Week 6 Free Response

As the seasons start to change from a blistering cold Midwest Winter to a well-deserved Spring, one of Miami's most ridiculous fashion items comes back into the fold. 

The Croakies.

Ya know, these things:

 

What bothers me about Croakies is that they look so stupid. When you're wearing your glasses you have 12 inches of fabric poking out of the back of your head just dangling there. When they're off your head and hanging from your neck your glasses are just hanging around your chest looking useless.

From a design standpoint,

They're brilliant.

They're so simple yet the function is incredible. How many times have you put your sunglasses into the neck of your shirt and they've fallen out due to any sort of movement? My guess is countless times. They also save your glasses from getting lost because once they're around your neck they're going nowhere. Also, you don't have to worry about breaking your sunglasses by putting them in your pocket or your purse.

Hats off to whoever invented this simple yet effective design

Still won't be caught dead wearing them though.

Week 6

It was really good meeting my final group project members this week. I think we're going to get along nicely. No one person is dominating the conversations and direction of the discussions. 

We got down to business right away after introducing ourselves and we started generating some really good ideas. For instance, we were faced with the challenge of finding problems on campus and brainstorming some ideas on how to fix them. We started small and thought about some problems that affect our individual living spaces and then we went big and thought about ideas that had a broader range of affect. We came up with a lot of good ideas but none that I thought would be good for the coming project. One idea, which I thought was the best, was shot down by the majority of the group. The idea revolved around personalized TV and was born from the overwhelming amount of channels offered by premium cable. This personalized cable will give a quick survey when set up for the first time and will analyze what types of shows/channels you are most interested in and create a list so you can quickly access programs you'd be most interested in. My group wasn't really enthusiastic about the idea but I will pitch it again later after some refining.

Week 5 Free Response

One thing that made a lasting impression on me this week was something that occurred in a different class yet still has some interesting design implications. 

In IDS 159, Strength Through Cultural Diversity, we were talking about how different cultures view beauty. Living in our Western culture, we naturally think that everyone has the same idea about what are some attractive qualities to have. The fact of the matter is that beauty changes from culture to culture. Yet human beings of all cultures still strive to attain those qualities through artificial means.

And that's where the design of the human body comes into play.



Take the ancient Chinese cultural practice of shrinking the feet of young girls. In the ancient Chinese culture, small feet were considered a sign of beauty reserved for nobility. Some of these lady's feet get so small they literally can't walk by themselves yet they suffer this torture to reflect the design of beauty.

Now in our Western culture we look at that and think that's appalling. But who are we to judge? Women will cut open their chest and insert bags of silicon in their breasts to make them bigger. Others will literally cut their face and stretch their skin to make themselves younger. 


 Young girls will see models who have gone through reconstruction and think that's normal potentially causing them to have lower self-esteem. Design has done a lot of good in our world but being able to design one's own body might have opened up a can of worms. 

Week 5

First off, I would like to say I thought the speech on paradigm shifts was very interesting. I didn't really know what a paradigm shift was and the implications an event like that can cause. The most interesting part about the presentation was when the speaker talked about Pablo Picasso and how he revolutionized art. Picasso started the cubist movement and took painting from something that was meant to be realistic in image and turned it completely upside down. His cubist style of art projects the same emotions that a "normal" painting would yet it is presented in an entirely different way. To me, that is the definition of a paradigm shift; when you can keep something's core value in tact while completely redesigning it.

 

Another thing I really liked this week was the Thoughtless Acts  presentation. I think the psychology behind the subconcious mind is fascinating. One's subconcious is as much a part of one's identity as there concious thoughts. In fact, I would say that someone's subconcious is responsible for more decisions than they actually think. Anyway, it was interesting seeing our own thoughtless acts after the presentation. Like for instance, at dinner yesterday, my appetizer plate was removed from the dinner table leaving me nowhere to rest my fork and knife I wanted to continue to use. In order to solve my problem, I laid the fork down with just the tips resting on the table and then rested the knife along the fork. 

Week 4 Free Response

 

So I was surfing the web the other day and I came across an article on the New York Times Website about the latest Chanel fashion show held in Paris. 

It was held in a supermarket.

Um.

What?

Apparently high-fashion is too high-fashion for an actual fashion show. The fact that these models are wearing thousand dollar pieces while strutting past cans of cat food is utterly ridiculous. The juxtaposition is hysterical.

The whole design of high-fashion is just so stupid. I understand that high-fashion is considered more art than functional wear, I get that. But, the lack of functionality is allowing high-fashion to go unchecked. It's now less about design and more about being edgy, avant-garde, and in Chanel's case; utterly random. 

Week 4

I had a lot of fun this week working in our groups trying to find a solution to a problem here on campus. I think analyzing problems in a place as important to our development as our University is a vital process. If we, as students, don't proactively pursue finding problems on our campus, we're sort of failing as students. It's our job to expect the best from our University and demand change when we see benefit.
Anyway, our group decided to reform the student scheduling process which I'm sure everyone has a problem with. My two favorite tools that DARs 2.0 (props for creativity) contains is the random schedulizer and the suggested schedule. The random schedulizer gives you options for your schedule based on remaining classes so you can get an idea of what you want before you tailor the schedule to your liking. The suggested schedule is my favorite of the two (not because I thought of it) but because it's something I wish I had when I was a freshman scheduling my classes. Freshman year I was eager to start my business courses and I killed myself with a semester of only business courses. The random schedule would have helped me realize that patience was better by suggesting a blend of Miami Plan and business courses.