Greetings everyone. In today's talk, we will discuss the notion of beauty in design. I believe design has three primary goals. Beauty, utility and sustainability to make the world a more beautiful place, to make it more utilitarian and to make it more sustainable. Today, we'll focus on the concept of beauty. Very often design is equated with the notion of style. And the process of designing is often referred to as the process of styling. That's not quite true, though design does get actively involved in style in creating beauty and creating aesthetics, that's not the only thing that it does. We all have ideas of improving the world by design. We think of design as problem solving. However, style and styling are certainly components of design, and that is what relates to the notion of beauty or the process of creating beautiful things. One of things design wants to do and should do is to fill up the world with beautiful interior spaces like you see in this church or to have products that are really beautiful to use, such as these wooden bowls and spoons. Or have beautiful packaging which gives a sense of the drink that is inside the container, or to create beautiful landscapes by landscape design to create serene, beautiful environments for people to spend time in. So this is one of the key goals of design, the goal is to create ecstatic experiences. Now what is aesthetic, aesthetic is essentially is branch of philosophy which is the study of beauty. What is an experience, experience is something that we go through as an individuals. And so an aesthetic experience is essentially something that we would go through as human beings that makes everything pleasurable for us as humans and this applies to all of our senses. We have five senses, and an aesthetic experience is something that is beautiful to look at something that sounds good, something that's good to touch, to taste. All of these together create an aesthetic experience. So when designers focus on developing products, they have to keep in mind that they think these all five senses as a part of the aesthetic experience. Take the example of a car, driving a car means that you need to have comfort. Comfort is a form of pleasure, so a seat that is comfortable, a seat that is the right shape, form, color, texture, materials, the contours that make it comfortable. But it also has a steering wheel that's easy to hold, but also gives a pleasurable feeling. We also have to think of things like public transportation. Public transportation should be just as beautifully designed, just as pleasurable an experience as would be private personal transportation as well or experiences of leisure. If you go into a movie theater, if you go into a theater to watch a play that should also give you an aesthetic experience. The environment design, the seating design, the graphics, the lighting, all that should be such that you leave with an aesthetic experience and that is one of the primary goals of design. If you think of a potter just as a potter creates products from clay, just as a potter as he works or she works with this lump of clay and converts that lump of clay into a pot, into an artifact. You see the form developing over time, you see the form developing underneath the fingers of this crafts person. Similarly, designers whether you're designing a new building or interior space or piece of graphics or fashion or interaction with a certain device or a product. In all of those cases, you are doing form development. You are essentially giving visual ductile form to something that is initially an idea, that is from development. Designers give form to ideas so that they become tangible ecstatically experiences for people. That's one of the primary task of what design does, and how do designers do that? Very often designers create something called a design language. It's very typical in the industrial design world. It's very typical for product. What is a design language? They often if you look at certain companies. You can recognize the products that they do. You can tell that this product comes from this company. In some cases, it could be specific designers, if you look at fashion design for example. You can look at certain amount of clothing and you can say that okay, this clothing was design by this specific designer. And that it because they have develop a unique language, which is expressed in terms of the shape, form, color, texture, materials, details, etc. So design language essentially is something visual that identifies the work as belonging to that specific company or the specific designer. I took an example of a design language. I had some students working on a project and one of the students was really inspired by this notion of the jellyfish. So jellyfish has a certain amount of neon, a certain amount of glowing quality to them. The student was also inspired by glowing objects, these neon lighting. And so he came up with a new design language that he referred to as luminescent futurism. And so what this did was it allowed him to create a certain visual language, which he put in things like lines, things like neon colors, into certain things like the interplay between phosphorescence or fluorescence and dark areas. And so that gave him a process, a direction by which he could design the products that he was working on. So what you see here in this case is an example of a product that is designed keeping in mind this notion of luminescent futurism. What you see here is a essentially a dark product, a black product. And you see these lines, these bright lines. White and blue lines running through the product that essentially glow when the product is turned on. So what you see here is an application of a specific design language, that is inspired by jellyfish and by products that use neon. So what this does is this gives designers one, a direction in which to create their products and their buildings or their graphics, etc. It gives them a unique aesthetic direction and it helps differentiate products. So the product that uses this ball for design language is different from something else that might be on the market that does the same thing, but this looks different. It's a good way of differentiating products in the marketplace. As an example of existent company that does this really well, we look at Bang & Olufsen. Bang & Olufsen is a company that makes a series of products including a whole range of communication devices, stereo system, CD players, etc. In this case, you see the example of a phone that was designed by Bang & Olufsen. You can see there is a very specific design language. It's very geometric, it's very sharp, it's very clean, very often on Bang & Olufsen products you don't see any text. You don't see anything that says, identify specific buttons or specific spaces of the product. They way they design their products is they want to make sure that the design itself, the shape, the form, the color, the textures and materials express what the product does. And therefore, they try to minimize graphics and they try to make it extremely clean, simple and elegant in terms of the design. So you can see that in this case, you can see in this case examples of monitors and television sets. In all of them, you can see that there is a very clean line design language on the product, that is translated to all of the variations of that specific product. Let's take an example of a product designed by a company called Numark, that does a whole range of equipment for DJ's. And what you see here in this case is a Numark turntable called TTX that was a part of series of product that the company did. And let's talk about how the shape and the form and the texture and the overall aesthetics or the beauty of this product was developed by the designers. One of the first things that human did was the engage with DJs. Now this if this is the turn table that is going to be use by DJs it's important that we get there and put we get there feedback we get a list of needs from them. What exactly are you looking for if you’re creating a brand new product for you, if you’re creating a creating a new turn table that you can use or would you like to see in it? So some of the things that came up in these interviews with the designers was that we would like this to be eye catching and cool looking, but not necessarily flashy. So this was a specific requirement that came up in the interviews that were done by Numark and it said that, we need to push the envelope on creating an interesting new look for this product. It has to have a certain unique aesthetic, it has to be cool, it has to be something that catches attention, but should not look to flashy. That's an interesting direction for the designers to run ahead with because they know that they can take some liberties, they can try some interesting new things. But they have to keep it in check, it can't be overboard, can't go too crazy with it. One other thing that the designers did in terms of figuring out how to develop a design language and how to develop an aesthetic or how to make this product beautiful is to look at the environment. The context, where is this product used? So as you know DJ is working clubs, and so what you see in this case is an image board often referred to also as a mood board that designers create. And this mood board includes images of what actually you would see in a club on the dance floor in the environment of it's DJ's work. Bringing this into the design of the product would then look like it fits, it belongs into the context for which it was designed. One other thing that they also looked is looked at fashion and lifestyle. What is the kind of fashion that DJs like? What is their lifestyle? And they put together this collage that created some sense of a visual direction that the product are going to. So for example, they like certain kinds of shoes certain kinds of T-shirts, certain brands, certain cartoon characters, certain activities like skateboarding. These gave the designers some sense of the fashion preferences, and the lifestyle preferences, of the DJ's that helped the design of the turntable as well. Then they came up with a set of attributes. What should this product have? Well it should express a certain amount of quality. It should be something that DJs can trust. It should be something that is reliable, but also expresses reliability through its design. Then should be robust but also expresses robustness through its design, should function really well, should be warm, should be something that they feel comfortable using, and should be durable. Something that lasts a long time, so it can be transported from place to place. And so these are some of the attributes the design attributes that came up in the interviews with DJs that we realize that we need to make sure. That the product that we're designing incorporates all these values, all these ideas into the design. It should actually be functional, but all look functional. It should be reliable, but it should look reliable. It should be durable and it should look like it is a durable product. And that's really important for designers to do. Functionally it has to be do all these things, and visually it has to express that it does these things. They did one other thing, they looked at these words like quality, like durable, like functional and they created another board, another image board. They looked at what are the other existing products that do this. Can we look at specific products that look reliable, that look clean, that look purposeful etc. And they created this mood board to see, can we draw from existing products that express these specific terms and can we use that into a design process. The next tip from designers was that they know what attributes are to be incorporated, what the language is like what forms, colors, textures to use to start drawing. What you see in this case, these are some sketches done by the designers at Numark. You see top views and side views, and angular views of the turn table. You see specific features built in to the product of these other sketches. Again, top views of the turntable that show different shapes for the tonearm, that show different bumpers on the edges of the product and also you see some more designs of the tonearm hinge mechanism as well. So this process continues, they come up with series of designs for the turntable for the tonearm. And the next step is I'm going into some CAD versions. So these what you see here these are variations of the final designs and what you see here in this case is virtual models telling the computer of some of the finalized designs of the turntable. So you can see there's a variation in terms of the overall shape, the contours on the product, the shape of the tonearm, location and design of the buttons themselves. So all of those details get figured out in these CAD models of the product. Then once a final design is selected, there is more details that are put into it on CAD. So what you see here is, again, a virtual model off the final turntable. And then finally, the actual design, this is the final product in it's final version, as something the DJs would buy on the market. So what we've seen in this case study is a series of steps that the designers followed in creating this product. But also what were the inspirations for the shape, the form, the color, the aesthetics of the product, what gave it this form of beauty? What made it beautiful for DJs to see that process unfold to Numark? So what we've learned today is we've talked about the process of beauty in design, what beauty means, how it is incorporated into the design process and how designers will take an idea. And by using such things as form, color, texture, materials and details, try to make the world a much more beautiful place, allowing all people to have aesthetic experiences in their everyday life. Thank you.
