ARTG210-CheSpetter

Tweaked Manifesto #6

Manifesto #6

Despite being a sizeable demographic the elderly are not often thought of in product design, And if they are, it's in a direct and often humiliating way. When was the last time you saw a stylish and elegant walker? They tend to look like medical equipment.

Predictably, design tends to fall short when the demographics that will be using it are overlooked. This can stem from a conception that the product is so explanatory or easy to use that its design couldn’t benefit from refinement.

Often the difference between an accessible and inaccessible design is the placement of a button, the inclusion of an arrow or a tab. Even if a solution turns out to be more complicated there is a nearly endless plethora of tools designers can draw on to help open the use of their item to a wider audience. Adding typographic elements, colour selections, or even things like textures can all be solutions to an accessibility problem.

If done correctly, accessible design considers all potential users and enables them to use a product.

So much of the world is designed without minorities in mind.

Elderly people make up a massive demographic. Yet things designed for them are often obvious and humiliating.

Nothing is too “simple” to consider when designing it.

Sometimes, styles and trends hamper accessible design.

There are so many devices we can use to make something accessible. Colour, placement, and typography to name a few.

accessible design is designed for everyone, it's supposed to benefit people with a disadvantage in an area, as well as people who excel in that area. And everyone in between.

A potentially inaccessible product

I think this might be a tough one. A child-proof lid. I can’t imagine how difficult this would be to open if you had arthritis. It's something common on my Dad's side of the family. You have to line up the little arrow, then press down, then twist.

At the same time, it's to keep kids out, well the really little ones we all know they'll be able to get past the lid by the time they’re four but by then they hopefully know better.

So what do you do? Not a normal lid. Lock and key? No strenuous hand movements. Apply pressure to the lid for like 10 seconds to open it? Have a normal lid but put a pill bottle alarm in it so it goes off every time it's opened? Have a lid that's realy easy to turn, has a little arrow that you have to line up but instead of having to push the lid in and twist, it pops off after being aligned with the arrow for 10 seconds. But it's super easy to turn, like on greased ballbarings so if you jostle it at all it unaligns itself.

Tweaked Manifesto #5

My message was lost in the complicated illustration in the last iteration of this manifesto. I enjoyed the idea of wacky humour to promote change so I tried to maintain the same mood but be more direct. Just out and say it. Pill bottles have painfully ineffective designs.

Manifesto #5

Accessible design is nice to have around unless it's life or death. Then it's essential. If traffic lights were convoluted messes of irrelevant information, they'd be taken down and reworked. If WHMIS symbols were minuscule lines of unreadable text, they'd be redesigned.

Accessible design is not necessarily designed for a minuscule fraction of a user basses. Although people with severe disabilities should always be considered, the term disability applies to some problems that almost everyone faces in life. Losing eyesight or fiscal acumen with age, injuries and mental illness. These are not uncommon problems and to design accessibly is to create with them in mind.

Pharmaceutical design has traditionally been accessibly sub-par. It's rife with tiny print and hierarchy blunders. For obvious reasons, medication or anything relating to medicine is an exceedingly dangerous thing to have inaccessible design with.

If disability is so common, why isn't accessibility at the forefront of the consciousnesses of designers and entrepreneurs? Almost everyone has had the experience of seeing an older relative going through the pain of trying to use a product that hasn't been designed with their demographic in mind.

Sometimes it's budget cuts or a lack of research. Other times, however, a  lack of accessible design can be chalked up to simple miscommunication. A survey in the UK indicates that accessible design is important to both clients and designers. That being said clients tend to hold the assumption that designers approach accessibility as a given part of every project. Meanwhile, designers tend to be under the impression that clients don't have the time or money to design for accessibility.

Almost everyone suffers from disabilities in life.

The pharmaceutical industry suffers from an atrocious lack of assessability in design.

Inaccessible design can be dangerous in some circumstances.

Accessible design does matter to people but is sometimes not included in a process due to miscommunication.

Tweaked Manifesto #4

Manifesto #4

Is a cradle-to-cradle production philosophy a realistic expectation?

Can we realy, all of us, crazy Humans get along for long enough to design a flawless no-waist system in which every part of everything is reused in an endless cycle?

Can we as a species depend solely on renewable energy?

Can we wholeheartedly embrace the idea of diversity in products and expend the energy to re-design our economy for every new environment?

Probably not.

This week's research addressed sustainable design. Not so much from an ethical approach but from a logistical sense. A central topic of our research was the product life cycle: the effect a product has on the environment from the gathering of the resources used to create it to the effects of its disposal. Several design models and philosophies address how we, as designers, interact with a product's lifecycle. Eco-design, reduce, reuse, recycle, cradle-to-grave, and cradle-to-cradle thinking are ways of approaching the design of a product in an attempt to make something that has less strain on the planet.

In cradle-to-cradle thinking, every part of a product is deliberately designed to be used in another system, be it industrial or biological.

Our current system encourages a thoughtless “take, make, waste” approach to production. Harmful as this model is, the financial strain of a switch to a more eco-friendly system would leave any individual company at a temporary disadvantage. That being said, once the jump to a cradle-to-cradle-based design approach is made, the costs of production could be considerably lessened.

Philosophies like cradle-to-cradle rely on designers to function. Our design choices determine whether a product remains useful after disposal and whether or not exorbitant amounts of energy are spent in its production. It seems obvious that sustainability is a problem worth our consideration, and the fact that our current industry has little to no room for its implementation is a problem in and of itself.

Our current industry is inefficiently wasteful.

Cradle-to-cradle design is the end goal.

Designers spend their time focusing on issues that seem trivial next to the problem of sustainability.

Designers have a large degree of power when it comes to sustainability.

Tweaked Manifesto #3, Type + Image

Manifesto #3, Type + Image

As a kid, I was scared of “global warming”. I didn't understand the nuances of competition in business or the marketing power behind colouring your products green. I was just a kid who didn't like the idea of my world becoming inhospitable.

I’m ashamed to say I lost that fear, and my concern as I grew older. Mhaby in part because I felt that my actions alone couldn't make a difference in the larger ecological stage.

As a graphic designer, I find myself with the tools to not only kindle awareness of environmental issues but to spread educational material through the same channels we use for our business. Graphic designers don't make decisions for large environmentally cumbersome industries. We don't “necessarily” go out and participate in restoration efforts; but, we can spark conversations with large audiences.

We can, after our own careful research distribute facts and factors on how to most effectively make a difference on an individual level, so let’s start talking.

Sustainability is a large but often unseen factor in graphic design. Unseen for the designer that is. The amount of resources and work hours that are committed to making the simplest contemporary design projects possible is perhaps too great a number to comprehend without meticulously analyzing each step of the industry and processing.

At first glance, graphic design may not appear to be an environmental burden on par with businesses like automotive production or unsustainable farming. This week, however, our research was geared toward graphic design and its indeed tenuous history with sustainability. Designers draw on an intricate web of services to meet their objectives. Benson and Perullo list “photographers, illustrators, writers, consultants, printers, paper manufacturers, developers,” and “hosting providers” as all services integral to graphic design (16). Many of these industries that graphic design relies on so heavily do have a large and direct impact on the environment.

A factor in “good design” is considering this reliance when at work. “Good design is environmentally-friendly” (Rams). A major topic in our research was approaching design and environmental consideration as one of the same. If we consider the long-term ramifications of our design decisions while in our planning, we can steer away from environmental strain and produce for our client at the same time. This allows us to continue to operate in the business world, which graphic design is a part of and work to reduce our environmental impact.

Graphic design, like every industry, is not separate from the ecosystem.

As a designer, ethics are essential for the long-term survival of your practice and the natural world.

Good design is considered not just in terms of function, but in terms of realizing the product.

Established processes are often outdated and resource-hungry. Innovation and sustainability can go hand in hand.

You can tell a lot about a designer from what they design. In other words, you're not designing anonymously so be a good person!

Benson, E., & Perullo, Y. (2017). Chapter 2. In Design to renourish sustainable graphic design in practice (pp. 16). essay, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group. 

Tweaked Manifesto #2

After some critique, a few problems with my manifesto poster became evident.

First; the word 'respect' got lost in the colours and textures.

Second; it wasn't obvious what respect referred to.

Manifesto# 2 - Type + Texture + Colour

I believe that communication and respect are two separate entities.

The medium of communication, speaking, drawing, writing, music, graphic design, fine art, etcetera, should have no impact on the importance of respect and the fact that human beings deserve it.

As graphic designers, our goal is to communicate, usually on the behalf of others. We create visual messages in the hopes of fashioning timeless icons that benefit our clients. This means our voice is often not regarded as our own. Nonetheless, we are the engineers of our own content.

This week's readings dealt with exploitative design and the ethics surrounding it.

Graphic design, like any mode of communication, has the potential to ameliorate or aggravate an issue. The main points of contention discussed in the articles were environmental, cultural, and personal problems. Graphic design and its surrounding industries have historically been a burden on the environment, Not through a specific message but via the waste produced by packaging practices and upkeeping the digital industry. Culturally and personally, careless or inconsiderate advertising has taken advantage of ethnic groups, genders, age brackets, and body types to make a sales pitch.

In my albeit limited experience, few designers aren't at least a little bothered by designs relation to these issues. As stated in our reading, however, due to a lack of time and resources the above problems often get put on the back burner as deadlines take president. A designer with moral qualms about the industry standard practises may find themself working with perpetrators of the same methods they find so alarming simply to make a living.

Ultimately, the only viable option for a designer with a conscience seems to be try your best. Try to navigate your clients and if at all possible work with groups who your morality aligns with. If you have the time, reach out and use your practice to support causes you consider important. Keep pushing and finding new ways to perpetuate considerate design. Nothing about this industry is clear cut it's full of variety and problem-solving. Answers to its issues therefore are just as undefined

Unethical design involves exploiting a group of people to sell a product.

Time and resources don't often allow for more sustainable or considerate design practices.

Many designers who are conscious of unethical design nonetheless find themselves working with clients whose practises they don't agree with to pay the bills.

Design has the potential to help ameliorate the environmental issues the world is facing.

Designers should be concerned about the work they create.

Tweaked Manifesto #1

I took my original concept and boiled it down to “never stop questioning.” This approach allowed me to cut out the busyness of my original design. In this adaptation of the manifesto, two fading lines turn a peace symbol into a crossed-out icon, demonstrating the dangers of miscommunication.

Symbles are neither intrinsically good or bad. They can serve any agenda.

Point one: As designers, we must always be knowledgeable about the symbols we employ lest they cause unintentional harm.

Unfortunately point one is humanly impossible. Point two: Failing point one, as designers we must be open to discussion about the symbols we employ.

Manifesto #1 Black and White + Texture

Symbles are neither intrinsically good or bad. They can serve any agenda.

Point one: As designers, we must always be knowledgeable about the symbols we employ lest they cause unintentional harm.

Unfortunately point one is humanly impossible.

Point two: Failing point one, as designers we must be open to discussion about the symbols we employ.