blog assignment 8

I believe that in our modern world of design art is more important than the science part of things. Even though both need each other to create a good design the art of the design will need to be looked at more than the science part. If the design looks ugly and the art hasn’t been thought out well it won’t appeal to other people.

I disagree with Hannes Meyers idea that design is a product of function x economy. I believe that design is more important than the function to some extent. In today’s modern world we are able create extraordinary things that rely on the design to make it what it is. Design creates the novelty of the object. If you brought a car that was reliable and did the job you wanted the design of it wasn’t attractive and made you look like a person you don’t want to be then the car would not be very noticeable or have any novelty to it. However if you were to have another car that had the same function and as reliable as the other car and did the job you wanted but had been designed to look very attractive and had years and years of work put into it to look good then design would play a major role in choosing which car you would want to drive. When designing the car I believe that the visual aspects of the car would appeal more to the consumers compared to the function of the car.

Blog Assignment 7

The "symbolic universe" is a utopia. A world in which everything is perfect and nothing will ever go wrong it’s a "perfect world". In 1939 General Motors showed there “utopia” in New York’s World Fair. General Motors Futurama showed a traffic network which kept the car flow steady at all times which would create no traffic thus no conflict.
In today’s modern world we can see that New York is always full of traffic jams and conflict.  Most of these futuramas that have been created will never actually come about. But because of   our modern technology we can now easy design our perfect world through video games such as Sims. Games such as these let you create your own house and family. It lets you live the way you want it and design your own house and live out your utopia.
Because it is so hard to actually make real utopias in today’s modern world and in years to come we can only make them in our virtual world such as video games. Most people are not happy with their lives that they are living and that there is always something that they want to change Sims is a highly popular game and a lot of people play it. This just shows that lot of people want to create their ideal world but are limited to video games that will give them a taste of what it would feel like if they had their own utopia    

Blog Assingment

If we explore today's digital age we can see by asking for the authentic copy of something would not make any sense because of the availability of mass production. Also because we can print a lot of copies of our modern art we are always changing what it looks like. Also if we print our first copy of our art usually it is not our final copy before we start to mass produce for a particular purpose. This juxtaposes history for they could only create one design at one time which gives it the authenticity

Walter Benjamin said "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” I think our modern society has highlighted what Benjamin has said here. Our mechanical or "digital" reproduction has taken the Aura or “Authenticity” out of the art work. Things that we have created in the 20^th century won’t have that the same authenticity as in the 19^th century because we can mass produce it and change it in so many ways.

Assignment 5- Colour

The experimentation of colour has changed the understanding and use of different ways we use it. We now use techniques such as light and shading to create realistic interpretations of what we are trying to create. Experiments such as the colour wheel which was created by Newton in 1704 helped us realise which colours work well with each other and which are opposite. After a while there was a change in which people thought colours were a science ( Newton) to what you felt the colour should be or should not be or more of a emotional interpretation (Van Gogh)

Van Gogh took this in to account and painted what he felt colours looked like in “The Night Cafe’”. The colours in the painting are off but it is his emotional interpretation of what he saw. He used contrasting colours in the empty space to create tension .Van Gogh said "Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens…” (Gage, 1993) which shows why he used contrasting colours in the space.

Even though Newton and Van Gogh had to completely different views on the topic of colour I believe that they have both revolutionised the way in which we see colour and how we use it in everyday life and design.

References
Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212) New York: Thames and Hudson.

Assignment 4 Ornament or Nature

I believe that Adolf Loos was right in arguing that we should remove ornamentation from our objects of daily use. I believe this because I think that it is a waste of material and pointless. By adding lots of decoration for the sake of adding decoration seems unjustified. Also by removing most of the ornamentation from the objects would make them look purposeful rather than just for show. If you look at some of the ornamentation from the Rocco period you can see that a lot of it looks pointless and over dramatised to a point in which real designers such as Pugin thought that it looked bad and didn't have any design principles or rules such as decoration having a purpose. 

However because of the middle class people who were buying these objects don't know what good design is they brought these over decorated objects because they are cheap. These over objects were cheap because they were mass produced and therefore didn't have any real value. So the need for education was in order so that Adolf Loos's argument of the removal of ornament could become true.I think that this process helped in the history and today as we don't often see over decorated things in our daily lives or as much as in 1908.

 

Assignment 3

“Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be
purposely constructed.”

When Owen Jones argued this in 1856 he ment that when you a decorating things the decoration should have a purpose in the design such as holding the weight of the stucture not to just be on the design just becuase it looks nice. I agree with Jones because when looking at his designs they look solid and true to what the desgin is trying to be but when I look at some other designs that do not follow what Owen Jones said the desgin look over decrated and over the top such as this table which was desgined in the Rococo time period.

 

The legs have alot of decoration and dont serve any perpose to the structure of the table. The table is ‘decoration constructed’. But if we look and one of Owen Jones's designs it dosent look over decorated and it still looks good and this table is ‘construction decorated’. 

Continuing curve assginmnet 2

An example of the continuing curve is this chair called the  "la Chaise" by Charles and Ray Eames. This chair is described as having "exquisite beauty and functionality". I was designed by Charles and Ray in 1948 for a competition at the New York Museum of Modern Art. I believe that it is a result of the "sensuous impulse" because it has a feminine and seductive look to it which entices us to want to sit in it and to look comfortable. This chair appeals to our softer senses which is why I believe it is a result of the "sensuous impulse.