My name is Catarina Archer. I’m a proud Portuguese, Graphic and Media Design Student at London College of Communication, currently taking my course directly from my living room, as a consequence of the pandemic we have all been stricken by. During the first term of my DPS, from live briefs to interviews and internships I engaged with design quite in a different way of what I was used to.
Design, as a lot of people know, as well as a lot of people don’t, is right in the middle of creativity and functionality. It is something anyone can associate with almost every area as we know them, but it is exactly what makes the difference in how those areas relate. If you go and search for design definition on google, you’ll be able to see that a range of options appear, for the definition to be applied to various areas: “design definition in art”; “design definition in engineering”; “design definition literature”; And through something as simple as this, we can see, as Paula et al. (2010) that design definition “in general” is in fact is related to the idealization, projection, creation, development of a product, which is something obviously relatable to any work area; Be it a communication campaign, an industrial piece, or a concept, design will be applied in order to make it stand out and, therefore, make a difference on people’s lives. And what is it that makes these product stand out? The most straight forward way for something to stand out it is the difference you can notice on it, or the better way of functioning that will save so much time to the user - but isn’t it the whole point to make something look so different from other similar purpose products, and more functional than all of them at the same time? If only one of design’s principles wasn’t to consider a product’s features within the whole context of its existence. (1999) The purpose or product a designer tries to reach, is what drives them through the creative process - being this exactly what defines what path the product will take. While design in its normal format is exclusively directed to the functionality and goal of the product and is, therefore, much more contained in terms of liberty for the designer - Anti-design by definition, was an artistic movement which took place from 1966 to 1980 (2011), talking about it nowadays, would make it a contrary division of the design world, would just define it as the most free way of creating a designer can have. Because of that, nowadays anti-design, will be exactly what will bring news and differentiation to the design world - this way, anti-design will be the element that will keep minds open, create new trends, and keep design from falling into banality. Design must keep its creativity; and this can only be possible by letting someone completely challenge everything that’s expected for something. For it to challenge everything, it must not follow design’s product achieving rules. As my first industry experience, I engaged with design and marketing on a quite corporate environment, where I had space and liberty for being creative on my tasks, but not that much. That got me to experience what it is to work straightly for a goal, not being supposed to change anything too much, and just keeping the visual language as it always is, just changing products for a cleaner look organizing them in a more logical way. This design work is obviously what is more needed on the industry world people are used to; The design that meets deadlines, the design that applies more easily to companies necessities is obviously much more easy to understand and include on the fast evolving world we live in. Only except that design shouldn’t be divisible in this way; in fact it is not. The human world's way of functioning is what ends up dividing everything, even if, as design, it is not divisible. This way, designers that, like me, work in order to achieve a company’s goal, are not working for design, but for the company; Not being designers in a company, but being employees of a company and developing the typical tasks of a designer, with the illusion of being free to achieve the best format a product can achieve. As Michael Johnson (2020) refers, during the times we are living in, we don’t actually need design to make us buy fizzy drinks or cars, people and companies might not even know, but what the world needs from design at this moment is for it to jump out of the box and actually develop something good for it “in general”, and not for “design in art” or “design in engineering”. In times of need, design comes and saves the day by working for design, and not for separate companies with their particular goals, even if sometimes we think that’s what design is about. And it is, but not quite in that way. On other of my industry experiences, I got to experience what “anti.-design” would ideally be. To develop a concept from scratch, that goes against all we know as, in this case, pedagogical scheme in schools. In order to insert lego in schools, and show this “schoolification” (Steen Kabel, 2020) way of teaching, that there are possibilities for pedagogy to grow. But shouldn’t anti-design go against everything, also including lego’s brief? In this case, anti-design comes in a more “tamed” way, showing us that in fact it isn’t so much of a wild movement inside design. This wold make both sides of design merge into the same thing, which leads me to believe, once more, there’s no such thing as a division in what design is. What there is, is a human incapacity of conceiving designs definition. Catarina Archer References: Paula, Adma & Semensato, Cassiana & Silva, Plácido & Paschoarelli, Luis & Silva, Danilo. (2010). ‘Breve história e análise crítica do ensino do design no Brasil’ To be published in Convergências Revista de Investigação e Ensino das Artes. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282614043_Breve_historia_e_analise_critica_do_ensino_do_design_no_Brasil (Accessed: 1 December 2021) Doyle, S. A., Broadbridge, A. (1999) 'Differentiation by design: the importance of design in retailer repositioning and differentiation’, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 72-83. Moffat, C. (2011) Art History Achieve. Available at: http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/antidesign/ (Accessed: 2 December 2021) Johnson, M. (2020) Johnson’s Banks. Available at: https://www.johnsonbanks.co.uk/thoughts/coping-with-irrelevance (Accessed: 1 December 2021) Kabel, S. (2020) ‘Playful learning in Danish municipalities’ Available at: https://www.legofoundation.com/en/learn-how/knowledge-base/playful-learning-in-danish-municipalities-professional-journeys-of-change-in-early-childhood-education-and-care/\
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