of these objects were functionalised and refined to such a degree that they became unusable and incomprehensible to humans. When modernist functionalisation combines with the technical complexity of the digital object, the results, (which may of course help in the production of an honest representation of the digital object) end up as meaningless and unusable to the user. The digital object may very well be a machine as the industrial object was, but this machine is not one of physical effort or power, but one of physically embedded knowledge and intelligence, which does not find its optimal representation through the appropriate arrangement of form. The digital machine must be viewed as subjective (due to its association with the processing of knowledge and information), compared to the pure objectivity of the industrial machine, glorified for its honesty and neutrality in the face of an aesthetically lost world.

“The decisive mutations of the objects and of the environment in the modern era-have come from an irreversible tendency towards three things: an ever greater formal and operational abstraction of elements and functions and their homogenisation in a single virtual process of functionalization; the displacement of bodily movements and efforts into electric or electronic commands, and the miniaturization, in time and space, of processes whose real scene (though it is no longer a scene) is that of infinesmal memory and the screen with which they are equipped” (Baudrillard, Ecstasy Of Communication pg128-129.)

Rather than have the digital object operate on a modernist “Form Ever Follows Function” basis, even though it was modernist principles, which brought about the digital object. The digital object seems to be more closely related to post-modern ideas, it is essentially a consumer product with little room given for experimentation compared to non-digital objects such as furniture or architecture. The digital object relies heavily upon the use of signs in order to define itself. The digital object often uses precedents and the re-adoption of styles in its design through how the digital object uses previous digital or non-digital objects to help define its form and mode of operation, being its interface. For example, the personal computer takes much of its form and interface from the typewriter in order to make the digital object understandable to its users, the cell phone takes much of its form and interface from the original non-digital phone. Even though both of these objects function internally very differently from their precedents and even have different functions for their user compared to their precedents, their sign, or even the fact that they possess a sign is what helps to put them above their contradictions (contradiction being common in post-modern works) and into context. This allows us to associate them with the processing of information.

There seems to be a great influence from the non-digital objects, which these digital objects originally emerged from. In essence, the digital object is being made understandable through a juxtaposition of non-digital objects, which share similar qualities. This need to define a form for objects, even when they are seemingly immaterial is possibly a downfall in the design of the digital object. If the digital object is represented as a tool, like earlier non-digital objects then we run into the problem that we are signifying the digital object to be a tool, an object with more or less well known possibilities in its use and limitations that are relatively accessible to the user to use to his advantage. This rendering of the digital object is in reality false, as the possibilities and limitations of the digital object are unknown and always changing, and contrary to the general rendering of the digital object, the possibilities of the digital object are not as easily accessible as it seems.

“The dominant mode of utilizing computers in architecture today is that of computerization; entities or processes that are already conceptualised in the designer’s mind are entered, manipulated, or stored in a computer system. In contrast, computation or computing, as a computer-based design tool, is generally limited. The problem with this situation is that designers do not take advantage of the computational power of the computer. Instead, some venture into manipulations or criticisms of computer models as if they were products of computation. While research and development of software involves extensive computational techniques, mouse-based manipulations of three-dimensional computer models are not necessarily acts of computation.” (Terzidis, Expressive Form, pg67)

It seems possible to imagine digital objects of the future with are not objects at all, but in fact post-objects, the design of products would have no physical presence upon the material world at all, or even cease to exist. The abandonment of the material in the design of physical objects seems to go a lot better with modernist ideologies relating to the representation of objects. Discussions of Ubiquitous computing relate heavily to this.

In conclusion, the way in which we design the digital object still needs a lot of refinement and redefinition. One main problem which seems to retard this process of refinement and redefinition in the digital object is the fact that the digital object (compared to designed objects such as architecture or furniture) has much less room for cultural re-interpretation or experimentation, this is mainly due to the fact that the digital object has much heavier ties to the marketplace and product design, allowing little room for error, which is a possible product of re-interpretation of experimentation.

“The First Transistor, is a test-rig for a key electronic component created by inventors who work at the level of both electrons and matter. They organise matter as interacting volumes of electrons, and they offer a possibility for reconciling the scales that separate the worlds of electrons and space. But once these prototype elements have been subjected to the extreme rationalization required by mass production, they become reduced to abstract ultra-miniaturized electronic components. Their modernist poetry, based on truth to materials, is lost.” (Dunne, Hertzian Tales, pg6)

The solution seems to be that more theoretical research needs to be made into the electronic object on the academic level. This research should not necessarily result in the production of a hypothetical product or be in the form of pathetic digital media for digital media sake but should attempt to redefine the idea of the digital object as a product. The main problem however with digital research is generally the high monetary costs and the availability of information surrounding digital experimentation. However, with the help of publicly available digital resources such as open source software, the cost and privacy of digital design is beginning to revert from the restricted private operations of corporations and becoming available for the individual to tinker with, inviting powerful re-interpretation of the digital object. Just as has been re-interpreted through the 20th century, the way that we define the digital object will hopefully become more defined by the consumer.

Bibliography.

Literature
Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Objects.” Pages 52-53. Published by Verso, 2006.
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstacy Of Communication.” Reading from: Hal Foster, Post-Modern. London; Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985. First published as The Anti-Aesthetic, 1983. Pages 128-129.
Kostas, Terzidis “Expressive Form: a conceptual approach to computational design” Page 67. Spoon Press 2003, London.
Dunne, Anthony, “Hertzian Tales” Page 7. MIT press 2005.

Websites
Bolz, Nobert. “The Meaning of Surface.” http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors1/transcripts/bolz/bolz2.html Viewed 8th June 2008.

Political Ergonomics

2008-05-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

Social Dimensions Of Wearable Computers

2008-05-29T16:15:00.002-07:00

Towards User Design

2008-05-29T16:15:00.001-07:00

The Revival Of Handicraft

2008-05-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

Cold War Hot Houses - Beatriz Colomnia.

2008-05-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

An examination of the status of architecture in post war in the US.
-The cold war was a hot house in the way that it produced new spaces for living.
Every aspect of post war american life has become domestic - architecture in terms of massive structures has lost its power to change. now a small domestic object can have infinite power in comparison. "Objects of everyday life involved more radical transformations than the most extreme architectural proposals."

"Public Space could only be sold as a form of domestic privacy similar to the suburbs."

In our society today there is a break down between the idea of public and private place. What goes on in the public is now relitavely domesticated wheras the private life seems to be a copy image of others, for example, television is supplied to the public but viewed in private. Public spaces become domestic and more associated with imagery rather than experience.

Rather than examine the impact of the cold war on american society, this reading seems more to try and define why on earth american society has become more domesticated. surely this can't be laid fully down to cold war paranoia?

Composition Presentation Images

2008-05-29T15:48:00.001-07:00

A3

2008-05-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

MEDIA
-Ink.
-Reduce down to pure meaning.
-Thought behind is more important?

-Photography as a media, meanings all media have meanings.
-Recreating ideas from different forms of media.

Scale has a meaning.
Relationship of the body to your composition.
-media- sound, video installation, photography.
-Workbook etc. PDF/ powerpoint?

Abstraction. - Theoretical rather than practical.

FUTURE

2008-05-19T18:43:00.001-07:00

Future technologies.

271 was a basis to form good decsisions for the future. the future however is unknown.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it!"- Allan Kay.

Robotics.
Asimo - Honda Motor company.
Artificial people has been going for a while.
Roboter - czech "slave labour."

Leonnardo Da vinici contemplated the idea of a humanoid machine
However, non human robotics has shown more sucess (Robustness+Performance.)
MIT robostrider - robotic strider (walks on water.)

IT's 2.007 Annual Mechanical Engineering Robot Contest.

SRL (Survival Research Laboratories.) - performance art by robots - Industrial robot fights.
-Robot wars.
-Junkyard battles.

Robotlab "Jukebots" 2001.
"bios {bible}" 2007
Both blur human - robot relation ship.

Stlarc
"Third Hand" 1981 - We have never had a mind of our own. Our bodies are manipulators. - Zombies + Cyborgs.

Tissue,Culture and art project.
"Disembodied Cuisine" - frog steak, Seperate death from meat.
www.tca.uwa.edu.au

Eduardo Kac - "Alba"
Fluoroescent Rabbit. - How to we deal with life in this form?

Science Ficton.
-traced back AGES.
Mark Shelley (Frankenstein 1818)
Jules Verne
H G Wells
Issace Asimov
Robert A. Heinlein
Arthur C. Clarke
Willam Gibson
Neal Stephenson

2001 space odyssey - Blindly developing technology + dangers.
-Fear of AI has diminished.

New Fear?
-advances in artificial life.
-Artifical intelligence is now organic.

-Star Trek - We copy ideas from it. (palm sized, universal translator, non needle injections.)

- COmplex interplay between science + Science fiction.

"Any sufficiently sophisticated technology is indisinguishable from magic."

The Material Of Invention By Ezio Manzini.

2008-04-24T01:10:00.000-07:00

"Material is being "intellectualized" - this is the amazinf new development at the end of the twentieth century; the terms "material" and "invention" are beginning to coincide.

The medium can become a "warehouse" thanks to possible ferromagnetism: the impulse received is registered and stored. It will be sufficient to code the messages in a binary system for the magnetized substrate to take on the role of unlimited and untiring "memory" If man forgets rapidly and deforms, the "conductor" preserves all that it is given. Ingenious assemblies connect the individual units. One can then draw inductions and consequences sums, implications, exclusions, differences ), the premises of artificial intelligence.

Without going that far, the technology of the camera obscura and the daguerreotype (end of the last century) was based on differential light sensitivity - the photosensitivity of silver salts or special thin emulsion that makes it possible to fix events and thus preserve them (graphic memory).
Beginning from the negative (where light appears black and the shadows white it is possible to obtain positive prints at will (talbot). And what copies: from the most precise (which register tiny details, where one can "count the hairs on a beard") to the most subjective (the silvery tenderness, the tones and atmosphere of old calotypes). It is as if the eye has been replaced by a machine , but above all the universe is inscribed in the film, where it is perpetuated and "reflected" in representation (image).

From the Material Of Invention by Ezio Manzini.
Page 15.

Lecture: Immaterial Practice.

2008-04-14T22:35:00.001-07:00

EPISODE ONE: WHAT IS DESIGN?

We could take design down to a few main parts ie. Form, Material, Design, Mass.
As a student of Industrial Design we are commonly mistaken as machine designers by the general public.

More Artistically centered people think us to be obsessed with technology.
Most Technologically centered people think us to be obsessed with art.

However the problems we wish to conquer are ones which require applied creativity, because the problems are messy and ill structured, they aren't like normal problems, like the problem of solving chess.

Solving the kinds of problems which we have can't be done in other the normal linear way, due to the goal constantly changing the further we go along in the problem solving process and the fact that the problem will always be derived from different parts that we can't allow ourselves to stray away from.

We could see design in many different ways, ie as a kind of learning.
-Sketching, Learn which propositions work. however if we overlearn then we may find ourselves stuck in a design process which may not work in all situations. We will however learn that the idea of the Eureka epifany will never just come.

Design can be seen as an evolution, more of a gradual generative process.

Design's problems are like moving targets which start vaguer and the problem changes as the designer learns more.
We need to search for the solution and the problem, therefore we need to find two which match.

Designers barely work alone, with other designers, engineers.... CLIENTS.
A Good Designer Needs to be a good negotiator. For a design to be good it needs to be well negotiated.
There are very little rules, however the problems are the restrictions and they are always more complicated than it seems.

Design as Applied Creativity, Learning, Social Proccess, Wicked Mean Problems, Problem Solving, Evolution, Game, Mastery Of Skill. Expretise.

Wicked Problems:

Lecture : Design And Postmodernity

2008-04-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

1. Postmodernity describes the value system associated around the postmodern ideology.
2. Postmodernism describes the qualities associated with postmodern ideas.

Post-Modernism:

Is innovative and inventive. - Modernism relies more on the idea of progress, which indicated more heavily heirachy wheras Post-Modernism likes to see things as seperate parts without the nesscessity of a heirachy.

Inovolves Participation

Communicates (Through the sign)

Depends On Interpretation

Considers want as well as need- therefore is heavily tied together with not only
consumerism but also anti consumerism.

Relies on performance play chance and choice - Feminism - postmodernism relies on choice and chance, therefore feminism is post-modern - Feminism opens thought for other knowns not necessarily related to feminism but also to do with Chance And Choice to start moving such as black civil rights, anti war, anti consumerism.

The part may represent the whole - no heirachy, postmodernism is not consistent.

A System Of Binary Oppositions.

It Focuses On The Marginal.

It Cannot Be Expressed Through Narritave - Acceptance that there is not a story going from the beginning to the end, eg Things after an action have an effect on thing before the action.

It is Web Orientated.

1960s
Communication got really big - Space Race

Embodied Interaction.

2008-04-10T17:11:00.000-07:00

-Wearable technology, Mobile Media, Interactive Installation + Telematics can be catagorized as 'Embodied Interaction.'

Waeable technology involves matters such as.
-Smart Fabrics. -Health.
-Safety. -Fashion.
-High Tech Jewelery. -Biometric Devices.
-Entertainment.

Current Examples- Safety Jacket. - Burton mp3 jacket.

Wearable technology adresses the feeling of constraint caused by the copmuter due to the enviroment (Study, Computer rooms) which it needs to be used in. -We don't neccessarily need to be bound to the machine in the way that a PC does.

Rethinking copmuter interfaces.

-Fashion.
-Printed Organism - personalisation through technology.
-How can the cultural use of clothes be applied in a high tech sense?
Steve Mann. - Wearable computing Pioneer - EYE TAP.

Wearable computers are worn not carried, usser controllable and always active.
Sousveillance - Inverse Surveillance.
Die AudioGruppe.
Audio Jackets, Peacocks, Ballerinas- Telephonic Symphony.
How Do we show the influence of the virtual on the material? - David Rockety Very Nervous System. Border Patrol Erkki Kurenniemi DIMI Ballet Optic Battle.
Telematics
Paul sermon - Telepresence Telematic Mission Kit Gallonry & Sherrrie Rabinowitz HOLE IN SPACE 1980.

Good Morning Mr. Orwell.

Lecture one - Design and modernism.

2008-04-03T02:07:00.000-07:00

Modernity - The characteristics surrounding modernism.
Modernism is partly a reaction to the Baroque (highly sylized, ornamental and lavish. Geometric reason is lost.

Modernism was concerned with designing a new world. This had alot to do with retrospective views on the first world war- How did we let this happen? How could we? Is it our enviroment in which we live?
Modernism was a reaction to the machine. The earliest steam engines were still styled like a classical structure (Watt Steam Engine with Roman Columns for support.)
Before modernism, things were given unrelative ornamental decoration to give them a shallow meaning. William Morris.
Louis Sullivan.

Der Deutsche Werkbund.
See the factory as an honest functional place with clear purpose and the product of the latest technology.
Therefore revere it. Base works upon it.
Many modernist designers began as factory architects.

WORLD WAR ONE.
Loss of rationality - rationality is important in modernist design.

Bauhaus - attempting to break down the great divison in art, money. Art having value.

Moholy Nagy - Considered first electronic artist.
The Chair.
Symbol of modern design, Cheaper to construct than a building.
Early modernists were not very well financially supported.

THE END OF MODERNISM.
Mass Market Modernism.

Lecture about networks, the internet, etc.

2008-04-02T03:44:00.000-07:00

So. We can use this new global network we now have for many cool things, including:

- Collaborating with other people, from other countries, with different cultures etc, allowing for an understanding of each other, peace etc. Globablism. However, most people already know this.

- We can share open source software and information with much more freedom, however the network can infringe one our freedom with the fact that it's getting progressively harder to escape from this network, not to sound like a science fiction digital media nerd, thinking up crazy futures where we have various novel products attached to us, inserting us into a virtual network like the matrix, but in a more metaphorical, hypothetic way of thinking about the future.

We have multiple paths from one thing to another in the network, we can encounter different things on the way, get new perspectives and stuff like that. The internet is very good at inserting grey areas into topics which didn't have them originally.
This is good.

There's no idea of movement in the network, the space is the event instead of the movement, there's much more going on outside yourself so what's this focus on the personal travel? We get much more out of the internet than each of us put in. It's good like that.

Archigram, Superstudio and Archizoom - Total Urbanisation, neverending cities, continuous monuments etc.

OUR BODIES HAVE EXPANDED TO THE SIZE OF THE NEWTORK, in saying this there is no movement, because we are everywhere at the same time, time is a waste of space.

Open Sauce.
-Users generate.
Democratic
all sides ( in the network) - there are still somethings we can't get at in the network, rare vinyl for example, antique books, actual reality.
Learn almost anything. (LINK)

Mixing things together to make one thing that's more exciting/ interesting than the original components apart.

1+1=3
Is this version of this long running phillisophic idea something coined by Luke, does this
have anything to do with 2+2=5 from george orwell's 1984? as in "an illogical statement, especially one made and maintained to suit an idealogical agenda." - wikipedia.

Is this sort of like juxtaposition? Juxtaposition has a bit of relevance to my thesis. In Hertzian Tales, ways that an electronic product is manifested gets split into the categories of Packages, Fusion, Dematerialization and Justaposition. Juxtaposition in this form is all about the Aesthetics of objects and the Microchips of objects to be treated as two very different sepperate parts that come together to fullfill a certain program, rather than having the aestheics, materiality being lost or made to seem digitalized or having the microchips infested by composition and artful ideas. The two are seen as not being able to be mixed and should both simply attempt to do their best together without infiltrating one and other to give the best solution to given program.

Kitsch, do it. It's great If you do it with the intention of sarcasm, but if you are doing it thinking it's beautiful or something then it shouldn't be shunned, as designers we revere the idea of the mistake in experimentation (for example: I was intending on doing this, went through this process but got to an undesired result which is infact quite beautiful in itself), this should be taken into more less obvious directions such as realizing that your project looks like something it isn't meant to. Like a part of the anatomy, a plant or an animal or something more culturally suggestive a car, a robot, cheese. End.

Product Design Now + Hertzian Tales

2008-03-27T01:47:00.000-07:00

"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.

Thesis Proposal.

2008-03-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

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."