Creative planning directed toward
perfecting man’s physical environment, which is created by the instruments of
industrial production; the method used is to reduce to a single system the functional
and compositional relationships between individual objects and groups of
objects and the objects’ aesthetic and functional characteristics. Design
aesthetics—often identified with design proper—is inseparable from the
modern-day process of creating industrial products intended for man’s direct
use; its practice results from creative interaction between design engineers,
technologists, and other specialists and is meant to facilitate a better
appraisal of consumer needs and an increase in production efficiency. Under the
conditions of socialism, design aesthetics contributes to the creation of a
harmonious physical environment that will meet all of the growing material and
spiritual needs of man.
Designers who practice design
aesthetics make use of the results of research in various fields of science and
technology and are familiar with modern industrial production and its
engineering and economics.
Design aesthetics is governed by the
theory developed by industrial design and by data derived from economics,
sociology, psychology, ergonomics, semiotics, and systems engineering. Its
methodology consists of an analysis—a study of the initial situation and
construction of the planned object, functional-ergonomic and design-production
analysis, and compositional analysis—and a synthesis, which includes a
functional-ergonomic survey and work on the object’s composition. The use of
modeling at all development stages (with scale models or, frequently, full-size
models) makes it possible to test and select the optimum variants of
composition, color and line, and ergonomic design. Here, the model serves not
as an illustration of the design but rather as a designing tool; continuously
modified in the course of development, it eventually becomes the standard for the
experimental model of the article.
Specific to the methodology of
design aesthetics is the consideration of the planned article as one element in
the entire group of objects that surround man in a physical environment, all of
which must meet utilitarian and aesthetic requirements as much as possible and
increase the efficiency of man’s activities. Systems that unite articles
produced or used together are the most complicated objects of design
aesthetics. In this instance the methodology of design includes such tasks as
solving the problems of component diversity in the system (the range of items
offered) and formulating the system’s structure with the techniques of
standardization and unitization.
Design aesthetics arose in the early
20th century, but the preconditions for its establishment developed long before
the transition from hand to machine production; such a transition entailed “a
complete technical revolution, which does away with the craftsman’s manual
skill that has taken centuries to acquire”. A direct result of this revolution
was the conflict between the progressive-ness of the engineering idea
underlying a new article and the article’s aesthetic inferiority, which caused
many utilitarian objects to lose the inherent artistic significance they
formerly possessed. Recognition of the conflict in the mid-19th century first
took the form of a romantic appeal to revive the traditions of medieval
craftsmen (J. Ruskin and W. Morris), but the unsoundness of the approach soon
became apparent.
The foundations of Western European
design aesthetics were laid in the theoretical and practical work of the
artists, architects, and engineers P. Behrens, W. Gropius, G. Semper, and H.
Muthesius in Germany, H. C. van de Velde in Belgium, and Le Corbusier and F.
Reuleaux in France, as well as in the work of the Deutscher Werkbund and the
Bauhaus. In the 1930’s and 1940’s the center of design aesthetics shifted from
Europe to the USA, where it developed primarily in the form of what is known as
commercial design and was used as an effective tool of competition. American
industrial firms organized design departments and a large number of planning
and design consulting firms appeared. In the 1950’s and 1960’s several higher
educational institutions of design in Europe and the USA became the centers of
theoretical research in design aesthetics. The state and public organizations
have been created for the purpose of encouraging the development of design
aesthetics, including national design councils, design centers, and
professional designers’ associations. Such organizations were united in 1957 .
The creation of highly utilitarian
industrial products is characteristic of design aesthetics as practiced in
capitalist countries, but there are also individual examples of the successful
use of the discipline to increase the efficiency of human activities under
extreme conditions, for example, in space and marine exploration. The creation
of “corporate packaging” for large industrial enterprises and corporations,
which embraces production, product packaging, advertising, transportation,
clothing for company employees, and the architecture of buildings, uniting them
with common artistic characteristics, was one of the most important spheres of
application of design aesthetics in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Corporate packaging
is often distinguished by a high aesthetic level; however, its design solutions
are dictated mainly by commercial publicity considerations.
The first leaders of design
aesthetics in the USSR were art workers , representatives of
the Russian engineering school (I. I. Rerberg and V. G. Shukhov), and theorists
of technical creativity (la. A. Stoliarov, P. I. Strakhov, and P. M.
Engel’meier).
After the October Revolution of
1917, the organization of Vkhutemas (State Higher Arts and Technical Studios),
with which the practitioners and theorists of production art were associated,
was an important landmark on the road to modern design aesthetics. In the
1930’s, elements of the design aesthetics approach were used unsystematically
in various spheres of planning. In the postwar years, design aesthetics
developed primarily in the branches of industry connected with transportation
machine building. The first specialized design aesthetics organization was the
Architecture and Art Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation Machine Building
of the USSR, founded in 1946, which developed design projects for passenger
ships, railroad cars, and trolleybuses.
The development of Soviet design
aesthetics intensified after the publication of the decrees of the Council of
Ministers of the USSR On Improving the Quality of Machine-building Production
and Cultural and Everyday Items by Introducing the Methods of Design Aesthetics
(1962) and On the Use of the Achievements of Industrial Design in the National
Economy (1968). Number of special bureaus of design aesthetics were organized in
different branches of industry; in the 1960’s and 1970’s, many departments of
design aesthetics were established at industrial enterprises, design bureaus,
and scientific research institutes.
They work on problems in the methodology and ergonomic principles
of design aesthetics, develop experimental design projects for the most
important types of industrial articles, and provide systematic direction of designers’
work in industry. The monthly information bulletin Tekhnicheskaia estetika
(Industrial Design), published since 1964, deals with problems in the theory,
methods, and practice of design aesthetics, In addition, bibliographic
and review publications are issued, designs are disseminated, exhibitions of
achievements in Soviet and foreign design are organized, and an information
service is offered by specialists. An international congress on design and design aesthetics was
held in Moscow.
One of the major trends in the
development of modern Soviet design aesthetics is an expansion of the aims and
an increase in the scope of planning and design (in addition to the development
of individual articles, the comprehensive equipping of large enterprises, and
the equipping of services organizations). A transition is occurring from
personal design work to the creation of programs in design aesthetics that help
improve the production quality and efficiency of production associations and
entire branches of industry.
Design aesthetics is also widely
applied in the other socialist countries, where it is used in solving important
national economic problems, particularly those involving an increase in the
quality of industrial and cultural production. It is developing systematically
with state assistance, and sectoral and intersectoral centers of design
aesthetics, scientific research organizations, and state coordinating bodies
have been established.
SUBSCRIBERS - ( LINKS) :FOLLOW / REF / 2 /
findleverage.blogspot.com
Krkz77@yahoo.com
+234-81-83195664
No comments:
Post a Comment