Question
Design Book
Hi Jorge, I am thinking of what a good design book would be... Design as a separate entity outside specific branch is almost philosophy and it will deal with the personal interpretations. One example of such book would be "Terence Conran on Design" by Terence Conran, in this book the author reviews all kind of designs giving his personal opinion of why he likes it or not and why he considers it good design. He touches the general concepts of what is design and why inventors need designers.
All Answers (13)
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Thank you very much for your suggestion. Ive not commented because I was waiting for checking this bibliography first, but I'm agraid I couldnt find it. Anyway, I guess it is just as you say. I try to focus the design on inventions specially in engineering.
I'll appriate if you could suggest others references avaliables on internet.
Cheers -
Hi Jorge,
One issue of WIRED magazine that I saw back in August have an interesting article with images of prototypes made by Inventors/Engineers, and illustrates very clearly the lack of design, you can compare it with the actual products by doing research on the net for the products the way they were launch and you will be able to formulate an idea of the difference between Invention and Design.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_prototypes/
Hope you can access the article.
Jorge I do not have the book with me at the moment so I can not tell you if there is any bibliography in it... The book is his personal thoughts on design and we designers tend to agree in much of what he says on it, that is why I recommended you to look at it.
You probably found the book in Amazon and have seen the review, by it you can see what the book is about:
Amazon.com Review
British designer Terence Conran runs from the ivory tower of much contemporary art and design criticism. Instead of employing impenetrable terms and the doublespeak found in many a dense, academic work of criticism, Conran attempts to understand for himself and convey to the reader why he finds certain objects pleasing--why, for example, he likes to look at some objects and colors but disdains others. He concedes that just because he likes something doesn't mean it's in good taste, but his observations and opinions are well reasoned and fun to read. Design is filled with both his writing and rich color photos of objects ranging from handbags to suspension bridges, tennis balls to traffic signs, blue jeans to restaurant interiors. In Conran's view, not even the ubiquitous paper clip is too mundane to consider. His insight into the design of our world--from the toothbrush we use in the mornings to the computer keyboard many of us work on all day--is lively and enlightening.
From Booklist
Terence Conran (prefaced by "Sir" by those who revere the order of knighthood) is once again larger than life. Without the smallest puff on his oh-so-trendy cigar, the self-professed doyen of design delivers his opinion on just about every particle that touches our lives, not simply on home furnishings. His universe embraces the world; design, to him, should be examined both at home and outdoors, while eating or moving, during relaxation and work. The usual suspects are held up for view: Coco Chanel, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Apple computer icons, the work of industrial designer Raymond Loewy, among many others. The prose, though occasionally pretentious, does flow; sometimes readers will catch themselves nodding at such sentences as "New media create new visual language." And, naturally, the graphic design amazes, astounds, and impresses. Barbara Jacobs
Cheers -
Thank you so much again for your prompt and complete reply. It is very kind of you.
I think is a quite good introduction about the book. And I also think that it is a good starting point to begin to study Design, "from the philosophy".
I'll appriciate if you could suggest me some another references (preferably avaliables on internet) about Engineering Design Methodology.
Cheers -
Well this is what you can find if you do a search on your subject in the net.
http://www.npd-solutions.com/dfm.html
http://www.engineersedge.com/catalog/products-extra/engineering-design-manufacturing-book.htm
http://www.design4manufacturability.com/books.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturability-Concurrent-Engineering-Manufacture-Production/dp/1878072234
I have not read these, but I think that they are about how to make design more efficient for manufacture, which seems what you are looking for.
Good luck,
Cheers. -
I was listening to CBC, Radio One today, I forget which program, but there were two sections in a row, one about how the fear of failure keeps most people from design, and one about how to make friends with failure.
I was thinking back to my recent experience in the local hackerspace where people tried to explain to my that my first prototype looked like a bunch of junk. They were quite put out, when I told them that first prototypes ALWAYS looked like a bunch of junk. It is interesting that the same people even though they paid for the priveledge of owning a Mendel 3D printer, pronounced that it looked like an Abortion, after the fact that it has been redesigned at least 6 different prototype stages in its current configuration.
Me thinks they wanted it to look like the 25000.00 machines that have all the bells and whistles and professional engineers thinking up new bells and whistles on a weekly basis.
Of course there is no reason why it CANT have a flashy surface, but then they wouldn't have been able to afford it. -
Hi Graeme,
I agree with you in your comments about the prototypes looking the way they do, it is a fact of life that when you are inventing something new you are more interested in accomplishing the goal than the way the actual product will look.
What is confusing for many is to understand the difference between Inventor and Designer.
People are not kept away from design from fear of failure, they are kept away from developing their ideas from fear of failure.
Usually the designer is trained to handle anything you come up with and make it ergonomically correct, ready for manufacture, fashionable or marketable, and all the other things that you can add to that... That is what the designer does, it is rare a designer that also invents things.
And is more rare to find an inventor that managed to take his prototype to market without a designer in between him/her and the factory and the designer also exist in between the factory and the consumer.
It is also the job of the designer to figure out how to make your machine good looking and affordable... then other people come into play, like marketing, and then you enter in the frustrated territory of the decision makers where usually the inventor gives up or sell out to dedicate their time to invent something else....
I remember one person that took the rounds to produce his idea until the end, it took him almost 10 years but now we enjoy a new technology in vacuum cleaners that was not there before.. James Dyson produced over 5,000 prototypes to develop the technology and then designers, with his input and requirements, finished his dream machine for production... I wonder what would have happened if Hoover would have bought the idea when Dyson was struggling?
Cheers -
achhh 5000 prototypes, it is enough to make a grown man shiver, especially at retail prices for the parts on a Welfare budget...
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Good design is held hostage by a number of factors. Most important seems to be the human interface of user informed considerations. I can think of the hundreds of carpentry hammers I have seen, as opposed to the 3 or 4 that I can comfortably use. Often the non-user designer completely misses important/obvious design considerations of the end user.
I applaud Dyson's drive to process 5,000 prototypes, but am amazed he had the resources to spend the time and money to do so. Most inventors/designers would never be able to do this level of due diligence.
What has always surprised me is everyone expects the physical product to be birthed in it's perfect form, while software has iteration #1, #5, #20 and so on ad infinitum...
Separating the idea of needed function by the inventor and design considerations of the designer results in an inferior product. The trick seems to be to be fully considering this thru the entire process. -
Hi Jorge,
You've chosen a really interesting topic to explore - it's one of my favourite's as well.
With respect to engineering design practices, a man called Stuart Pugh wrote a lot about this, particularly his book entitled 'Total Design' which really formed many design processes as we know them.
I really think this is a seminal work in the field, and was even used to heavily inform the development of BS 8887 (British Standard for Design for Manufacture). You might find Pugh's methods in a form which is slightly easier to digest in other books on product development though.
For the newer wave of 'design thinking', and more about the more creative problem solving approaches used in industrial design check out 'Change by Design' by Tim Brown from Ideo. It's a really useful introduction and overview which I highly recommend.
If you want more about design thinking, Ideo also have another book with lots of interesting case studies called 'The Art Of Innovation' by Tom Kelley.
Also, I really love all the books by Donald Norman. Start with 'Emotional Design'. It's a really good, pragmatic look at how to design things for usability and function.
At the moment I'm also half way through a really interesting book by Bruce Sterling called 'Shaping Things' which talks about tangible products, electronics, media and society and tries to bring it all together to look at out relationship with the things around us, how this has changed, and how it will change in the future.
All the best!
Leila -
Hello again... no idea how I forgot this one... 'Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams' required reading for design geeks everywhere.
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@Filippo Salustri, If I write the following in my book without attribution to your public communication above, would you regard it as plagiarism? Research can generically be described independently to the different "research fields" (architecture, biology, chemistry, divinity, engineering, etc.) by looking at the process of research rather than looking into the knowledge domain of the field. The process of research is the same, in my opinion, whether you're researching a building, a heart, a new compound, new scrolls, or a Mars Rover. -
Thought this article showed the potential of great graphic design...
Bikers get a helping hand
Article by: JEFF STRICKLER , Star Tribune Updated: August 10, 2012 - 3:30 PM
A design student's electronic glove translates bikers' traditional hand signals into directional lights.
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Anthony Carton is getting a lot of attention these days, and with his help, soon so might people on bicycles, scooters and motorcycles.
Carton, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, created a glove outfitted with sensors that translate hand turn signals into lighted directional indicators. It won Most Innovative Design Concept at the International Symposium of Wearable Computing, held this past June in England.
Not a bad finish for something that began as a quick project for a spring semester seminar.
"I'm really surprised at how much attention this is getting," said Carton, 29, who lives in Robbinsdale and is pursuing a master of fine arts degree in graphic design from the College of Design. "The whole thing took only two weeks" from concept to finished prototype.
Carton, a frequent scooter user, realized that many automobile drivers either don't pay attention to bikers when they signal turns or no longer recognize the meanings of the hand signals, which were widely used until electronic turn signals became standard vehicle equipment following World War II. He decided to tackle both problems at once with gloves that light up to get drivers' attention and show the direction the biker is going.
"The main point of the project was to enable people to communicate visually with another person," he said.
He assigned the project a caveat: It had to work without the bikers thinking about it. Because the ultimate goal is to improve safety, he was adamant that the glove not distract riders by requiring them to activate it.
"People don't need a new gadget," he said. "The bikers do what they always do, and the glove recognizes the gesture and reacts with the appropriate signal."
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The heart of the glove, which is officially known as the Context Aware Signal Glove for Bicycle and Motorcycle Riders (that's not a marketing acronym, so don't sprain your tongue trying to pronounce CASGBMR) is a microprocessor that reads hand movements. The back of the glove has a square outlined with LED lights positioned to resemble a baseball diamond.
When riders stick their left arm straight out, the two lines of lights on the left side of the diamond blink to form a chevron pointing left. When the arm is bent upward at a 90-degree angle, the other two rows of lights blink to point to the right. And when the riders point downward at an angle in an indication that they plan to change lanes, the two lines on the top of the diamond are illuminated constantly to show where the biker intends to go.
There's one other funct... [more]
