Art History: What makes for good design? 10th January

Today at college we talked about the elements of good design, and looked a t a diverse range of things we had brought in, to demonstrate.  The things ranged form a battery-powered tiny toy cockroach which ran endlessness around the floor, through various pencil sharpeners (Jo brought one which was shaped like a cat with its tail in the air, you put the pencil into its red end, and the shavings come out into a sort of litter tray: ingenious, but not really 'good' design).  James brought a Spong Mincer - Victorian engineering and kitchen usefulness at its best - and a really useless gadget for cutting the tops off boiled eggs.  There was an embossed book cover, newly commissioned for Penguin Books, and a digital camera which looked very like a film-based one.  I took in a red plastic ashtray which came from Habitat which I had discovered, only last week, had been designed by Alan Fletcher

Here are some other die sings by Alan Fletcher.  he designed a huge number of logos and things which have become widely recognised and familiar.

Many more images on the web and in particular on his website here.

Then we looked at excerpts from a video called Objectified, with interesting ideas about design form a range of good people, including Dieter Rams, who was a big wheel in Braun until he retired, who had a long list of criteria for good design: 

• it should be innovative, 
• useful, 
• should improve our experience (of doing whatever it's designed to do), 
• aesthetically pleasing, 
• understandable (i.e. you shouldn't need a hefty manual to work out how to use the thing), 
• honest (i.e. simple, plain, direct). 
• unobtrusive, 
• long-lived, 
• consistent in every detail (i.e. the tiniest parts should be as well designed as the whole, the inside as well as the outside), 
• environmentally friendly, 
• compact, 
• as little designed as possible - i.e. it should be discreet, it shouldn't shout 'look at me, how clever I am' it should just do the job really well so we think, "how good is that?"

The video also included an interview with Jonathan Ive, head designer at Apple, and the good design which makes i-phones etc so desirable, and that people are prepared to pay over the odds for good design which is also somehow tactile and makes you want to hold it and play with it - and therefore also buy it and use it.

There's a trailer on You Tube which you can access here and there are various clips form the film on You Tube too, plus other bits of film with Dieter Rams and Jonathan Ive