Being trained as a lawyer and not having any technical education, I have always been blissfully ignorant of design aesthetics in a product.
I always assumed that the beauty of a product ( gadgets mostly) would only be relevant from a technical point of view - you judge a television by how good the picture quality is, you judge a laptop by its configuration, and similar such things. To the rest, like me, design and aesthetics in a product always seemed synonymous - an iphone is beautifully designed, simply because it looks beautiful ( why wouldn't it - it has everything that a pretty gadget needs). The house that overlooks the cafeteria in my office is designed well, because it is white, majestic, has dreamy balconies, and a terrace garden, and hence, beautiful. In other words, design didn't really an independent meaning in my world-view other than inter-changeable relation to aesthetics.
All of this changed when I read Steve Job's wonderfully written biography by Walter Issacson. I am still someone with no technical education ( so I do not know the difference between an intel processor and a microchip or a frying fan), but the book made me realize that a product isn't merely its technical configuration. Or for that matter, a product isn't always gadget. Or, that design isn't only about aesthetics. There is a lot more to a product than I had perceived it to be for so long.
Design is, contrary to what I believed earlier, a far more holisitic and integral element which gives identity to a product. Also, equally important is that utility is also an important element of design. Of course, there is the debate that sometimes design is mutually exclusive from utility, but I would think that utility is an integral part of designs.
As it would happen, weeks after I finished reading Job's book, and was looking around the world, trying to segregate the world into binary categories of "good designs" and "bad designs", I happened to watch a program on BBC on a design used by Samsung for user manuals. This design is created by a company called the "Design Vitamins" and looks like this :
Look how beautiful it is again :
As the excerpt on the Design Vitamins' site rightly says "good design is for everyone", it indeed is. A good design can convert a prosaic user manual to a handy, useful tool, more accessible to everyone. The irony of a good design is that you almost look at it say " Oh come on ! How could anyone not have discovered it before ? Doesn't it seem like the only obvious way of doing a user manual ?" A good design also makes the earlier commonly used design look all the more stupid and ugly in retrospect - imagine going back to the user manual which doesn't look like this ever after knowing such beautiful designs exist. What is essential perhaps in creating a good design is to understand what the product wants to achieve and what value it intends to provide to its user. A user manual is of no use, if the user does not like to use it. Univerally, X is of no use, if the user of X doesn't like X.
With this, I began to again distill the world with the design-locator radar and looked at how flats are designed. By way of a hypothesis, I asked myself what could be a well designed flat for an urban crowd that is predominantly double income nuclear family. The woman in this family works, she has long hours at office and often un-predictable work hours as most private sector jobs are. While her husband is helpful, he doesn't cook. They have a cook who comes daily. Like most Indian families, they do not like eating packaged food, and would prefer fresh cooked food, made twice daily. Waiting for the cooking lady in the morning means that she has to co-ordianate her gym timings with her, or miss out on yoga classes. It is even more problematic in the evening, when either of them has to rush home to open the door for the cook, or just end up missing the cook's timings and re-heating the food. She isn't comfortable giving the keys to the cooking maid for the whole house.
Would it not make sense if the kitchen had a separate entrance in most flats ? It would mean that the kitchen is secluded from the rest of the house, and the key can be given to the cook easily without being giving access to the whole house. It also means more flexible in and out time for residents in the house.
More and more women are going to work in the coming decades, and cooking, being a traditionally done by women, will continue to remain a difficult thing to manage. However, with the rich culture of home cooking habits that we have inherited from our mothers and grand-mothers, it is not very likely that we will shift to the American culture of packaged food. The food habits will therefore, continue to be fresh cooked food, but mostly done by cooking helps, and not the women in the family. All of this would probably work very well, if flats and houses had an extra door to the kitchen. It would mean that you didn't have to co-ordinate your day with the kaamwali bai's timings and still have fresh cooked food when you are back home - all of this comes at no extra cost , but just an extra door.
I would think it adds more utility to the house, and is better design. What do you think ?
I will write more on more design-efficient products as I locate more.
I always assumed that the beauty of a product ( gadgets mostly) would only be relevant from a technical point of view - you judge a television by how good the picture quality is, you judge a laptop by its configuration, and similar such things. To the rest, like me, design and aesthetics in a product always seemed synonymous - an iphone is beautifully designed, simply because it looks beautiful ( why wouldn't it - it has everything that a pretty gadget needs). The house that overlooks the cafeteria in my office is designed well, because it is white, majestic, has dreamy balconies, and a terrace garden, and hence, beautiful. In other words, design didn't really an independent meaning in my world-view other than inter-changeable relation to aesthetics.
All of this changed when I read Steve Job's wonderfully written biography by Walter Issacson. I am still someone with no technical education ( so I do not know the difference between an intel processor and a microchip or a frying fan), but the book made me realize that a product isn't merely its technical configuration. Or for that matter, a product isn't always gadget. Or, that design isn't only about aesthetics. There is a lot more to a product than I had perceived it to be for so long.
Design is, contrary to what I believed earlier, a far more holisitic and integral element which gives identity to a product. Also, equally important is that utility is also an important element of design. Of course, there is the debate that sometimes design is mutually exclusive from utility, but I would think that utility is an integral part of designs.
As it would happen, weeks after I finished reading Job's book, and was looking around the world, trying to segregate the world into binary categories of "good designs" and "bad designs", I happened to watch a program on BBC on a design used by Samsung for user manuals. This design is created by a company called the "Design Vitamins" and looks like this :
Look how beautiful it is again :
As the excerpt on the Design Vitamins' site rightly says "good design is for everyone", it indeed is. A good design can convert a prosaic user manual to a handy, useful tool, more accessible to everyone. The irony of a good design is that you almost look at it say " Oh come on ! How could anyone not have discovered it before ? Doesn't it seem like the only obvious way of doing a user manual ?" A good design also makes the earlier commonly used design look all the more stupid and ugly in retrospect - imagine going back to the user manual which doesn't look like this ever after knowing such beautiful designs exist. What is essential perhaps in creating a good design is to understand what the product wants to achieve and what value it intends to provide to its user. A user manual is of no use, if the user does not like to use it. Univerally, X is of no use, if the user of X doesn't like X.
With this, I began to again distill the world with the design-locator radar and looked at how flats are designed. By way of a hypothesis, I asked myself what could be a well designed flat for an urban crowd that is predominantly double income nuclear family. The woman in this family works, she has long hours at office and often un-predictable work hours as most private sector jobs are. While her husband is helpful, he doesn't cook. They have a cook who comes daily. Like most Indian families, they do not like eating packaged food, and would prefer fresh cooked food, made twice daily. Waiting for the cooking lady in the morning means that she has to co-ordianate her gym timings with her, or miss out on yoga classes. It is even more problematic in the evening, when either of them has to rush home to open the door for the cook, or just end up missing the cook's timings and re-heating the food. She isn't comfortable giving the keys to the cooking maid for the whole house.
Would it not make sense if the kitchen had a separate entrance in most flats ? It would mean that the kitchen is secluded from the rest of the house, and the key can be given to the cook easily without being giving access to the whole house. It also means more flexible in and out time for residents in the house.
More and more women are going to work in the coming decades, and cooking, being a traditionally done by women, will continue to remain a difficult thing to manage. However, with the rich culture of home cooking habits that we have inherited from our mothers and grand-mothers, it is not very likely that we will shift to the American culture of packaged food. The food habits will therefore, continue to be fresh cooked food, but mostly done by cooking helps, and not the women in the family. All of this would probably work very well, if flats and houses had an extra door to the kitchen. It would mean that you didn't have to co-ordinate your day with the kaamwali bai's timings and still have fresh cooked food when you are back home - all of this comes at no extra cost , but just an extra door.
I would think it adds more utility to the house, and is better design. What do you think ?
I will write more on more design-efficient products as I locate more.
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