Introducing... Design

This reading helped clear up some of the confusion surrounding design. As mentioned early on in the first chapter, there is a lot of confusion regarding design practice. Heskett mentions that the word "design" is over-used and I couldn't agree more. Every time I come back from downtown on Fourth St I see a building that says "DESIGN" in big letters. I looked more closely one time, and realized that it's actually a lighting store. The people who work there don't actually design anything, they just sell lights. I also found it interesting when Heskett states that every aspect of the environment will be designed in the future, and he specifically mentions plants. It's a little known fact that turf grass (as in the kind in your front yard) is not native to the U.S., but it is native to Great Britain, and the settlers really really liked it, so much that it is now ubiquitous in a region where it shouldn't exist. In a sense, the upper class was responsible for this, but designers (landscape architects specifically) had a hand in the spread of turf grass. I also found the point about the wheel not being a natural shape interesting. I suppose I had never thought of it before. I remember reading a long time ago that the ancient Egyptians who built the Great Pyramids did not use wheels (later ancient Eqyptians did, but not the ones who built the pyramids), and instead they used rows of logs. The fact that they did that makes more sense now, as trees are a natural shape and they serve the same functions as wheels. The writing about globalization was also very interesting. Colgate was mentioned, but there's another example from their company that's pretty ridiculous. "Colgate" is Spanish for "F*#! Yourself" and needless to say, they had some trouble marketing toothpaste in Latin America. Also, this is somewhat unrelated, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (finally someone with a harder to pronounce last name than mine) was mentioned. I haven't read The Meaning of Things, but I did read his book Flow a couple of years ago, and I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.