Don Norman: 3 ways good design makes you happy

For anyone who has has never heard of TED Talks they should really check it out. They always have really inspirational people that share there ideas and stories. This man, Don Norman, came to talk about the 3 ways good design makes you happy. His story was very uplifting and light hearted take on design which I loved. Basically his take on design is that if it looks neat and it makes you happy then you should buy/use it. He emphasized that pleasant things work better because they make you happy, and when you're happy problems tend to get solved easier because you're not stressed out or anxious to fix it. One of the things I thought was so cool about this guys outlook was that he sounded literally, deeply, happy. Sometimes you can tell that someone has an underlying hurt or frustration that they haven't gotten past in their life, but Don Norman sounded downright happy with his life, which is rare. I think it is because of his new philosophy on life:

"My new life is trying to understand what beauty is about." - Don Norman

I think everyone should try to live by this phrase, because I think if you're focusing on seeing the beauty in life then you're going to find it, or you may just end up seeing the world in a more beautiful way. Don Norman pinpointed the 3 ways as to how design makes us happy:

1. If it's beautiful 2. If it's functional 

3. If it's reflective (has a story behind it)

Color Schemes

During one of our class periods in Think-and-Make we listened to a lecture about color schemes. It was interesting because I had no idea that there were so many different ways designers could put colors together for a certain use. I used to think that color was just simply color and that there were bright colors, light colors, dark colors, etc. After the lecture I realized that there are so many different aspects to the way colors can be arranged and put together to suggest a mood or feeling.

• Hue: the name of a color (orange, blue, etc.)
• Value: the lightness or darkness of a color, Light Colors = tints, colors mixed with white; Dark Colors = shades, colors mixed with black
• Chroma: the purity of a color, weak chroma looks very grey
• Color Balance: ratios of colors that are easiest to look at

Types of Color Unity

• Analogous Color: color palet with colors next to each other on the color wheel
• Limited Pallet: 3 colors or less
• Hue, Value, or Chroma Dominance
• Transitions in Hue, Value, or Chroma
• Soften the Chroma to eliminate big color leaps
• Use of Neutrals: black, white, and treys can unify composition
• Keying the color: adding a "filter," ex: adding a filter to a photo on instagram
• Harmony: elements that are related/ colors within 3 steps on color wheel
• Contrast: visual movement, colors more than 3 steps away on color wheel
• Harmonious Chroma: colors either all greyed out or all pure

Our assignment over the weekend was to take 2 photos each representing a type of color unity. I will put the pictures up soon!

First Project!

For one of our first projects we were asked to pick 5 objects that we considered good design, and then one of those objects we would use in a poster showcasing its design capabilities. We sketched the items and took photographs of them. My 5 objects were a lamp, a salt shaker, a hairbrush, a claw clip, and a ring.

 

The object that I thought was the most easy to use and had the simplest design but still looked pretty complex was the claw clip. I will post pictures of my finished preliminary poster and final poster soon, but here are some of the uses that came with the claw clip that I included on my prelim poster.

If you need to shower but don't need to wash your hair, a claw clip can keep your hair out of the way.

When getting ready for a party, you can use a claw clip to keep the strands of hair that you don't need to curl or straighten out of the way.

And of course, after the party! If your room mate isn't home to hold your hair back, a claw clip is easy to use no matter what state you're in.

I'm going to be honest with you...

I'm going to be honest with you. I only read the introduction to this reading we were assigned in class, but it seemed to have a lot of good info in it that opened my eyes to what design is and how it is used. Basically the introduction starts out telling us about a theater in a small midwestern town around the time that segregation of African Americans and caucasians was just starting to become illegal. The theater was not legally segregated, but many of the customers segregated it themselves by taking up the front seats and leaving the back seats for African Americans. Many college students opposed the segregation, and the owner of the theater informed them that it wasn't him who was doing the segregating, it was his customers. One day the students took a stand by rushing in at the beginning of the show and mixing the two races equally among the crowd. Some older customers left, and the owner tried to get the crowd to segregate, but no one would budge. The owner decided to just let the crowd be. Later he received many letters congratulating him on demolishing the segregation in his theater.

So what does this have to do with design?

That is the big question of this story, but basically what I got from it was that design is literally everything. Design is our world, how we live, where we live, what we see, the list goes on and on. This is our life and our world, and how we "design" determines the way we live. The way your bedroom is set up determines if you are comfortable or uncomfortable. The way your bedspread was made determines if you are cold, warm, or hot when you go to sleep at night. Design boils down to the very last detail in your life. Just as Dieter Rams said in his Ten Principles of Good Design (see last blog post!!). I'll leave you with a little excerpt from the reading that I felt spoke to me the most.



https://courseware.ku.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-3470317-dt-content-rid-3044461_1/courses/4139-21421/THINK_MAKE_READING_ONE.pdf

Dieter Ramms: Ten Principles of Good Design

Vitsœ’s designer, Dieter Rams. Photograph by Abisag Tüllmann

As a well known industrial designer in the late 1970's, Dieter Rams asked himself an important question, "Is my design good design?" This was the question that lead Rams to create the Ten Principles of Good Design, which are also referred to as 'The Ten Commandments' for designers and artists today.

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible
https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design

I am just starting my second year as a Design student at the University of Kansas. My advisor warned me when I applied that this program was going to be very fast paced and difficult, and it is already proving to be even in the first 2 or 3 weeks! This blog is mainly going to be dedicated to my Think-and-Make design class, but I will probably post some of my struggles and triumphs on here along the way. I'm very thankful that Dieter Rams came up with this list of design commandments so long ago, otherwise I'd probably be completely lost.