Design is Dangerous-Microwave

Safety is the most important part of the considerate factory of design. Even though design attempts to look for good ideas, functional design and achieve aesthetic, but nothing is important than using the product in a safety way. Since designers do not want to put users in danger.r.

microwave

I believe each family must have a microwave. It seems to be a convenient and necessary product in humans’ life. But don’t you know that microwave is an invisible weapon that can kill people’s life? As the doctor said microwave will produce carcinogen when people was heating their food. Seriously, it is hard to believe we are being insensibly killed. However, even if we know microwave will affect our health, why won’t the Government retrieve it?

Imagine you put a frog on the pan and turn on to big fire; of course the frog must jump out from the pan. But if you use the wax and gradually heat up the pan; the frog won’t feel anything at the beginning. However, when the frog feels some pain on its feet, it is too late to leave, since the wax already stuck on the frog’s feet. It is a metaphor that microwave is the wax, we are the frogs who are going to stick on the pan, even though it might take ten to twenty years to get a cancer. It happened in the hospital; when a nurse needed to help the patient to make a blood transfusion. In order to save time for thawing the blood, the nurse mistakenly used microwave to heat the pack of blood. Unfortunately, the patient died.

From what the Yahoo knowledge showed, using microwave to heat meat will create a carcinogen called d-Nitro Sodienthanolanines. Also after microwaving milk, fruit, and oat, it turns the amino acid to carcinogen. Therefore, microwave is a dangerous product which intentionally affect human’s health. 

Design should not be a danger and affect the society; design is useful, aesthetic, functional and innovative, as Dieter Rams said. Nowadays, people are seeking to have a high quality life, and produce so many kinds of products to achieve their demand. However, even though some products can bring convenience to people, it might have dangers that can affect human’s life. Let’s think of the day before the microwave was created, can’t we still heat up food a microwave? 

Design in Society-24 Rooms Apartment

Link  for video: 24 Rooms Apartment“

A floor plan of Chang's apartment

“The house transforms and I'm always here; I don’t move. The house moves for me,” Gary Chang said. In a tiny three hundred and thirty square feet space by using a futuristic transform system, Chang can make any rooms and anything he wants.
He lives in a small apartment within Hong Kong. As everyone knows, Hong Kong is a small city with seven hundred million people. In order to have more spaces for people to live, tall buildings are everywhere in Hong Kong. Even though tall buildings can create more rooms for families to live, the space in each apartment is still tiny. Therefore, designer Gary Chang redesigned his apartment in a special way and made the seemingly impossible be possible. What Gary thinks of design is that he can make anything happen, but he cannot make it without an idea. His goal for creating this changeable apartment was by using a tiny space and considering it as a huge possibility.
This apartment can transforms to twenty-four rooms. Gary used the theory of movement to adjust the structure of the house and maximize the furniture’s space to promote a bigger extensibility in the apartment. The special thing of the house is each pull and push can easily turn the living room to be a kitchen and bathroom. For example, hiding the huge bed in the wall after he wakes up in the morning can provide more empty spaces and let the house look bigger. Also, he appropriately applied the natural sunlight to reflect in the house, which can save energy and create aesthetic warm color. Moreover, as Charles Eames said good design does not necessary about high costs, it is better that if the costs are lower without harming the quality. And Chang smarty use the nature energy as one of the design elements.
In Chang's design, you can see how fonts and contents work well together. Content is his idea to create more spaces and the font is the technique of how he designed the apartment. Good design has to break through the past design and have new ideas, rather than copying from the history. Gary's apartment is totally a good example of design. Design is an important element which can become a fashion that push forward and improve the society. It can also bring people a convenience and high quality life.

"Social design is design with the society in mind. Social design would be more reflective of everyone in the community, and the diversity and commonalities of our collective realities" ---by Msekhar

Using shifting wall units suspended from steel tracks bolted into the
 ceiling, the apartment becomes all manner of spaces 

The walls in the apartment's main room, awash in yellow because of tinted windows, are pushed against the wall to the left to create an open space, with CDs to the left and the desk to the right.

Mr. Chang uses a hydraulic Murphy bed of his own design, hidden behind

 a sofa during the day.

Resources:
1. Pictures from the site: http://www.nytimes.com/
                                       http://www.toxel.com/
2. Video from Youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tio7k82aDf4

Color Transforms-Make up product

Color forms a major part of life and visible range of reflected light, which is one of the design elements, it can also be a design symbol. As you look at the stop sign in different countries, even you cannot read the words but you can still realize that is a stop sign. It is because the red color already symbolizes the meaning to stop. Also people use to give a name to symbolize the color that they are talking about. For example, when I look at the red color, I will immediately think of fire, and it does make me feel warm. Or if I look at the blue color, I will think of the sky with ocean. Also it makes me feel cool and peaceful. That is why people like to add more names with their feeling on colors. However, different people will have different color in their mind even they are talking the same apple red, because everyone has different color sense. Therefore, in order to solve the misunderstanding and knowing which color it is, Pantone is one of the color matching systems that help people to match the color and contact with one another. Imagine if you can only see black and white, how will you feel? As Marco Boschini, Venice said without colors, design may be called a body without a soul. Colors can make objects to become more aesthetic also can help to improve our life.

Color Pantone from Wikipedia

Make Up for Ever's HD Microperfecting Primer

Goethe's color wheel from his 1810 Theory of colors

Recently, I bought a make-up product called Make Up For Ever. It is HD Microperfecting Primer, a color corrector product for balancing the skin tones. The special aspect of this product is there are seven different colors for different people’s need. I bought the green color for minimizing redness on the skin. I think it really works because as everyone knows, colors are distinguished into warm and cool shades. In the color wheel, you can see how colors are transformed and interacted by others and colors are separated into primary, secondary and tertiary. Red is a part of warm color and green is the side of cool area. Therefore, when the green color covers on the top of the red color, it seems to balance the color and reduce the redness. 

Moreover, mauve color can counteract sallow undertones, which is the contrast of blue and yellow to balance the skin tone. Also, pink and yellow can help to lighten the dark complexion and counteract the sallow underneath the skin. Basically, this product is using the theory of color contrast to balance the skin color.

Link: http://www.makeupforever.com/products/complexion/hd-primer.html

Zhihong Shen’s talks

Zhihong Shen, who is a professor at Wuhan Textile University in China, had a talk on Tuesday class about the concept of design through showing his graphic design works. Although it is only a shortly ten minute’s speech, he explained the concept so well.

His type of design works used the Chinese characters express the inspiration of design. One of his works really caught my attention. It is a poster about the idea of Art, which is a design include the technique of hand drawing and computer. The using of colors only included black and white. When I first looked at the picture, a question popped out of my head “What was that?”  I feel surprised because I couldn’t figured out what it is even I am Chinese. However, after he explained about it, I totally changed my mind and I started to appreciate his design. The letter in the middle of the page is a Chinese character means Art. The way he made the word misty since he wanted to tell people the principle of Art. It is represents no matter in anytime; designer and artist should not over designing. Because when a work carries too much technique, the work will come out with the misty message as the same idea of the poster. You can see how contents and forms work together by looking at this poster. The content of this  poster is the idea of good design should be creative but the technique is no as important as the idea.  Since technique is a tool to help for designing. And the most important of design is the concepts and ideas.  And forms is how Shen use the techniques to make the word fuzzy in order him to bring out the message to viewers.

Shen said design is a process and an action. First step before started to design, designers have to understand their customer needs. Also think the better way to express their idea, in order to achieve own great design.

Basis of Design-Canned Food

There are so many different kind of canned food in the market. No matter it is solid or liquid food, people can make it to become canned food. Canned food has a long history over many decades. Canned originally is dairy foods for soldier to eat during the war and urgent food for relieving people in stricken areas. Nowadays, as the society keep changing, canned foods become common food for every family. People seek to eat in a fast and simple ways. Therefore, the idea of canned food is easy to use also bring convenience to the costumers. The benefit is to save people's time to cook; they don't need to spend much time for the cooking preparation anymore, in order them to have a delicious meal in a short period.
The manufacture processes of making canned foods have to go though gas-separation, air-tight wrapping and disinfect. Canned are made of aluminum, which material characteristic is light, durable, lightweight, ductile and malleable metal with appearance ranging from silvery to dull gray, depending on the surface roughness, it is appropriate to store food. The canned on the top of the blog successfully  achieved productivity, which brought the idea of bring consumer convenience.

One of the important design processes is to evolutes same kind of the previous products, and knowing the product's advantages and disadvantages. Try to figure out the problems and solve them, in order to have its improve. The previous of the canned food package design, we need to use a can opener to help us open the cans, which is really inconvenience. Also the edge of the canned is really shape, people might easy to get hate when they was opening the canned. Therefore, nowadays many canned food company made many changes of the package. For instance, like the pulling key at the top of the soft drink cans. People can easily open it with their finger without using any tools. In which achieve the principles of ergonomics that the science of designing user interaction with equipment to fit the user.

Good design needs to be functional, reliability, usability, proficiency and creativity. Oppositely, bad design is not memorable and causes people feel confusing; users will easily feel difficulties with the products. As in this canned design, the worst problem is the surface design. Even though there are so many different brand, different size or shape, and different type of canned food, their outlook are all the same. That are really hard to recognize. For me to buy canned food in the market, I usually just picked the one with the highest prices. Since I think only the highest prices can have better food quality. The problem of this happens because the design didn’t use the surface of the can to publicize the product. Therefore, in order to catch users’ attention, it is better to make things differently and easy to identify. Even just redesign the outlook can make a big difference, that catch user's  attention.

Every people have their requirement of using the product. So before you get started to design, you have to think about the five areas of ergonomics research. Also whom are your target to design the product  and figure out what they needs.

PS: In spite of canned food are tasty, we should not eat too much. Since canned food is a manufacture food, over eating is not good for health. 

Examples of Words and Images combined

There are many examples in the society that words and images come together. Newspaper is one of the examples. Newspaper includes different type of news, accident, government report, entertainment and advertisement. All of these are combining words and images together. For instance, try to report a car accident event. Writers usually post some pictures about the accident, like take a picture of the place happened or illustrate the process of the accident happened. It can help the readers easy to understand. I have heard a writer said including a picture in the report is stronger than write a thousand of words. Words and pictures come together is powerfully to describe the situation detailed. No matter how’s your imagination are strong, you cannot think the same situation as happened in the picture. But only look at the picture without reading the words, you will never know how the accident happened.

self-work

Poster is another example of words and images combine. The goal of poster is selling product or telling information. Poster is a page of design, so it doesn’t have too much space to explain detailed. Therefore, is better to put important information instead of so much description. But in order to catch viewer attention, poster usually has an image below the words. Other reason for putting image because it can also achieves aesthetic. Therefore, words and images can’t be separate and have to be related.

Words and Images combined

To work for a comic’s book need to take many steps. First, comics transcend words and drawings; in Brian’s goal he thinks words and picture cannot without others because they have meaning on it. And it’s easier to explain and understand the idea. But it also can be write in different ways, have the pictures and try to guess the meaning can be another style of comics’ book.

How to use the language and comics get idea cross? One example that Fies gave was the page from his book Mom’s Cancer, which his mother was getting illness by the pictures that he draw. It is a page that included six illustrations. From the first to the last picture, it showed the chemotherapy cause his mom getting less and less hair until she had no hair. Without looking at the words you popularly think Fies just want to tell how his mom became sickness. But when you try to read the words, you know the idea is totally different. It was telling how her mom felt conflict and waver sense of responsibility for her illness. That’s a good example to support Fies that word and picture is meaningful. I believe word is to deliver massage and images is supporting the message that you tell. Also this picture remains me McCloud’s book Understanding Comics the concept juxtaposed pictorial and other image in deliberate sequence.

Brian Fies's Talks

Brian Fies have a talk on Tuesday class about comics’ book. He had written two comics book which called Mom’s Cancer andWhatever Happened to the world of Tomorrow. First he asked a question why it has to be comics, why he had to tell mom’s story with comics but not other media. He related comics’ book as rock music that impresses his feeling, because if you just listen to the music without pay attention to the words, you won’t feel the soul of it. Since music is just repetitive and lyrics poetry, it has to be combine for creating an emotional response. As comics book has to combine words and pictures in order to tell a story, which is other media can’t do it. In his speak; he said to be a good cartoonist you don’t necessary have to be a good writer or good artist, the point for that is the idea of what are you going to tell the audiences. You think you are good artist because you have the practiced skills or experiences, but don’t you know that there must be hundred thousand of people who are better you are, so how to make yourself to be special and unique. Which is make something that only you can do it, as Brian said the book Whatever Happened to the world of Tomorrow presenting him that is what he is, only him can do it.

Analyze a product Photoshop

Andrew said in the film Objectified that he feels designing is really the search for form, what form should the object take.

From the interview with Charles Eames, Madame Amic asked “Can the computer substitute for the designer?” Charles said probably, in some special cases, but usually the computer is an aid to the designer.

Photoshop is truly an example of aid the designer to create works. There are so many different kinds of software as Illustrator, Quartus 2, ModelSim, DSP Builder and Vectorworks, etc. Those are the method to help designer develop their works. As the most popular software Photoshop, it created by Thomas and John Knoll in 1987 and published by Adobe Company until 1990. It has been taken fourteen times to transform, the newest version is CS5. Each version has its unique logo; consumer will notice that is the newest version. The bigger improvement of the new version has improved the functions, especially compositing and select object. Here is the link from the website Youtube, it shows the steps how to use the tool to select the hair perfectly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUIcQ1nXkWk

Photoshop is a product that has been designed, but it also is a form to recreate another design works. Even though designer has a good program to help for designing, it doesn’t mean they can create good design. As the designer Dieter Rams said, “Good design should be innovative, useful aesthetic and understandable. Also good design is honest, unobtrusive, long-lived and consistent in every detail.” Design has to take many processes, and it is important to know what are the purpose and content that you want to bring to the audience. Without an idea and purpose, no matter how beautiful is the work; audience will not get the connection for it.