Creative Design: Design Principles Reading
I found this book from the libray which was a really interesting read. I have written my favourite quotes below:
"Design is the means by which we order our surroundings, re-shaping natural materials to suit our needs and purposes." (Rawson, 1987, p.10)
"The evolution of the human race depended on our developing successful ways of relating to our environement. Our brain evolved a special intelligence that enables us to plan and apply techniques for dealing with specific challenges posed by the natural world." (Rawson, 1987, p.10)
"We can think of design as a kind of mental modelling, a varety of abstract thought derived from basic human activity in manipulating and reshaping the physical world. Some kinds of formal thinking, such as mathematics, are highly abstract. But the designer has to conceive forms that can be turned into realities with the available resources." (Rawson, 1987, p.13)
"A good design solution can be complex, although the best design usually appears simple, belying the complexities of its formation. Purposes, though, are rarely as simple as they can be made to seem by someone in pursuit of an easy solution." (Rawson, 1987, p.14)
"Purpose and function are different things. At one end of the design spectrum there is an artifact that has a single physical purpose, which we can call a function... At the other is the purely aesthetic artifact..." (Rawson, 1987, p.14)
"Every designed object falls somewhere along the spectrum of puposes between pure function and pure symbolic exprression. A bridge, for example, has a clear primary function, and its design entails problems that must be solved by engineers." (Rawson, 1987, pp.16-18)
"A large part of the cost of any product actually goes on making it look good for the customer, according to criteria having nothing to do with the function." (Rawson, 1987, p.19)
"As designers, we need to understand how the human body moves and responds and how its characteristics impinge on our work." (Rawson, 1987, p.21)
"Designers thus think in terms of mental models: abstract combinations of form which they develop by mentally combining and adapting them in various ways to suit the requirements of the projected atifact." (Rawson, 1987, p.24)
"No designer ever starts from scratch; he or she has inherited a basic language of design which humanity has been developing for thousands of yeas. What matters is what each individual designer is able to say in that language. In a truly creative piece of design the fundamental elements of the language ae varied, combined, and/or adapted to produce an original statement." (Rawson, 1987, p.24)
"Drawing can express the most profound concepts with the simplest resources.... Marks and lines take time to make, and so have a beginning and an end." (Rawson, 1987, p.154)
"The graphic artist must bear in mind that any drawing he or she produces will derive part of its meaning from the powers of interpretation brought to it by the viewer. These powers are a function of two elements: context and expectation." (Rawson, 1987, p.163)
"Perhaps the most important fact about photography from the point of view of design is the way its images are already arranged as 2D plans by the machine. The eliminates a whole field of the artist's responsibility for translating 3D qualities - even 4D, if you include time - into 2D. There is thus a great loss to set off against the gains." (Rawson, 1987, p.206)
"Graphic design is the arrangement of flat layouts of text and/or images for books and magazines, newspapers, advertisements, publicity sheets, posters, and a host of otherr products of printing process." (Rawson, 1987, p.208)
Rawson, P., 1987. Creative design: a new look at design principles. London: Macdonald Orbis, pp.10 - 208.
