Month: January 2020

This week’s readings touched a lot on the concept of “new ideas.” All successful designs have three things in common. Every design concept has a message to the work, has a focused tone for that message, and the message has a clear format. Although these are concepts that are common, the way they are configured creates uniqueness within each design. The way designers configure these concepts leads to new ideas. The concepts of these new configurations serve as prerequisites for new ideas, meaning that every new design requires the use of already developed designs or ideas. This doesn’t mean that the new designs aren’t “new,” but it would be impossible to create something new without using some type of material or concept that is already existing.

In this week’s readings, we learned a lot about inspiration. People can pull inspiration for anything from anything. The idea of originality came up in last week’s discussion, and the questions was “is anything original anymore?” This is a hard concept to think about, because people are inspired by their world, whether they know it or not. So maybe they think their idea is unique and original, but subconsciously, it was inspired by something they saw. That being said, being inspired does not mean your work is unoriginal. I think the idea behind originality is a hard concept to grasp. But one take away that I really enjoyed from this week’s reading was that if you light one candle with another candle, neither of their flames are dulled. Meaning if you take inspiration from something, that is not taking away from that thing’s value, or your something’s value.

Throughout this week’s readings and video, I gained a general idea of design thinking and the design process. These two terms can have different meanings to people, but generally, there are a few ideas that guide these terms. Design is not limited to one thing, one media, one idea, one career, etc. Anyone can be a designer and a designer can enhance any idea. There are also many steps to the process of design. Most people put an emphasis on the finished product, but they forget about the middle steps in between. I would say the biggest take away I had from this week’s readings would be the idea of “how” and “why.” The idea behind “how” is the techniques and skills of what it takes to complete a task. But the idea of “why” is the passion and the driving force to create and complete the task. One must have a good balance between “how” and “why” to be successful, otherwise their progress could be disrupted and their best work may not be displayed.

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