Keith et al,
To me, this sounds like 'affordance'. The designer designing a chair seeks to ensure the object "affords" sitting. Users see other affordances in things too, hence a log or a cement block of sufficient size becomes a chair in use.
The stripping down of letters into marks seems to me to be a stripping of affordance.
Cheers.
Fil
--
Filippo A. Salustri, PhD, PEng
Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University, 350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada
tel: 416/979-5000 x7749 fax: 416/979-5265
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----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 11:44 pm
Subject: Re: A simple definition of 'Design'?
To: [log in to unmask]
> I like the distinctions being made by Gunnar and the quotes he has
> provided, because they point to what might be called the agony at the
> center of designing.
>
> For me the agony goes like this:
>
> If the object can be sat on, then it functions as a chair and hence it
> is a chair in its use.
>
> If the object was made to be sat on then it is a chair in its
> designing.
>
> If the object looks like a chair but can not be sat on then it might be
> art but it is not a chair and it has not been designed as a chair.
>
> Making joke chairs (subversion) is fun and such chairs obviously need
> to be designed if they are to function as a joke chair. Such designing
> does not have the central agony of making that Gunnar points to. Such
> joke making is pulled towards an aesthetic freedom that diminishes the
> agony (like saying there are no rules in wrestling, you can just shoot
> your opponent - it's fun, but not wrestling).
>
> Interestingly, Dada produced no written works that escaped the agony at
> the centre of communication - language is an excellent ironic machine
> but it retains the core issue of communication no matter how extreme its
> flirtations with the merely aesthetic. In many ways the same is true for
> design. To set out to make a faulty tap is a crime of the heart unless
> it's exhibited in an art gallery where it's just a joke and not much of
> a joke.
>
> Graphic design students often like to play the idiot game of breaking
> down letter forms until there are graphic marks but no longer parts of
> letter forms. As soon as the eye announces: "looks like part of a
> letter", then the agony has emerged. While the fragment retains its
> freedom as not a fragment of a larger form, then it is just a mark.
>
> Keith Russell
> OZ Newcastle
>
> >>>>>>>>>
>
> Gunnar Wrote and quoted
>
> Thanks to David Durling for the "art & design" explanation. Most
> graphic design education in the US is in art departments so most of our
> arguments about the definition of graphic design tend to center around
> whether and how (graphic) design is like or unlike art. ("Art," of
> course, suffers from multiple definitions even more than "design" does.)
> Kathryn Simon asks "What is art? What is design?" I'll let a couple of
> my favorite writers take a stab at that one.
>
> Kenneth FitzGerald's review
> <
> of Stefan Sagmeister's -Things I Have Learned So Far in My Life- says
> "art and design differ only in the segment of the marketplace in which
> they operate. The essential activity is the same. They just answer to
> separate validating structures."
>
> Natalia Illyin's "The Man in the Irony Mask"
> < suggests
> a distinction of attitude: "Contemporary art*s quarter-century-long
> vogue for taking things apart, for subverting the distinction between
> 'high and low,' for irony, for pastiche, for the abjuration of concepts
> of totality, unity and determinate meaning, for fragmentation*well,
> that vogue never really has sat well with design. We*ve tried, but it
> just doesn*t. 'Erasing the distinction between art and design,' which
> we*ve heard so much about in recent years, is impossible for this
> reason: Design, by its definition, is generative. It is the process of
> making things. Taking things apart is the opposite of design.
> Irony*creating distance*is the opposite of real communication,
> which is the underlying aim of graphic design.
>
> "We designers are a 'making' tribe. Unlike the Dadaists, whose pose we
> emulate, we live in a world already fragmented. As to the avant-gardism
> we still lean on--that long-ago radicalism that set out to shake up a
> Victorian worldview--its notions of chal-lenge and subversion are still
> important to contemporary art. But the importance of those notions in
> design has been eclipsed by greater urgencies. We live in a challenged,
> confused and subverted world. We don*t need to put any burrs under any
> saddles. We have enough burrs for a lifetime. We have enough distance.
> The great challenge now is to find relationship."
>
> Gunnar
> ----------
> Gunnar Swanson Design Office
> 1901 East 6th Street
> Greenville, North Carolina 27858
>
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> +1 252 258 7006
>
> at East Carolina University:
> +1 252 328 2839
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