note to myself
originally written on April 3, 2009
1. Design that brings people’s attention to, raises their awareness of the things that are often overlooked
2. Solving given problems vs. finding out problems worth solving
3. Attention – It had become a ‘big word’ for me after hearing it from many places recently – in my cog psych and understanding perception through design class and the Dan Saffer’s lecture I attended a few weeks ago… and today I came across a quote by Herbert Simon (who might well be my cog psych professor if only he was alive now and young enough to teach) saying “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” And I went on to think that the action of designing something maybe then isn’t different than bringing something to its users/viewers’ attention… This then led me to think (along with the projects I’m currently doing where I have to deal with the information and data) that we, designers, are really given enormous abilities to shape what gets our attention and how it’s interpreted, and maybe even what’s valued, which will make up the building blocks of our culture. hmmmm… maybe I’ve gone way too far… talking about designers’ role in shaping the culture seems to be a little too overwhelming to deal with for a mere individual student. And yet I do believe it’s true that the quote I’ve seen somewhere “the great power comes great responsibilities” can not be more appropriate than anything else to suggest what our mindsets should be like.
It’s all good that I’m feeling these wriggling thoughts growing out of my mind and hopefully I won’t lose them so that they will guide me when I have to navigate through my career as a designer.