All in Design Philosophy
We spend a larger portion of our lives in a vehicle than we realize. That doesn’t mean we can forget about design while traveling by car. The lessons for good design can still be found all over our roadways and transportation system. Keeping your eyes on the road can let your eyes see some good design features too.
Although design is largely concerned with the future and what we’ll design it to be, it’s valuable to look to the past for inspiration and to quickly learn what might have taken decades for our predecessors to learn.
Editors from the BYU Design Review recently sat down with Professor Nathan Johnson, an associate professor in The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, with research areas in global sustainability and systems engineering. Check out a few short passages taken from the interview.
While the book, The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly, is full of useful anecdotes, principles, and tips, there is one timeless principle that I wish more creative people knew and practiced – especially engineers. It’s related to seeking feedback.
Some great ideas come from Japan and Kansei Engineering is one of them. The principles of kansei can make us more sensitive to customers’ emotions and thus more proficient, design engineers.
Your primary job is to perform good design work, but a close second is to make it easy for other people to understand the work you’ve done. Neither of these is trivial, and neither should be underestimated.
Designing for the ordinary might sound boring but it may be just as important as designing for the extraordinary.
There are an infinite number of possible designs. How can designers choose the right combination of materials, geometries, and processes to achieve the best outcome?
The recently published book “Product Development: Principles and Tools for Creating Desirable and Transferable Designs” is a unique addition to design resources available to students and engineering professionals interested in evolving their design ideas from the early stages of opportunity development all the way through to production.
When gathering inspiration for your designs, consider doing so from nature. After all, nature is the perfect engineer.
To have any hope of success, the following three issues should be focused on simultaneously during and from the beginning of product development. Don’t leave them to chance and don’t ignore them.
Without ambiguity, there is no design freedom, no decision-making, and no design. Therefore, we should embrace ambiguity and consider it our job as designers to thrive in that environment.
