This week I began "ART 156: The History and Mystery of Design" within Stanford's continuing education program.
The instructor (Barry Katz, above) has been a consulting professor at Stanford since 1980 and is a fellow at IDEO.
The first session was great. Some notes:
-There are two kinds of designers, those who get paid for it and those who don't. (we are all designers)
-He talked a lot about the power of context and story. How the perception of an object can be greatly altered by the story surrounding it. Ex: He had asked a woman what single object she would choose to save from a disaster. That coffee mug, she replied. [hmm] why? It was the last thing my husband was holding before he took his life.
-Barry refuses to start using a cell phone because of how they immediate shape our behavior. (he doesn't think he hold out for much longer)
-Peter Menzel, "Material World"
-DESIGN is not about things, but about TRANSACTIONS between people and things
-We now read images and look at words
-Biologists are the next thinkers to be added to the design 'team'. We're need to see nature as a library of ideas
-Is our functionality being reduced to our fingertips?