Another instance of something that gives design a bad rep:
I've got in my hands a book on Design Research.
It is a beautiful book.
The main text is in spanish, and then there is a section with translations. This section is printed in green ink and has no page numbers (nice touch!).
Now for the main course: the main text is printed in orange ink. It's difficult to read in most environments, and virtually impossible to read in artificial lighting. Oh, I almost forgot: it's got that neat trick of having both page numbers only on one of the pages! Very "designerly"... I thought we got that out of our system in the early 1990s, but looks like I was wrong (the book was published in 2011).
This is bad typesetting, bad design, bad communication.
I hate when that happens.
The fact that it happens in a book about design and design research, published in academia, makes it particularly painful to witness, and it sends a very clear message about design academia.
I think this kind of unfortunate instance of bad design relates to what Buchanan called "mannered imitation of an earlier invention":
"(...) However, when a designer's conceptual placements become categories of thinking, the result can be mannered imitations of an earlier invention that are no longer relevant to the discovery of specific possibilities in a new situation. Ideas are then forced onto a situation rather than discovered in the particularities and novel possibilities of that situation." (p.11)
Buchanan, R. (2002). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. In V. Margolin & R. Buchanan (Eds.), The Idea of Design (pp. 3-20). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
(BTW, IMHO, this article is an absolute must-read)
Right now I just wanted to re-read a couple of paragraphs on that other book, but I'll have to wait for the sunlight to shine on these beautiful orange letterforms...
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Carlos Pires
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Design & New Media MFA // Communication Design PhD Student @ FBA-UL
Check the project blog:
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