Nicholas Oddy’s Design & Technology lecture posed a multitude of answers to the question: What Makes Great Design? Instead of trying to define great design, he explored the different reasons for which the term ’great design’ could be attributed to something. He pondered if people in history who are regarded as great designers today, such as George Stevenson, can in fact be called great designers, or whether everything they did can be considered great design simply because one or two of their products went down in the history books. In the case of George Stephenson, a man who’s chosen rail specifications became the standard for almost every railway in the world today, and who’s Geordie Safety Lamp became so widely used that it gave the miners (and subsequently people) of North England their name, my opinion is yes. Everything he achieved was done with no prior scientific knowledge; and no latter scientific knowledge: Stephenson’s lamp design was created exclusively through trial and error.
Even despite the circumstances, the lamp is famed for the amount of lives it has saved. Inarguably, this makes it great design. Factors we usually consider when discussing great design, such as aesthetics and usability, tend to take a back seat when something is heralded for this reason. But what about when something is so intriguingly beautiful that it captures the eyes of many, when in fact it is completely useless? Can we say that the most beautiful juicer in the world is great design, purely on its (stunning) looks? The answer is already yes. Philippe Starck’s eye-catching, yet substance-less designs have cemented him a place in the hall of fame of great designers, when perhaps he should be amongst artists. The Juicy Salif was described by Terrence Conran as ‘completely hopeless,’ but hastened to add that ‘god it looks good,’ and I don’t have a problem with that. Certainly, nobody should be stopped from creating something beautiful on the grounds that it doesn’t ‘work’, but a juicer that can’t juice is an art piece. Nicholas made a good point in saying that anyone who owns a Juicy Salif, almost certainly has a more functional fruit squeezer tucked away out of sight, which speaks for itself.
For me, designing around definite ‘tasks’ such as this involves advancing how effectively the task is carried out, or making the experience more enjoyable to the point where it transcends being a task and becomes entertainment. As the human race progresses, more efficient design means less time and/or money needs to be delegated to certain tasks, and who doesn’t like the sound of more free time?
But where do we funnel this new found time? As computers now have the processing capabilities to organise vast amounts of information that our economy runs on, we give more value to imaginative qualities than we ever have before as we progress into a creative economy. Humans have time to work on things which are exclusively ‘human,’ and we are celebrating that. A computer may be able to tabulate gargantuan amounts of information in a fraction of a second, but it could never look beyond that information to innovate the way that Stephenson did during his experiments. Looking at the world through ‘what if?’ lenses is what led him to create the lifesaving Geordie lamp. When Starck first doodled the Juicy Salif on the menu of a pizzeria, he didn’t think about what was standard, or normal, or even functional, he just drew. Great design is progress, and progress is within the human ability to imagine.
LWS Design Blog 