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