Dear Ali:
Indeed, yes, it is wierd that so many designed objects are nasty. They are intended to appeal to their target audience though and they sell well enough. They are aesthetic but some of us don´t like the style.
The pleasing engineering-designed objects you have in mind are pleasing to you and also to me because we (to be polite) probably have quite good taste. Designers of a certain sort enjoy simple, mistake-free shapes rather than elaborate and convoluted ones.
If a designer does a bit of plain engineering design they are not really using their capacity to work with aesthetics in that instance. They have been nudged into good-taste, mistake-eliminating engineering design. I will have to think about intentions. .... On balance, no, they don´t matter. We can never know them, only the object.
Whatever happens to your concept after it is taken from your desk is not going to affect your claim to be a designer.
Regards
Richard
Hi Richard,
A quick question, you wrote:
"There isn´t a mysterious quality to designers in my view - it´s that they want to make things that would look noticeably appealing when drawn. That brings me to the visual. The designer draws a shape that is aesthetically rich and then tries to make a physical thing that reflects that design intent."
There are many many objects (I am limiting my argument to 3D objects), which are horrible in terms of their visual "appeal", designed by well-meaning designers who have serious degrees from serious design schools. In my humble view, these things are abundant (and I suspect they are more numerous than the good looking things--whatever that means--from a statistical viewpoint). And there are many engineers, who have no formal education in design, and do not even have a manifest goal of designing "beautiful" things, who end up designing unarguably "appealing" 3D objects.
So where do we draw the line? Who is going to decide who is a designer and who is not? What if a designer draws a shape that is not aesthetically rich? Is it not a design then? Are intentions enough? Where do we locate the agency of the designer, then? There are multiple sources of variation in a design process--design is a relational and networked activity--so is it really easy to pinpoint ownership in a design process? In other words, if my design ended up very differently on the market because of some engineering constraints and some other marketing issues, am I still the designer?
Warm wishes,
ali
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