The geneuis of Design - "ghosts in the machine"

A movie we watched in Design Theory class, Friday 26^th of November.

The question is: What does it mean to be a designer?

It was a movie about designers and how they see the world history in design point of view, it tooks us through the history of designers from the 18^th century and up until today. From the start it was about man-made products and our generation is more about machine- and mass production. It comes from that designers look after something that could be a better design, and solve problems with old designs. They are thinking new and innovative, and are caught up with global warming, consumerism and capitalism. And the need of a lifecycle in their product has a big influence in their design.

We met some designers in the movie and one of them was Dieter Rams, he had an exhibition in Tokyo were his lifetime work was shown.  He meant that good design is useful design and that designer not only is inventors, but also engineers and artists. The other designer we met was William Morris who was a pattern designer; he was the first designer who invented a machine to produce fabric. One of his thoughts was that a machine would make it a better life for the people.

We got an insight in how the American way to design was, in terms of that they talked about Ford Motor Company and how the first car Model T was designed. It all started with one type of shape, material. You could get whatever color you wanted as long it was black. Later on they started to use different shape, color and material when they found that no one come back to buy a new car.

A question is that was it better before when it was man-made or today’s machines. The truth is that new ideas come every day, and the world needs new things to approve the old ones.