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.