Born in Manchester, Alice graduated in art history from Cambridge University. From 1985 to 2001, she was an award-winning journalist for the Financial Times, working as a foreign correspondent in Paris and pioneering the FT's coverage of the creative industries. Alice was director of the Design Museum in London from 2001 until 2006, when she became design critic of the international edition of the New York Times. Alice wrote a weekly Design column for the New York Times for over a decade. Her columns were syndicated to other media worldwide
Her works include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and Design as an Attitude
She starts off her lecture with introducing her design hero; *László Moholy-Nagy. She continues by explaining the idea of constructivism and emphasises her point on how designers and scientists should work together. To her, design is:
-an agent of change
-help us make sense of our world
-we should use it to turn situations to ur advantage
A modernist and a restless experimentalist from the outset, the Hungarian-born artist was shaped by Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and debates about photography. When Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany, he took over the school's crucial preliminary course, and gave it a more practical, experimental, and technological bent.
She continues by giving us examples, particular communication design, proves her points above.
1. The raised fist
-has been used for over 3000 years
-a symbol of resilience
-used in many many situations but still conveys the same meaning throughout
→message of resilience is communicated effectively and quickly
2. The white flag
-has been used for over 2000 years
-a symbol of surrender
-used in many many situations but still conveys the same meaning throughout
→message of surrender is communicated effectively and quickly
3. The Jolly Roger flag
-used by pirates
-communicates fear
-very powerful and effective
→was able to save valuable crew from unneeded conflict by communicating intentions with just a flag
After bringing up the example of Florence Nightingale's proposals for better clinics for soldiers, she moved on to the conclusion of how at this point, design was bonded with commercialism due to Industrilism. She believes that this constrained design into a 'tool of profit'.
However, with the coming of age of technology, she brings up crowd funding as a means of designers to be able to reach their won goals rather than being told what to do by a company. The example she came up for this was The Ocean Cleanup by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat (at the age of 18!).
The position of designers has changed from; artists being told to make a efficient factory design from a company, to a more independent position. However, the problem here is that design should be collaborative by nature, and how constructivism implies, designers are to work together with specialists from many many areas to reach a goal.
Alice concluded the lecture with something we should be worried about. The more we design, the more we will fail. And the bigger the scale of what is designed, means the bigger the loss and more difficulty for future designers to take on the same project, for it'll be feared to fail again.
REFLECTION
I was interested in what Alice had to say about design's danger of being a 'non-collaborative' thing. It was a bit difficult to understand what she was trying to say, but I do agree with her point that design is an area of art that expands itself into other subject, such as science, politics, or money. I think I should have perhaps a little more understanding of the world around me if I were to be a collaborative-able person. But then again, what kind of design is not related to science? what kind of design would be closer to art, as in, the perspective of beauty. What happened to VISUAL GRATIFICATION? Perhaps these are two factors I want to experimenting with balancing and think where my opinions stand on.
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