A study trip to London (Part 1)

Date of the trip: 1st.November.2011
Date the blog was written: 3rd.November.2011
Time: 4:30am

This is the handout the tutor gave us for the study trip plan in London. After we finished visiting the Design Museum (http://designmuseum.org/) everyone were split in groups and each group followed the tutors that were going to their favoured museums listed in number 3 above. 

I had my day planned prior to the trip which was to followed Jon Spencer to the Folkner Fine Papers shop then head straight to the British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/) along with the Cartoon Museum (http://www.cartoonmuseum.org/), and later to the London Graphic Centre as well as Magma.
Although the plan didn’t went quite well it was still all worth it because I got the chance to visit V&A Museum ( Victoria and Albert Museum, http://www.vam.ac.uk/) instead and an outrageous shop I have never seen before, Muji. 

Everyone has their own expectations when they have little knowledge about a museum with great name and my prediction was that it would be a massive building like the Art Gallery Walker in Liverpool and that it would be layout with colourful walls and pieces of artworks, yet it sort of disappointed some enthusiastic students (such as the blogger herself) and here’s the appearance of the Design Museum:

  ”Disappearance can be deceiving”, this is totally true. When we stepped in and saw all those great designs and inventions from historical times and modern days, the expectations recovered and there were lots of great pieces that I have always always always wanted to see in live such as:

The Telephone Candlestick Style

A really old-fashioned sewing machine:

The hactic that I saw in a video on my research for 3D Modelling:

Huge Calculators (Adding Machine):

The exhibition was named as ”This is Design”, it features the museum’s Collection including ”the Angle poise Lamp, UK road signs, UK traffic lights, the candlestick telephone and the Moulton bicycle”.  

The exhibition were categorised into different sections with a big heading and caption on the soft walls, thet are as follows:

Lifecycle:

”Many of the products that we once used are no longer with us. Objects such as the typewriter, which have a rich design heritage and offered genuine utility, are no longer part of everyday life. In the 1950s, a typewriter or a film camera were understood as lifetime purchases. But many of the new categories of products that have replaced them have a very different perspective. The life of a mobile is more likely to be measured in months than in years, let alone decades. 

Perhaps as a result, sustainability and reusability are now a common concern. An increasing number of companies are aware of the need to integrate these practises into their business models. More effort than ever is being invested into the seemingly paradoxical needs of advanced industrial economies to encourage consumption, while simultaneously reducing its negative impact on the environment.

It is misleading to suggest that sustainable design and a consideration of product lifecycle is a new phenomenon. In different ways, designers such as Dieter Rams and Alvar Aalto were actively practising elements of what we would now term sustainable design in the first half of the twentieth century. However it is only in the past twenty years that it has reached a critical point where it is now fashionable, and perhaps more importantly, marketable.”

Archetypes:

”Designers work within the context of a visual language, in which certain forms acquire meanings over time. Very occasionally, they are asked to create a unique form, for a new category of object, the telephone for example. But once this definitive form or archetype, has been created, every subsequent telephone is a development, or reaction against it. While many variations on an archetype do offer genuine developments in areas such as costs, utility and aesthetics, others represent nothing more than small changes in styling, in attempt to sell more units.

Archetypes give us the visual signal that help us understand what an object is for, and how to use it. It is notable that archetypes are often chosen as the visual interface when creating a virtual version of a previously existing physical device. It is not surprising that the calculator on the first generation Iphone references Dieter Rams and Dietrich Lubs’ calculator for Braun. It was and still is the archetypal calculator and provides users with an interface that they knew and understood how to use. 

In a product landscape that is continually changing, individual designs can endure. Archetypes such as the bicycle or the ballpoint pen, are so perfectly realise that their appearance and function remains largely unchanged. Nonetheless, archetypes do have a limited lifespan. While changes in our way of life can lead to the eradication of an archetype, advances in manufacturing and new technologies are the most common causes for the creation of a new archetype that replaces the function of a previous one.”

This sections are mostly displaying archetypes from 20th Century including the various archetypes of angle-poise lamps, telephones, cars bicycles, sewing machine, cameras, etc. 

Digitisation:

”Occasionally, the world experiences periods of focused and condensed transformation. Comparable to the agriculture and industrial revolution, the digital revolution is one of these moments. It has brought about one of the most profounds of change - and opportunity -for design.

The digital revolution charts the relatively short period in which analogue equipment such as the adding machine and the record layer, turned into electrical devices that have since become fully digital. Since the invention of the first transistor 1947, there has been a much bigger leap to silicon semiconductors and microchips. The invention of these technologies made the early computers possible. As the chips became more powerful, personal and portable computers followed. Similarly, digital communications, and the ability to digitise what was formerly analogue data, gave birth to the internet and facilitated the rise of mobiel phones and MP3 players.

The endless possibilities and speed of technological improvements has often left designers struggling to keep up. In the 1930s, modernists believed that a careful analysis of the mechanism on which a machine depend would allow the designer to produce a form that was both functional and beautiful. When a machine has no moving parts, a different approach is needed, requiring designers to rethink what design can do.”

This sections displayed a variety of designs ranged from different media such as technological entities both old-fashioned and advanced, architecture, press release of magazines, laser cut lamps and etc: