Interesting TED talks
My supervisor distributed an email with a TED talk about “the value of intangible utility” by Roy Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man.
After watching this talk, I realized that there are tons of interesting TED talks that are worth watching such as, for instance, Don Norman’s Design and Emotion, John Maeda’s Journey in Design, Paola Antonelli’s Design and Elastic Minds, Yves Behar’s Designing Objects that Tell Stories, etc…
Mismatch between form and function
After having discussion about why some products are food shaped, my Japanese friend introduced me a website where a Japanese designer keeps posting his/her own design prototypes (Prototype 1000).
In fact, there are many products whose actual function is not matched with the function inferred from its form. Examples include donut shaped tape (from 3M), burger shaped/fries shaped/coke shaped USB drive (from Burger King), and chocolate shaped mirror (from Meiji).
Why do companies create and sell these products? Do consumers like a product when there is a gap between the actual function and the inferred function? If not, do consumers want to be shown different from others by having those products? If not… why? I want to identify the benefit of form-function mismatch, which has not been discussed in the past.
How to identify harmony or a good interaction?
My observation suggests that some consumers do not make good decisions in terms of design. For instance, they choose bad paintings, bad wines, bad interior products, bad clothings, and so on. I wonder if education or training improves their taste or their ability to identify well-designed products. Indeed, Reber, Schwartz, and Winkielman (2004) suggests that beauty evaluation can be trained by exposing to an object more often.
I further argue that a critical skill that needs to be trained is to appreciate the (positive-negative) value of interactions among more than two components within an object. For instance, they must know whether a specific shape and color of a figure in a painting goes well with another figure, whether the bitterness of a wine goes well with its sweetness, and whether red muffler goes well with brown boots, etc.
There is much evidence that people pay attention to interactions and they evaluate a product highly when a positive interaction was identified. For instance, when consumers make a purchase decision about a stereo component, they consider “ensemble”: when the stereo component goes with other interior products that consumers previously purchased, it is more likely to be purchased than when it does not go with others (Bell, Holbrook, and Solomon 1991; Holbrook and Anand 1992). Consumers also prefer a product whose various form features are “consistent” over a product whose form features are not (Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998), suggesting that the value of interaction is elaborated and supported by the works based on Gestalt theory.
Then, I raise questions: (1) how do we test whether a specific consumer is able to distinguish between a good interaction (harmony) and a bad interaction, and (2) how do we train them to distinguish good and bad interactions?
designer salary
Coroflot released its annual report about designer salary (See the coroflot’s 2009 designer salary survey). Although the sample size is small, it shows that academic research does not seem to be a smart choice, at least, financially. However, it is also true that more academic approach is needed for design. Please see below someone’s comment (I am sorry to forget who posted this note) on the PhD design mailing list.
“Teaching by showing is normal; teaching by explaining the way of thinking is the next step forward. An excellent designer with superimposed doctoral training can be a real treasure. It is a pity that so many good designers do not actualize themselves to their full potential both as designers and as professors just because they hate that bookish staff. It is high time that design academia rethink their way of creating new professors.”
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