Energy, Renewability and Contemporary Design Thinking

Why designs look the way they do

A design is never only a solution to a technical problem. Two designers handed the same brief in the same week will produce different objects, and the same brief handed out a century apart produces objects that barely resemble one another. Something other than the problem is doing that work. Three forces shape a design besides the job it has to do. The first is the context it will live in: where the product will be used, who will use it, and what will be available to it there, including the energy it needs to run. The second is the moment in history it is made in, because the materials, the machines and the costs of one decade are simply not those of another. The third is the culture around it, which decides what people of that time find beautiful, what they find serious, and what they find absurd. Learning to see those three forces in a finished object is a skill you can use on anything, and it is the skill this module builds. Two things it does not cover: the engineering of where electricity is generated, and the procedure you will follow in your own design project. Both of those live in other modules.

Five words for reading a design

Learn these before you use them. Four are about how designers work and think, and one is about where the power comes from.

What shaped each one

What should shape it first?

A designer is asked for a reading lamp to be used where there is no mains electricity and no reliable way to buy batteries. Which consideration should shape the design before any of the others?

• How the lamp will get and keep the energy it needs, in that place
• Which design movement the shape of the lamp should refer to
• Which colour is likely to be most popular next year
• How quickly the lamp can be manufactured

The same object, a century apart

Give two designers the same brief, a storage box for a household, and set them a hundred years apart. Neither is trying harder than the other. The difference is what their own time made possible and what it made attractive.

Real influences, and things that are not

Which THREE of these genuinely shape how a product turns out, in the sense this module means?

• The materials and machines that happened to be available when it was made
• What people at the time considered beautiful, or serious, or old-fashioned
• A wish among designers to react against the way things had been designed just before
• The price the very first buyer happened to pay for it
• The name the product was given when it went on sale

Naming a style is not explaining one

The commonest weak answer in this topic is a sentence that names a movement and stops there. Writing that a product was influenced by a style tells the examiner only that you have heard of the style. It says nothing about the object in front of you, and it would be equally true of a thousand other objects. The fix is small and it is always the same: name a SPECIFIC feature of the actual design, then connect it to a specific pressure of its time. Not that the cabinet was influenced by a style of the period, but that its surfaces are polished and its lines are strong and unbroken, in a decade when speed and luxury were what people admired. Not that the chair reflects a school of design, but that the chair carries no ornament anywhere, because the designers who trained in that school held that anything not doing a job should be taken away. Do the same with context. Not that the radio was designed for a difficult place, but that it carries a crank handle, because a supply that cannot be relied on has to be replaced by the person using it. One specific feature and one specific reason is worth more than a paragraph of movement names.

Complete the design words

A short statement of what is wanted and who it is wanted for, which the finished design is judged against, is _____. The loop in which a design is proposed, tested, changed and tested again is _____. A period in which many designers shared a way of working and a look is _____. An energy source that is replaced naturally about as fast as it gets used is described as _____.

Read a design in this order

You are handed an unfamiliar object and asked what shaped it. Put these five moves into the order that gets you a real answer rather than a guess.

• Work out what the object is actually for
• Name what the place it gets used in demands of it
• Ask what the materials and machines of its time allowed
• Ask what people of its time found attractive or serious
• Only now say which of those did the most to shape it

A lamp shaped by where it lives

Picture a reading lamp made for a household with no mains supply and no shop nearby selling batteries. Work through the three forces on it. The context comes first and it is unforgiving: whatever powers the lamp has to be replaceable by the person holding it, which rules out anything bought in and points instead at light collected during the day or at energy the user puts in by hand. That single limit then decides a great deal else. A panel needs a surface facing upward and a flat place to sit, so the lamp gets a broad base rather than a narrow one. A hand crank needs a housing strong enough to be wound by somebody in a hurry, so the casing is thicker than it would otherwise need to be. Now the moment in history. Cheap moulded polymer makes that thick casing one part rather than five, which would not have been true a few decades ago and changes what the object costs. And now the culture. The lamp is plain, because plain currently reads as practical and honest, and a customer choosing a lamp for a working household is not looking for decoration they did not ask for. Three forces, one object, and none of them is the technical problem of making light.

Find the empty sentence

Five sentences from an answer about a cabinet. Tap the ONE that names an influence without explaining anything about the object.

• The cabinet has strong unbroken lines running the full width of each door.
• Its surfaces are polished to a high shine rather than left matt.
• Both of those were admired in a decade that took speed and luxury as its themes.
• This cabinet was clearly influenced by the design movements of its period.
• The veneer is cut in a repeating pattern, which a machine of that time could do quickly and by hand would have been slow.

Build the influence sentence

One sentence can name a feature and explain it. Choose the option in each gap that turns a label into an explanation.

Design thinking run

Five quick questions on reading a design. Three lives.

Reading an unfamiliar object

You are handed a hand-powered water pump made for a village with no electricity supply, and asked to explain what shaped its design. It is heavy, it is entirely plain, and its handle is unusually long. Work through three decisions.

• Where do you begin?
• You notice the handle is much longer than it needs to be for an adult to grip. What is the useful move?
• How do you word the explanation of why the pump is so plain?

Explain what shaped it

A wind-up torch is sold for use in places where mains power and shop-bought batteries cannot be relied on. It has a broad flat base, a thick plain casing, and a folding crank. Explain what shaped this design. Remember that naming a style on its own earns nothing.

• Say what the torch is for, and what the place it is used in demands of it
• Explain why the energy it runs on had to be put in by the user, and what renewable means here
• Tie at least two specific features of the torch to a specific reason
• Say one thing about the making of it that would have been different a few decades ago
• Finish by saying which of the three forces did the most to shape it, and why