Applied Arts April/May 2010

This past week I received my April/May issue of Applied Arts in the mail and was happy to see a huge article dedicated to packaging.

Applied Arts

I found the whole article so interesting, as it mainly focused around making packaging sustainable. Creating sustainable packaging is a major theme in my packaging design classes that I have taken this year. So, I found it very interesting to read about the steps that various packaging design firms are taking to create sustainable packaging.

Lesser Targeted Demographics

While doing some research for my newest packaging design project- Design or redesign a current package which houses a product that has a lesser targeted demographic - I came upon this:

Hearing Aid Packaging

I also did this project in Packaging Design 1, but feel that what I ended up with wasn't my best work, so it's nice to have the option to do it over again. I selected hearing aids as my product for lesser targeted demographics and thought that this design that I found is very clever.

It is a great piece of design because it creates movement out of a simple package. It also directly represents what is housed inside, and those who may be purchasing hearing aids will directly get the message of the soundwaves shown on the front of the package. Although it may seem like overpackaging, I still think that it creates a great sense of movement and is just so cool.

Packaging

Research Question
How is the packaging of a product as important as the product housed inside?

• Taking into consideration the idea of packaging something that is not typically housed within a package design:
- Trees
- A car
- Rain
- Elements (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water)
• Sustainability and environmental capital
- Affects and factors such as shipping, size, safety, etc.
• Application of sensory branding
• What are the factors that go into packaging (Shape, size, raw materials, etc.)
• Sensitivities within packaging (Ethics, cultures, connotations, etc.)

Semiotics: A Primer for Designers

Semiotics: A Primer for Designers
by Challis Hodge

“Semiotics is important for designers as it allows us to understand the relationships between signs, what they stand for, and the people who must interpret them — the people we design for.”

I read Roland Barthes' "Mythologies" last year in my Humanities class. The short stories and thoughts in Barthes' were very interesting and intriguing and allowed me to understand even more about semiotics and the study of signs.

Semiotics helps us not to take reality for granted as something that simply exists. It helps us to understand that reality depends not only on the intentions we put into our work but also the interpretation of the people who experience our work.

How Professionals Think in Action

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
by Donald Schon

The three principal doctrines of Positivism:
• First, there was the conviction that empirical science was not just a form of knowledge but the only source of positive knowledge of the world.
• Second, there was the intention to cleanse men’s minds of mysticism, superstition, and other forms of pseudoknowledge.
• Third, there was the program of extending scientific knowledge and technical control to human society, to make technology, as Comte said, “no longer exclusively geometrical, mechanical or chemical, but also and primarily political and moral.”

The example about the construction and building of a road was very interesting in this reading, and made it somewhat easier to understand after reading a bunch of historical garble that I did not seem to understand what it had to do with the article.

This example about the road building, "they deal usually with a complex and ill-defined situation in which geographic, topological, financial, economic, and political issues are all mixed up together." Yet when they perhaps reach a neighbourhood, all of the issues arise yet again and problem solving and problem "setting" take control.

There are actions, recognitions, and judgments which we know how to carry out spontaneously; we do not have to think about them prior to or during their performance.
We are often unaware of having learned to do these things; we simply find
ourselves doing them. In some cases, we were once aware of the understandings which were subsequently internalized in our feeling for the stuff of action. In other cases, we may never have been aware of them. In both cases, however, we are usually unable to describe the knowing which our action reveals. It is in this sense that I speak of knowing-in-action, the characteristic mode of ordinary practical knowledge.

Text Talk (pt. 2)

Continued from: Text Talk.

Research Question
How has the growth in technology and the introduction of "text talk" and "emoticons" affected the communication and design aspects of typography?

This could entail in the exploration of:
• Pictograms
• Hieroglyphics
• History of communication through design
• Technology development and growth
• Communication through technology

This graphic design forum thread asks a similar question and the replies are interesting. A lot of it also relates to the argument about whether the computer has been a positive or negative influence on the graphic design field.

I Come to Bury Graphic Design

I Come to Bury Graphic Design
by Kenneth Fitzgerald

Design is everywhere and on everything, and with the access to so many programs and computers and other things, it seems like anyone could be a designer if they feel like it.

This applies to design as well as art. Sure, anyone could probably put together a simple CSS/HTML web design for their own home-run company, but there is just something about these "self-made" designers that make their work look like they weren't designers.

But as the saying goes, "Everyone can draw. Not everyone can draw well."