Form, function or folly?
By Megan • Nov 12th, 2007 • Category: News for Creatives (archives)Kevin McCloud reports for the Times Online:
“Product design has always fallen into three categories. First, the serious form-follows-function school, espoused by industrial designers such as James Dyson, of vacuum-cleaner fame, who says he “can’t really see the difference between a designer and an engineer”. That’s why his cleaners look like plastic aircraft engines.
Second, there is the more playful category of design as style, in which the everyday and functional is cloaked with sexy lines, tactile surfaces and colour, using familiar, powerful ideas in new ways to give an impression of character: look at how 1960s chrome and big radiator grilles have reentered car design in the past five years. More like form, function and fiction.
Third, there is the going-home-time category of design – not so much a school or discipline, but more a lapse of attention, and one all designers are guilty of. These are designs that surely must have been started at 4.55pm on a Friday, and ought to have been destined for the bin, not the retail market. The best examples are jokes; the worst are puns.”
Megan is a creative producer at Wise Elephant.
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