The pressure of this year is really catching up on me. In roughly 8 months the whole class and myself will have had to designed a complete product and present it. Throughout the summer I have been trying to figure out the direction I want to take it and have been so indecisive about it all. At the very start of coming to art school to study Product Design I imagined myself doing something along the medical side of things, prosthetic arms or maybe something helping those who suffer from dementia. For ages I felt the need to research and focus on big problems and a lot of my projects that I’ve done have been health related where the the forefront of the design has been the well being of the user. I enjoyed these kind of projects and the research involved in them but have recently been met with a factor that throws me off going in this general direction, that being the lack of creative freedom involved.
Over summer when looking through the works of companies and different products that focus in on the well being of others it made me realise that this was not the route for me as there seemed to be a lack of creative freedom involved in the making process.
That’s why this trip to the design museum was really important and beneficial to me, because it helped the things that inspired me the most were all about the form and aesthetic of the product. The two products in particular that I really liked were the Alessi juice squeezer and the modular book shelf by Ettore Sottsass. The reason for this is mainly because although the products are basic in their function, they have real personality in them due to the interesting shape and forms, and that’s what made me realise that the product I want to design in my last year I want the actual aesthetic and design of it to play a big role. So rather than focusing on big scale problems I’m going to concentrate on something with a lesser purpose, but see how I can make the design of the product enhance the value of it for its users.
