Yingkai Yu (BA) User Experience Design Since the pandemic struck in 2019, there has been growing evidence of critical writing on the subject of “anti-design”. With reference to your own experience and three sources, what is your perspective on the Design/Anti-design discourse? According to John Levanier, the definition of “Anti-design is a digital design approach that rejects convention and traditional aesthetics in favor of challenging, innovative layouts.” (Levanier,2022) This apparently is a meaningful approach for creative workers, it can generate new design approaches and unprecedented and memorable artwork through countless creative experiments and thinking outside the box. However, as a User Experiment Design student, what I have always been taught to remember is that the purpose of design is to serve the user’s needs sometimes we even reduce the value of the aesthetic to make the design more readable. This certainly goes against the definition of Anti-design. In the 2 years studied UX design, I found out that UX design is more commercial, less creative and aesthetic than other design majors, all our design works focus on users, and we often emphasize product’s readability, because we’d like to make our design user friendly and make them easy to access. However, anti-design challenged this point. Just like the Lounge chair by Gruppo Sturm, it turns the chair in to grass. It gets rid of the original shape and use of the lounge chair, I believe it artistic value is now higher than its practical value, this chair is now has become a successful work of art rather than a product. “Anti-design embraced various exaggerated and expressive qualities to undermine the purely functional value of an object.” (Matinique, 2016) Anti-design pursues the innovation and aesthetic of a product, it can turn product’s practical value to artistic value. This didn’t mean bad design, but in user experience design, this would not be seen on our final outcome. Now, I’m interring in a technical company, in my daily work, there are not many creative opportunities in my daily work, because we got restriction in fonts, typography and color patterns. The reason is that we have to follow the corporation image and unify whole design style, this is reasonable, and it makes my work lots easier by reduces a lot of my workload, since in my design process, idea generation and creation used to take a big part of it. All the task I have to do now is to puts different materials into a template and reorganized the text. Those restrictions will make creative work harder even resulting in unchanging design. Anti-design however can help with this situation. “To grasp the users’ attention and keep them engaged; to use it as a humorous piece; to divert from usual cookie-cutter design styles and bring complexity just for some change; if your brand is about creative fields then you can explore anti-design for your brand to make it more memorable. “(Khode, 2022)Just like Khode said,anti-design can bring positive effects to design process, sometimes changing an eyesight might help designer generates new ideas. One example is Nelson Heinemann’s website’s home page, he puts his name on the webpage, and when user scroll down, that text will not disappear. Undoubtedly, this website is not user friendly, but it certainly catches viewer’s eye and make them remember Heinemann’s name. Because of those reasons, if sometimes the goal of the products is trying to make it memorable and artistic, anti-design can be a great approach. In conclusion, I’d like to see Anti-design as a tool to help designers change an eyesight and think outside the box, so they can be more creative, find new design approach and output new creative artwork. However, in UX design anti-design is not going to be that helpful, UX designers sometimes even sacrifice products artistic value to enhance user experience. All in all, there is no such thing as good and bad design, anti-design is just a design approach but not suit for every design field.
Reference List: Khode, K. (2022) Everything to know about the anti-design movement, 9Works Design Services Market. Available at: https://www.9works.co/blog/everything-to-know-about-the-anti-design-movement (Accessed: January 31, 2023). Levanier, J. (2022) Anti-design: The anti-rule book Redefining Digital Design - 99designs, 99designs. Available at: https://99designs.com/blog/design-history-movements/anti-design/ (Accessed: January 31, 2023). Martinique, E. (2016) Anti-design movement - aestheticism of the modern era, Widewalls. Available at: https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/anti-design-italian-movement (Accessed: January 31, 2023). Nelson Heinemann Nelson Heinemann. Available at: https://nelsonheinemann.com/ (Accessed: January 31, 2023). Sturm, G. (1966) lounge chair, https://www.connox.com/categories/furniture/seating-objects.html. (Accessed: January 31, 2023).
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