Lorris assignment one

Ideas and Quotes From the First 8 Chapters of: What is a Designer: Things. Places. Messages¹ By Norman Potter

-Chapter #1:

Design requires constant questioning. What are the design problems, who are the users, what are the economic or material considerations? To design one must always be in some sense a student.

Quote from page 13: “There is a perfectly good sense in which a creative worker remains, perpetually a humble student of his subject.”

Quote from page 14: “By the word ‘student’, Therefore, I mean those who still question what they are doing, and ask why.”

-Chapter #3:

A designer requires principles. There should be an ideal, moral or ethic underpinning to a design.

Quote from page 23: “In short the designer, like other honest citizens, will need access to faith and vision as much as to a keen analytical intelligence to engage with life effectively, and to make something good through work.”

-Chapter #4:

A designer is part of and constrained by social conditions, considerations and limits, but a designer also influences these things.

Quote from page 35: “He is of and for the people; and for them and for himself, he must work at the limit of what he sees to be good.”

-Chapter #5:

Innovation for innovations sake may not be good design. To throw out designs, ideas and even objects from the past for no other reason than that they are not new is wasteful.

Quote from page 58: “This is only one of many possible design activities which (like interior design) are interpretive in their nature, and which could offer a contribution within the spectrum of ‘adapt, adjust, make do, mend and develop’: as distinct from ‘erase, forget and innovate’.

-Chapter #8:

Design comes from day to day living and observation. Design ideas are everywhere and unique to a persons(or peoples) collections for experience and experiences.

Quote from page 95: “Fortunately, the veriest beginner can draw confidence from the same source as a seasoned design specialist, once it is realized that the foundations of judgment in design, and indeed the very structure of decision, are rooted in ordinary life and in human concerns, not in some quack professionalism with a degree as a magic key to the mysteries”

¹⁾ What is a Designer: Things. Places. Messages¹ By Norman Potter. Fourth edition 2002, Hyphen Press, London.