Reading Response #1
Reading Response #1
to Artful Design • Chapter 1: “Design Is ______”
PDF, Chuck File
Raghav G.
10/3/2023
Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University
Reading Response: Ends in Themselves
For this week’s reading response, I will be responding to Artful Design’s chapter 1. Specifically, I will be focusing more on Principle 1.12: Design is Artful Engineering.
I especially resonate with the definition for what design is, as specified in this principle. I definitely can also see design as being Artful Engineering, wherein pure art and engineering come together to achieve a specific goal, which often is a balance of evoking specific emotions/feelings while also having the desired utility. Design is beautiful in that it is something everyone does on a daily basis, and something that does not have to be gatekept to a specific subset of people simply based off skill and training alone. An education background and experience consciously employing design and design principles is definitely great in growing and sharpening skills on specific types of design processes, but fundamentally anyone who experiences emotions and sets out to achieve their goals can be a designer.
Bach, Da Vinci, and Mozart all employed design to make beautiful creations of art while Gordon Moore, Steve Wozniak, and Jonas Salk created designs with the goals of achieving very scientifically specific results. A great example of how design is extremely interdisciplinary and universal is in the great polymaths of history. Da Vinci and Omar Khayyam created marvelous works of art while also simultaneously making ground-breaking scientific and mathematical discoveries. It could be argued, that the actual Artful Engineering and the general design processes for each of these breakthroughs remained consistent, but only the contextual field-specific details and knowledge which informed the design decisions varied.
The subjective and objective and the physical and transcendent all come together to form a beautiful blend of goals, values, and ideas that ends up making design a type of art form. As with all forms of art, design can be judged and critiqued from a variety of dimensions. The artful aspect of design can never truly be judged objectively for any of its qualities. It can simply only be observed and experienced. Once observed, the emotions and feelings evoked can then be recorded and written down. On the other hand, the engineering aspect of design can measured for its performance and evaluated as per its adherence to the engineering goals listed out beforehand. Bringing these two sides together, we can, for example, evaluate an electric car based off of how fast it is able to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in comparison to others of its class, but only describe whether its physical body design makes us wretch internally or makes us become infatuated with smooth metallic curves.
The art of design is something I hadn’t consciously thought about much prior to reading this chapter, and I’m very excited to discuss more about this in class!
Design Etude #1
Part 1: Taking Notice
Three things I find beautiful in my day are the power outlet strip in my dorm room at Roble, my guitar, and my 2 liter water bottle.
Part 2: Means and Ends
My Roble room’s power strip is a beautiful piece of design work I have been noticing more and more in recent days. The non-invasive, simple, white design doesn’t draw very much attention to it, and very much seems to be by design. As the power strips snakes across the entirety of the room it makes sense that it’s aesthetic is very low key, to not seem out of place with the rest of the room’s largely elegant and simplistic design. Functionality wise however, the Roble power strip is amazing and sparks me with great joy and comfort, as it allows me to plug in my phone charger on my bed, my computer monitor on my desk, and fridge on the floor to the same physical power strip, despite being on opposite ends of the room.
Whereas my Roble room’s power strip is definitely square in the Means-To-Ends camp of design, my guitar is definitely falls more into the Ends-In-Themselves design philosophy. The guitar functionality wise does literally make audio vibrations which travel into my ears as sound, but the effects that those audio vibrations have on me are very personal. With just a few strings and some wood holding them together, my guitar allows me to enter a wide variety of emotional states, ranging from extremely peaceful, to overbearingly alert. The beauty and elegance of the guitar to me, is something that greatly exceeds its base audio function and elicits emotions that few other belongings of mine are capable of doing.
Finally, my 2 liter water bottle is one of my favorite works of design, that has also transformed my day to day routine on numerous levels. While I used to have to take multiple trips back and froth across my dorm room hallway to fill up my water bottle throughout the day, my 2 liter water bottle allows me to cut down on those trips by almost half. Despite being a much larger and heavy item, the benefits of my 2 liter water bottle far exceed its downsides in my perspective. Despite being an item with a design I cherish for simply being extremely pragmatic, my water bottle also has an aesthetic side to it as well. By having a sleek, monochrome, and matte appearance, my water bottle seems like a 3D asset from Watch Dogs Legion or a prop from the movie Oblivion.
Part 3: Guerrilla Design
I will attempt to write a few lines about my life today with a very aestheticized and prose/poetic spin:
On this fine day, I find myself wandering the labyrinth of our very own Roble Hall.
When I require some aqua, I meander my way up the corridors to the water fountain, quite quaint and small.
A small step takes me in the direction I want, but also often astray, from my productive space.
It seems that in the hustle of each day, each activity competes in a chrono-race.
Song Chuck Code
/* Play a sine wave at 440Hz for 1 week */
SinOsc osc => dac;int freq;
int gain;
int duration;
while( true )
{
Math.random2f(100, 100000) $ int => freq;
Math.random2f(0, 100) $ int => gain;
Math.random2f(0, 1000) $ int => duration;
freq => osc.freq;
gain => osc.gain;
duration::ms => now;
}