DESIGN RESEARCH IN ACADEMIC PRACTICE

Every Design Tells a Story

Suresh Sethi Industrial Design Center, IITB, Powai, Mumbai 400079, India

ABSTRACT Design involves feelings and storytelling helps build meaning and emotion in design. Metaphors, analogies and stories have become powerful tools to bring concepts to life. Designers often create objects not as a set of logical proposition, but as a pattern of experiences. They link apparently unconnected elements to create new designs. Visual experiences draw from the features of the visible world. The visual impression, rather than the actual object, becomes localised to form the visual experience. These experiences are by definition stored in the unconscious and become manifested through the ideas they generate. Lived experiences as a result of direct perception appear to be a critical factor in the generation of design ideas. Little has been written about non- formal methods, approaches about the designer’s playful, childlike exploratory sketching – visualization at the earliest stage of design process. How do designers start sketching their first ideas – where do these ideas come from? The aim of the research is to establish that designers use images and memories from their own lives that help them in visualising forms at the earliest stage of design process. The idea of storytelling becomes a theoretical instrument, a tool for helping designer discover new possibilities and opportunities within the creative process.

KEYWORDS

Design visualization, storytelling, memory and experiences

PROLOGUE

It is the story and not the object alone through which we construct meaning. I have always been amazed as to how feelings and things, things and memory are mixed together… you care for things that are layered with emotional experiences. ‘The story of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan, of the devoted wife and the grieving husband, is so much a part of mythology of the Taj that visiting the building feels almost like meeting a proxy. The Taj is a medium through which we encounter their personal relationship.’ i Taj Mahal is a metaphor of love –sustained by viewers own lives and loves.

Experiencing Bill Viola’s art works in a gallery in Berlin was breathtaking. Viola is a contemporary video artist whose works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences and capturing the essence of emotion. His personal experience with water is used as an important part of his pieces. He lets the viewer to have both an internal and external view of his work, allowing them to get in touch with emotion and make a soulful connection.

INTRODUCTION

Designers often create objects not as a set of logical proposition, but as a pattern of experiences. They link apparently unconnected elements to create new designs. Metaphors, analogies and stories have become powerful tools to bring concepts to life. The richness of the visual form, a designer creates, depends, to a certain extent, upon the nature of his/her visual surroundings. Designers use visual material and memories from their own lives as a source of inspiration during design conceptualization. According to English art critic

and poet Herbert Read, ‘Form, though it can be analysed into intellectual terms like measure, balance, rhythm, and harmony, is really intuitive in origin.’ii Indeed, the process of giving form to an idea in industrial design encompasses three basic disciplines: technology, which deals with production, materials, processes, and economic considerations; human dynamics; and aesthetics, the intuitive element, Read observed, that projects the perceived product image. The designer can claim uncontested expertise in this third area of image creation through form. For Raymond Loewy, design was a simple exercise....a little logic, a little taste and the will to co-operate. Christopher Alexander argued that design was about giving form, organization and order to physical things. For Michael Beirut somewhere along the way of the design process an idea for the design pops into his head out of the blue, like magic. However there is not, as yet, any unified theory of design to serve as the basis for claims about designers work and the effects it has on form creation.

“The way to understanding is through experience,”iii says Miyamoto Musashi in The Book of Five Rings. Design’s purpose has always been to define and solve problems; changing technology creates the need for new approaches that respond to a new context. Traditionally designers create objects that support appearance – today emotional design is the buzz word. ‘An obvious difference between New Design and Traditional Design is a question not so much of ideology or style but of changed market and production conditions,’iv states Andrea Branzi, an Italian architect and designer. This new view emphasises the importance of creating an alternative to the rigid strictures that industrial design has imposed on objects expressive and functional potential.

Traditional design has always referred to mass markets — now rapidly disappearing, partly because standardisation, with its urge to transform different types of behaviour and traditions into fixed models, had its roots in a large homogeneous international market. Designers took the approach that they must formulate objects to suit everyone, when in fact they could not. The simultaneous presence of a variety of markets that correspond to different cultural groups, each with its specific behaviour, language, fashions, and traditions that demand particular consumer customisation characterises present society. The provider of a new product must actively choose its targeted user, promote it to a particular group, and avoid standardisation. A new concept of product and environmental quality thus asserts itself — one that goes beyond performance and service to create an emotional value not by the object’s functionality but by its expressive level.

The New Design approach lies in interweaving a different product culture via a system of ties and functions; it cannot be explained in purely ergonomic or functional terms, but it covers a wider cultural and expressive point of view. Designers must make themselves aware of the world for which they design and alert themselves to the emotive directional flow. A need exists to develop a designer’s intuitive nature and the ability to see possible future images, so observed Johannes Itten, the founding teacher in the early 20th

century of the Bauhaus School, Germany’s most important and avant-garde art and design school: ‘I reached the conclusion that we must counterbalance our externally oriented scientific research and technological speculation with inner-directed thought and practice.’v Designers communicate their ideas through words and drawings. Traditionally designers create objects that support appearance – when mass produced objects become so widely available and instantly accessible, being everyplace, at the same time makes the obj ect commonplace and lose its value. Design needs to be placed in a ‘context enriched by emotion.’ Emotions in design should be a part of the industrial design process states Don Norman –‘Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context; capture the emotions.’vi And in Barbara Radice’s words: ‘an object exists as a system of signs, as a catalyst of emotions, as a container of values or information that one wants to possess….in other words, as an instrument of communication.vii

The designer’s dialogue with a sketch

The memory is made up of a pattern of ideas, thoughts and images, and by visualizing; designer promotes the creation of new connections that didn’t exist before. Designers create new patterns, new relationships, that once may have seemed obtuse, unrelated or even inappropriate. A narrative, or story, provides a way in which a designer can explain what they do in an easily understandable, informal way. Our objects signal ‘who’

we are – the impulse to measure human experience through the things we can touch, see and hold comes naturally. From an early age, children register and coordinate their surroundings and sensory perceptions to interpret and explain what puzzles them and governs their lives. This stored knowledge grows with time and accompanies a person throughout life. Designers are able to draw themselves into their own experience of spaces, of people and of things. Clues exist in their own memory. This phase of the research experiment aimed to confirm the importance of sketching at the conceptual design stage and to explore if use of visual imagery/story improves the efficiency of ideation.

The main research questions in this experiment are:

1) Do designers currently use image/word/story for inspiration?

2) Does this improve the efficiency of ideation?

Approach

In my approach I use the emergent aspects of working directly with real-world observations, values and opinions. We needed to get different people together who both had knowledge of theory and practice on the matter. Furthermore we needed a way that would let them open up about the phenomenon in an associative yet structured manner and lead to create new artworks, new designs through their everyday experiences.

Experiment 1

Designers make moodboards and story boards to express their thoughts while making a presentation, often not mentioned in interviews. Three women designers participated in this study. The first one was an industrial designer working (FG), the second one was textile designer (SK) the third one was student of textiles (AP) the student was in their final year of her master’s studies. All three participants were part of Color Finish and Material groups in the design studio.

Two participants were given the following quote: “Colors are like words, with colors you can tell stories.”Ettore Sottsaas. Images of fruit and vegetables were shared with them to let these images become the starting point, to have a dialogue with keeping a focus on creating something out of this conversation.

Figure 1: Tell your stories with the colours that you could eat!

The idea is to reconstruct a system of expressive and emotional relation between user and the color of the home appliances of his/her living environment. Each participant were asked to think of their interaction with the words and visual material. They were free to add images on their own however these should be related to fruit and vegetables. Colours you could eat! The keywords and phrases used by the participants contained extensive lists of aspects pertaining visual material in their design work. Also they used stories and descriptions of experiences to explain their interaction with collections of visual material.

The participant (GE) explained her concept: ELEGANT, DREAMLIKE, LUXURIOUS –‘The peel of pomegranate is slight silhouette of kernel, the ripe crystal pulp is dreamlike-Pomegranate, emerging from the natural - easily merges back into life.’ For her next concept she said it was ‘LUSCIOUS, PLAYFUL, SENSUAL –a shade so juicy and happy, pulpa is also the colour of watermelon. It is one of nature's most eye-catching hues; it works well in many spaces. Pulpa adds a dose of drama, though more nuanced and softer than pure red or magenta, it is a pink that has grown up.’

Figure 2: Pomegranate – Elegant, Dreamlike, Luxurious!

Figure 3: Pulpa – Luscious, Playful, Sensual!

The second participant (SK) said ‘a picture is worth thousand words’! And she chose not to use any words in her presentation.

Figure 4: Colour Fuchsia?

Figure 5: Strawberries, Cherries!

Figure 6: Cocktail at Mumbai Airport Lounge - A picture is worth 1000 words!

The third participant, (AP) was asked to create colour for and from her own surroundings. She was from

Calcutta and was studying in Ahmadabad. She took pictures from her own surroundings and created the colour

palette for the appliance. It was the familiar spaces from where she found her inspirations. Contrary to my

expectation she did not use words or description in her presentation.

Figure 7: Calcutta – getting ready for Pooja!

Figure 7: Calcutta – celebrating Pooja!

Figure 8: Kutch– celebrating colours!

All three participants described their use of images as helpful; the images triggered association and gave them a clear direction to arrive to creative and original solutions.

Experiment 2

University students in Shanghai were given a project to design a home appliance – these were done in two different terms in the year 2012– the participants were thirty undergraduate and graduate industrial design students. The students had to investigate the emotional and personal quality of an experience, how ordinary things are shaped, used and how they inhabit their lives. This became a possible starting point for design. The group working on refrigerator was given a clear brief – ‘from your life – of your time’ and the user segment was 18-24 years old. The visual impressions became the intended design ideas; giving meaning and contextual richness in the form language; so essential for creating an original product. Design emerged from their everyday experience – and the concepts were novel and youthful.

Figure 9: REFRIGERATORS “COLOURFUL” – Shopping at IKEA- the concept came from their experience at the Ikea store in Shanghai,

where they observed the idea of customisation and plenty of colourful plastic containers.

Figure 10: REFRIGERATOR “ATTITUDE” – the very own personal refrigerator. Like the mobile phones comes in many colours.

The second exercise was to design a new washing machine. No brief was given and the students were asked to work in groups and come out with concepts. The resulting concepts were functional and mundane washing machines, there was very little storytelling. The student did not seem excited with their output. Only one concept where the group had a narrative, the idea was novel.

Figure 11: Concepts without stories resulted in functional washing machines.

Experiment 3: Handles

Four designers participated in this study. Three were professional designers with 3-5 years of work experience and fourth was a student doing internship in the same design office.

Two participants worked on design of handle for a single door refrigerator. Each one saw images and used text to share the work during the presentation. When the visual imagery used as an inspiration was weak, the concept generated was also weak. The design direction was ambiguous, and presentation did not have any inherent strength. The participants during this phase of conceptualisation were given no clues, images or any written brief. Both particpants struggled to arrive at meaningful solutions. They had no clear direction and during the presentation they could not communicate clearly their ideas.

Figure 12: Choice of weak imagery led to uninspiring solutions!

Two participants were given a brief which was to take images from their surroundings and think of their cultural identity connections when conceptualizing handles for refrigerators. One participant was a Chinese industrial designer, and the second participant was an Indian industrial design student, in his final year of graduate study.

Figure 13: Stories from your own lives can inspire to deliver original ideas.

In the process of designing handles for a two door refrigerator, the two participants worked with clear

imagery that inspired them to deliver original concepts, which surprised them. They said that deciding on the

direction and their search became easier. The selected images helped them to organize and were useful in

conceptualising the shape, pattern, motif and color combination. The method encouraged the participants to

phrase their process into a language of everyday experience. The participants have provided both a set of

keywords and a structure, which could efficiently be organized and compared to the presentations.

The image becomes the intended design idea; it gives meaning and contextual richness in the form language; which is so essential for creating an original product. Students make abstract forms as signals to the imagination, form that take on qualities of meaning, forms that have a definite personality or begin as nostalgia of some quality. Getting out of your comfort zone is an important part of this experiment and to draw the idea from their experience rather than from marketing design briefs imposed on them. The focus is to develop each person’s ability to look within their own self, to find their potential in rediscovering design. When first starting out, stories provided a way of getting a feel of a new terrain. Telling stories, sharing their experiences helped designer feel more comfortable as participants of the design process and it made it less intimidating. Designer’s ways of thinking can play an important role in the development of creative alternatives. Valuable cues and ideas can also arise by admitting and examining feelings, intuitions, and emotions. Storytelling enables us to more richly express what we mean and to understand complex forms The final results are sensual, unconscious and adventurous.

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my guide Professor Ravi Poovaiah for his consistent guidance and encouragement.

Professor Rohit Manchanda and Professor K. Munshi for their views that help shape the way this

research has progressed. I am very grateful to the participating professional designers and my students

from whom I have learnt a lot during the last two years. Together we went in to this great adventure, of

discovering the soul of storytelling. I am especially grateful to Ashish Gupta, Anannya Patra, Althea,

Chandradhar Rathore, Fisher Ge, Sharad Singh for sharing with me their experience and stories.

i Tillotson, G. Taj Mahal. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. Print. ii Kepes, Gyorgy, ed. "The Origin of Form in Art." The Man Made Objects. London: Studio Vista, 1966. 30-49.

Print iii Miyamoto, Musashi. A Book of Five Rings. Trans. Victor Harris. UK: Allison and Busyby, 2004. Print. iv Some of the reflections on new design in these pages have been from the notes of the lectures by Prof. Andrea Branzi which the author attended as a student at the Domus Academy, Milan in 1984 v "The Foundation Course at the Bauhaus. " Education of Vision. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. London: Studio Vista, 1965. 104-21. Print. vi Norman, Donald A. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic. Print vii Radice, Barbara. Memphis. London: Thames & Hudson, 1985. Print