After reading the first six chapters of John Heskett's Design, I have learned a lot about many of the ideas and principles behind the different types of design. Chapter one starts out by simply answering the question "What is design?" One of the things that I gathered from this chapter as I was reading and highlighting key points was the sentence "Very few aspects of the material environment are incapable of improvement in some significant way by greater attention being paid to their design." It's thought-provoking to realize that design can cover so many different parts of life and really can't be defined by just one thing. A quote on page four reads that "Part of the reason why design can be used in this arbitrary manner is that it has never cohered into a unified profession such as law, medicine, or architecture..." This concept is an underlying point behind all of the following chapters in that design is never just one thing. The next chapter goes on to describe and explain how design has grown and changed over many years to be the new concept that it is today. To be completely honest, chapter two was somewhat boring and factual, but did do a good job summarizing different points through history and across different countries. Chapter three then moved into describing the differences between the words function, utility, and significance in relation to design, with the words "utility" and "significance" being broken down from "function." Although this doesn't really relate to the points of the chapter, one of the most interesting things that I took out of this section was the part about the CEO of Coca-Cola finding out that the pronunciation of the company's name translated to mean "bite the wax tadpole" in Chinese. They then had to go and change the Chinese characters on the packaging so that it could be adapted to mean "tasty and evoking happiness" instead.
Chapter four was mainly about product/industrial design and covered a range of different products and companies with some of their designs. One quote that I found to be interesing in this chapter relates back to the points made in the first chapter: "Most principle disciplines, such as architecture and engineering, have a body of basic knowledge and theory about what the practice is and does that can serve as a platform...The absense of a similar basis in design is one of the greatest problems it faces." This absense of a starting point is exactly what causes the requirement of designers to be creative "think outside the box" people. I just found it to be interesting that there was such a solid reasoning behind why.
After concluding the chapter on industrial design, Heskett moves in to chapter five to talk about visual communication design. To me, this chapter was the most interesting since visual communcations is the field of design that I am looking into. I was interested in learning about April Greiman who has been labeled as a "pioneer in the use of computers in design" as well as a "fountainhead of modern typography," and Milton Glaser, who I wrote about for assignment 02. The chapter also discussed design in relation to advertisement which very specifically realated to my major in marketing and what I would like to do in a job after college.
Lastly, chapter six covered the last major subdivion of design, interior space. This subdivion however, can be broken down even farther into the decorative layout design of spaces as well as those who are interested in "the original creation of spacial concepts and layouts." The most interesting fact that I took from this chapter was the statistics that were presented on page 70: "On a population basis, the Netherlands...has one interior designer per 89,000 people in comparison to one to 8,700 in the USA." It's amazing to think about how much this profession has grown and escalated in the U.S. even in comparison to another country that is known to be an example of "design consciousness." Overall, the fist six chapters of this book were informative and interesting, but also somewhat dull at times. However, as someone who is interested in pursuing design as part of a career, I would definitely consider it to be necessary to read.
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