Reading Responses


Week 1: Response to Victor Papanek, “Design for the Real World”, Chapter 4.

In Chapter 4 of his book, “Design for the Real World”, Papanek continuously reiterates the idea that designers must be aware of the social context in order to contribute to the problems in product design.

For a lot of people in this world, the word “design” means fashion, or something that brings aesthetic pleasure. Papanek suggests differently. He uses examples and anecdotes to argue that design is much more that just “beauty”, and that designers are responsible to make the world better by “designing for many” instead of “designing for money”. 

It was appalling to see how unsafe the design was in the automobile empire at the first place, and Papanek blames this on the consumer society. He states that the industry’s motive to work is largely influenced by profit, so it will be too expensive for the designers to make a safer product. I was kind of furious when I read this, however, when Papanek goes on to list what kind of knowledge need to be taken into consideration(maths, economics, politics, and so on), I started to understand how hard it really is to design something perfect. 

Another intriguing point Papanek mentions is the idea of the triangle of the design problems. The triangle reminds me of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where actualization is on the top layer and basic needs is placed at the bottom. Based on Papanek’s argument, designers shouldn’t be concentrating solely on the top layer of aesthetic beauty and actualization. Instead, a great designer should accommodate to common people’s basic need, and really “design for many”. 


Week 2: Response to Don Norman, “The Design of Everyday Things”, Chapter 6, “Design Thinking”.

In his chapter “Design Thinking”, Norman first mentions the importance of “solving the right problem” in the design process. I couldn’t agree more. It’s like writing an essay, solving the wrong problem from the beginning would be like finding evidence for an inappropriate thesis. In human-centered design, the key to finding the right problem, according to Norman, is to study the users. Similar argument is proposed by Papanek from last week’s reading. In order to find the right problem, designers have to “design for many” and empathize with the targeted users. 

Then Norman expands on the process of proper designs. He introduced the “Double-diamond Model for Design”. Within this model, there are 2 stages (“discover” and “define”) to identify the right problem, and 2 stages (“develop” and “deliver”) to find the right solution. This model is very intriguing to me because I’ve never thought of design process as a diverging effort. In this model, I can see the importance of diverging in order for the designers to find the real problem. 

Also, I’m surprised to see the design process as a loop. The repeated process, from observation, to ideation, to prototyping, and finally, to testing, offers the chance for the designers to really enhance the quality of a product. What is really interesting to me is when Norman claims that the final product is delivered only hours before the deadline. I’ve always imagined a design team with a “perfect” final product days before demonstration, but perfection does not exist when where’s room to improve. You can only enhance the design to its possible best within the time frame given.

Another thing Norman repeatedly mentions is the importance of collaboration among different teams in the design process. I totally agree that all teams should work together to get the work done efficiently. Instead of mocking each other’s work and being condescending, we should all respect each other’s effort, cross-examine the results, and move forward as a team. 

I really appreciate the examples Norman uses in this chapter to further illustrate his ideas, especially the Apple example of designing for the entire activity. This makes his arguments easier to understand for the readers.


Week 3: Response to Sunni Brown, “The Miseducation of the Doodle”.

In her essay, Brown gazes into some examples and applications of how doodling can help us to focus and solve problems. She makes a point that doodling is not the traditional childish activity we normally assume it to be. Brown asks us in her essay to abolish the denotation we already have about the world “doodle. ”Instead, we should just see doodling as “markings to help a person think”, and it is a useful tool to help us achieve our goal, wether it’s design, scientific or artistic. 

Brown proves her point right from the beginning where she introduced how doodling helps Virginia Scofield get her PhD. This anecdote really surprised me because I never thought of doodling as such an efficient tool for learning. 

I remember how I used to takes notes in class and my teacher would use charts to organize and explain a  concept we need to learn. During middle school was the time that I realized visual representations of knowledge works better for me to digest them. Ever since then, I have been taking notes along the margins in my books while I read. Interestingly, when Brown lists her examples of the visual “alphabet”, I can see the overlaps between my visual language(my symbolic doodles) and hers. 

Also, I really like the idea of “group doodling”that Brown mentions. I wonder how well the doodling strategy could work if we, as groups, were able to come up with a uniform alphabet of symbols, and utilize it in our working process.

Week 3: Response to Benjamin Bratton, “We need to talk about TED”.

I laughed really hard when Bratton says that TED actually stands for “middlebrow megachurch infotainment”. TED is supposed to focus on subjects and problems in Technology, Entertainment, and Design in today’s society. However, according to Bratton, TED fails to address the truly important problems and crisis in the tech world today. Instead, TED only gives people a rough blueprint of possibilities of (mostly unpractical and unnecessary) innovations for the future. 

I remember the first time that I watched a TED talk when i was back in middle school. I was in awe. I was amazed at the fact how a speaker could explain a seemingly complicated concept so well using only the simplest words. But now, as I take a look back at what was said then, I think Bratton is right. Oversimplification filled the entire speech. Instead of really making every detailed knowledge clear for the audience, the speaker only articulated the parts where we “could” understand(which wasn’t a lot when the audience was mostly of 14-year-olds). Through similar speeches like this through TED platform, the speakers don’t really let the listeners understand the knowledge. Instead they just shove a pile of shallow summary into the audience’s face. 

Of course, at the moment the audience would feel the thrill of “obtaining” the information. But after a while when they realize they understood nothing, the disappointment can be truly devastating. 


Week 4: Response to Thomas Thwaites, “How I built a toaster — from scratch”.

I really enjoyed watching Thwaites talking about his process of taking a toaster from scratch. Ever since I was a kid I started building my toy cars by myself, and I managed to be able to finish building a car in 40 minutes when I was 7. Putting the plastic parts needed for the toy car seemed like the easiest and most fulfilling activity at the time. That’s why, before watching this video, I’d never realized how much effort there is to put into building the parts for a product. 

The raw materials needed for building any product don’t come from vacuum. It takes painstaking process as a collective whole for us humans to get the resources we want in order to even start putting them together. As we can see in the video, it is hard for a single individual to do all the digging and melting on his own. By seeing that, I start to understand why it’s important for people to specialize in something and then work together collectively, dividing the production into small steps and each take on the responsibility to one job. It is simply too hard for one man to complete all the work. 

Week 5: Response to IDEO, “The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design”, “Mindsets”.

For the IDEO reading, I chose to focus on the “mindset” involved in human-centered design. According to the reading, a good human-centered designer needs to have 7 traits. These mindsets include the “Creative Confidence” to start designing, the willingness to “Make It”, the courage to “Learn from Failure”, the “Empathy” towards targeted customers, the resolution to “Embrace Ambiguity”, “Optimism”, and the repeated process of “Iterate, Iterate, Iterate”.

This process of establishing the mindset to design reminds me of the Papanek reading we did on the first week. In his piece, he talks a lot about how design process is a loop of empathizing with the customer and creatively working to make the product for their needs. The same things are said in this chapter as well. 

I grouped the mindsets into 3 basic categories: Will, tangibility, and repeat.  The will we have to have as designers include the confidence the chapter mentions to start the whole designing process. Also, out will to empathize with others is highly important when we have to design for people. The tangibility of the prototype is crucial. Instead of just thinking it, designers should make the production in each cycle of the process. Of course, one can never get it right the first time, this is where the repeating process comes in handy, by believing in the knowledge failures can bring, and embrace iterations, one can become a responsible and optimistic designer who’s not afraid to take on any challenges. 


Week 6: Response to Alastair Fuad-Luke, “Design Activism”, Chapter 4.

This chapter talks about how designers bring forth activism through their work, and raise awareness to the changes they want to make to the status quo. This chapter gives us many examples of designers creating prototypes, projects, and artifacts to change the world by influencing the civilization through environmental, cultural, human rights or health ways.  

Before reading this, I never thought of design as a humanitarian activity. i already learned from the precious readings that to design is more than just to create something aesthetically beautiful. However, I still thought of design as a practical tool to “engineer” a better product. In this chapter, the idea that design can invoke activism in a society and create changes that matter is a novel point. 

I can see how communication through design can raise awareness from the public. The “No Shop” mentioned in the chapter showed me a prototype designed against over-consumerism by creating a tangible shop that sells nothing. This intrigued me so much because rather than simply making a poster or start a campaign online, the designers really made a shop in real life. And such tangible creation is much more efficient when it comes to raising awareness. 

Also, the “Connecting Lines” by Judith van den Boom took my by surprise. Being a system that collaborates workers in a factory, it is not a tangible design but rather a sustainable humanitarian system that improve the working environment in factories in China. We often think about making improvements on machines to gain more creativity or efficiency, but this project thought about another important elements in all creative processes — the worker. This system not only improved efficiency by letting the workers “co-create”, but also improved the lives of these workers by sharing knowledges. 


Week 9: Response to Robin Nagle, “Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City”.

In the few chapters of her book “Picking Up”, Robin Nagle talks about the situation faced by the sanitation worker in New York City. As perhaps the largest modern metropolis in today’s consumerist world, New York City has an overwhelming body of waste thrown out by everyone each day, and DSNY, Department of Sanitation New York, is in charge of taking care of al the waste. The demanding labor of processing all the garbage, to me, is a dreadfully tiring and dirty task that nobody is willing to do voluntarily. So the sanitation workers in New York have my praise of taking care of something that nobody else bothers to handle. However, in Nagle’s writing, I learned that the san workers in NYC are not getting the respect or attention they deserve. 

According to Nagle, whenever the san workers put on their uniforms, it is as if they are putting on “invisible cloaks”. Loading the garbage and driving the truck seem unnoticed activities that no citizens would pay attention to. The only times they are noticed are the times where they have inevitable encounters with the pedestrians or motorists in the streets. Often times, Nagle writes, such encounters would not end well because the fragile hearted citizens see the san workers as their “servant” instead of their respectable equivalent. 

However, the san workers’ jobs are so essential to the city. Their job keeps the rhythm of NYC and the city would quickly become unlivable if they ever were to stop working. After reading Nagle’s explanation, I learned that the san workers’ job are only noticed when they missed a bag of garbage. Therefore, the unmarked status of the workers represents their job well-done. But still, doing such demanding labor yet not being acknowledged or thanked seem unfair to me, and I want to help change that situation. 

Later in the reading I learned that there was an artist Ukeles, who represented the routined jobs of the san workers in her art piece. I started thinking maybe I could do something similar, to raise awareness in my community, mend the relationship between pedestrian and san workers, and pay the workers the respect they deserve. 


Week 11: Response to “Her”: The City

Though a romance story between human and AI, Her juggles between human relationships and interpersonal connections in a highly modernized urban context. Spike Jones, the visionary directer, set up an ideal version of AI but only to reflect on the self-conscious emotions of humans.

In the course of doing so, the urbanization context is worth a reexamination, for it unnoticeably incorporated two of the most prominent mega-cities in the world in its depiction of the future Los Angeles. The film rook place in near-future LA. However, the beginning sequence of the film whereas the protagonist walks out of his office building stroke some of the audiences with the shot located at Lujiazui Circular Pedestrian bridge. As the film unfolds itself, Shanghai features were morphed into this futuristic LA representation in its subway stations, plazas and the ending sequence of the city skyline etc. 

To compliment the future city context, Shanghai and its identifiable skyscrapers certainly served a better medium to the film’s emotional approaches. The shot in which the protagonist sits alone in a plaza backed by a gigantic digital screen, surrounded by LED lights and high-rising neon signs perfectly exemplifies the loneliness that channels the emotional base for the entire film. A clean high-speed railway, the well-known “Hexie” C.R.A. train was also adopted as transportation for the protagonists’ weekend get-away. The clean, modernized urban facilities in Shanghai were well saturated in the film unknown to many audiences, whilst elevating the future utopian city portrayed by Spike Jones.

Lujiazui Circular Pedestrian Bridge, Shanghai

Lujiazui Circular Pedestrian Bridge, Shanghai

“Hexie” C.R.H. train, Shanghai

“Hexie” C.R.H. train, Shanghai

Wujiao Square, Shanghai

Wujiao Square, Shanghai

Jingan Temple Hilton Hotel (rooftop), Shanghai

Jingan Temple Hilton Hotel (rooftop), Shanghai

Week 11: Response to Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, “Speculative Everything”, Chapter 1 & 2.

After watching a couple of science fiction films assigned this week, I started to think about how the world building in them can propel the design works we do today. The first two chapters of this book gave me the answer. 

I use to find the idea of boldly imagining the future quite unreliable in the past, because of the unrealistic and often unachievable ideas people have. However, this week’s reading reminded me that without such imagination of the “possible future” there would be no designed oriented around the most innovative ideas, therefore we would be standing still in the current mode forever.  I really like how the writers admit that building something based on pure imagination can be dangerous, for that would be a huge leap to the non-existing future, similar to building an attic in thin air. But I strongly agree with their method of using the imagined future to speculate and reexamine the current existed designs. They called us to “look beyond design to the methodological playgrounds…and embrace the many tools available…”. For me, that is a perfect combination of practicality and idealism. 

I find it intriguing that the writing mentioned Victor Papanek, whom we’ve read before, and called his method outdated. It is true that Papanek focused more on social and political designs. I have to agree with them that his method is outdated in the 21st century because it would kill some great seemingly improbable ideas. In this new era, because of the more autonomy and more individuality we get, we are eligible to more optimistic and bold. 

In the second chapter, I like how they used many examples from different field to explain how different suctions of the society are working together to come up with more concepts for the future. It is really assuring to see how this “ideas” are able to create more “ideals”.