Focus or broaden up? This is a question that bothered me for a long time as a design student. When we look at the glory trail of the designers in the canon, the answer is clear: designers should never limit themselves to one discipline. Once one’s knowledge spans a significant number of subjects, one can…
Addressing Human Needs
Eames, Gerstner, and Sutnar improved and reinvented the forms and organizations based on the principles of human ergonomics and human factors. They aim to bring convenience to humans. Furthermore, they addressed the importance of user experience. Firstly, Eames’ design of chairs takes users’ need into consideration instead of producing chairs in bulk. Secondly, Grester’s responsive…
Three Trailblazers to the Core of Interaction Design
“To look ahead one must learn to look back.” – Henry Dreyfuss Dreyfuss & Human-centered Design Henry Dreyfuss is known for improving the design of some of the most common objects in a daily scene. Dreyfuss and his teams spent time digging into the user needs & using scenarios in order to come up with…
Think, Think, Think
Henry Dreyfuss, Charles and Ray Eames, Karl Gustner, and Ladislav Sutner all had some amazing contributions to the world of interaction design, and to people. They designed with people in mind, and managed to consider how people would act/ react to new things, how these things would be considered in the lives of their “users.”…
It’s All in the Technique
Charles and Ray Eames are pretty awesome in that they were working with so many different materials and made so many different chairs with different combinations of features. When people would use their products they learn each time what made those chairs successful or not then applied that data to their ultimate design, the Eames…
X, Y, Z-Axes of Designer’s Thought
When making a 3D model, designers will realize that to make it accurate, they need to consider three dimensions. Interestingly, I was surprised to find that this also applies to the realm of thought. The situation of interaction designers now is challenging, just like the mid-century industrial designers, who faced with numerous choices and new…
As a future interaction designer
Interaction design is a relatively young design area compared to other design majors. At the same time, with the rapid development of technology, it is difficult to predict what interactive design will look like in the future. Maybe no one even knows whether the website will exist in 10 years or it will be replaced…
Mid-century designers
Most of the mid-century designers did a variety of things in different design areas. Their experiences made a huge contribution and built the foundations to the later design area such as interaction design. Ray Eames and her husband Charles Eames’ skills have covered the field of architecture, furniture design, industrial design, manufacturing, and photographic arts….
The Mid-century Design Burst & Rules
As we all know, after World War II, the world art center began to shift from Paris to New York. Part of the reason could be attributed to the relatively good economic environment and development opportunities of the United States at this time, which makes American design developed rapidly. From my point of view, I…
I Found My Way
The designers in the Mid-Century laid the foundation and standards for our design today. Many of their concept and ideas have been used by us today. My favorites are Sutnar and Dreyfuss. One of them is free and bold; the other is neat and delicate. They are two extremes that portray the high standards of…
Narrow thinking will affect design ability
As an interaction designer, recognition of professional field is of course important. However, I think having broad thinking ability is a thing that can improve professional ability. In the process of our design, we will constantly involve new knowledge from peers. It’s like asking, “What’s this?” in the process of communication. We Googled something we…
Our Design Legacies
The techniques used by the Eames, Gerstner, and Sutnar seem to be in different fields, but they have a lot in common. For example, the Eames couple will do a lot of brainstorming before the actual designing, they will draw connections between each element they have listed out. I find it just like the “task…
Design is people-oriented
In the Mid-Century, four designers had a profound impact on the design industry.Henry Dreyfuss was the first designer to systematically apply ergonomics to the design process. The purpose of ergonomics is to study the coordinated relationship between humans and human-made products. Charles Eams is known as one of the most influential designers in the Mid-Century…
Designing for People, by People
Henry Dreyfuss, a notable industrial designer who quoted “when the point of contact between the product and people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed” created works like The Measure of Man which helped construct principles that revolved around ergonomics (human-factors engineering). He also incorporated the importance of approaching every problem…
The more the merrier!
A multidisciplinary design approach seeks to integrate the different skillsets into the design process. While it’s important to specialize in one area, a designer who has more to offer brings extra benefits. In the process of working with many different areas, the mid-century designers discovered new approaches to the same old problem. And by shifting…
The mid-century designers
Ray Eames was an artist, designer, and filmmaker who had great contributions to the design field. She and her husband, Charles, together working on furniture design, graphic design, architectural design, textile design, and filmmaking that tried to express the idea of playful design. Karl Gerstner was a Swiss designer, typographer, author, and artist. His design…
Pioneering Interaction Design
Both Charles and Ray Eames were contributors revolutionizing and simplifying interior design, with Charles’ architecture, Ray’s fine arts background—together, creating chic chairs. These successful design principles are used in interaction design. Layouts do not need ornamental designs if they get in the way of the end goal. Karl Gerstner and Ladislav Sutnar are pioneers in…
The mid-century foundation
The mid-century is the age of interdisciplinary. Instead of focusing on one single aspect, designers from the mid-century experienced in different areas, and their works built the foundations for interaction design. And in this post, I want to write about the influences from multi-disciplined designers Charles and Ray Eams, Ladislav Sutnar, Karl Gerstner, and Henry…
Valuable assets for a better designer
Dreyfuss appealed the Human-centred design, focusing on how people enhance their life’s security using the design and minimize the impact on people’s fluidity behavior. His principle affected the products to be human-friendly in terms of safety. The round edge of tables or the rubber cover for corners is to avoid the injury from sharp edges….
Never stop thinking
The Eames Creative Process inspires me. They keep testing, then draw the ideas in their minds through sketches, change the materials, adjust the size, shape, and test again. This design method continues to any design field today. At the end of the video, said to go outside and create something. It means that we have…
