Bill Moggride!

Bill Moggride, who is the director of the Cooper-Hewitt design museum, gives a wonderful insight, on what is design, Ranging from architecture to industrial design and then goes on to explore the ideas of good design and bad design.  He explains that we wouldn’t recognise a good design, unless we are able to recognise bad designs.  He refers to “smart design” as designs that are suitable for everyone he uses kitchen utensils as an example, where it would be comfortable for a youngster, but also comfortable for the elderly who may even have arthritis. 

He then provides a video of the first lady of the united states, who talks about the education of students in design.  The first lady expresses that  the some a portion of children are “cut off” from America’s rich cultural life. She wants to open up new incentives for younger people to embrace the culture of design that surrounds them in their everyday life. She talks about achieving this through workshops and mentoring sessions like the one she gave her speech at to give direction to those interested and shape dreams.

  He refers to the intel tab as a supposably good design, as it integrates many functions together, and then goes on to bad design where he refers to the i-mode in Japan.  He shows a video where it demonstrates how the i-mode is able to allow you to purchase a drink through your cell phone, in the video it takes approximately thirty five minutes for the lady to finally purchase the drink.  Bill explains this bad design can come from the lack of communication between different aspects of design, in respects to the video he refers to the people who designed the phone and the people who design the web service for the i-mode.  He stresses the importance of prototyping to understand people better in order to achieve success.  There are 3 stages to prototyping; inspire, evolve and to validate

He refers to the  4 factors of design as being :

-physical design

-human and subjective

-Digital design

-Technical and objective

Bill explains to us that there are three expanding contexts that relate to design. Personal, Social and Environmental; all of which play a pivotal role in the design process. On a personal scale, we strive to design to achieve health and wellbeing. Socially, we design for impact, to change something, to improve it. And with environmental we look at how the materials that it’s made up of affect our world. 

This is a great video, which I found to be very insightful in expressing design processes and the flaws of design that we are faced with, and coming up with an approach to combat these flaws.  Bill also emphasises to us that it is important to design for others and not to be selfish and just design for ourselves.