Month / October 2015

by isabela

Reading Response 4

Question: Is it possible to make something that is objectively beautiful?

“Beauty does lie in the eye of the beholder, but that some beholders are better able to identify that elusive, but existent true beauty.”

This is a good summary for most of the text. It’s basically a nicer way of saying that a person’s opinion is only valid if they have good taste. Being in the arts, I’m definitely guilty of feeling this way about people sometimes, especially if they’re critiquing my work. During my time at Parsons, i’ve noticed that no matter how amazed I am with a person’s work, there will always be another person who doesn’t like it as much, or has something to critique about it. However, I think that anyone can respect the amount of time someone put into their work, especially if the work is very intricate and is well done technically. Because of this, I think that it is somewhat possible for a work to objectively beautiful technically, but not conceptually.  It has to with aspects of personal taste, not exactly how refined a person’s taste are, but a matter of preference .

by Breeana

Reading Response 4

As a product designer, is the goal of the design to appeal to the audience?

It sounds like a stupid question, but I think there are different ways to answer it. Of course, as a designer one of the first things you do when planning a design brief is to look at your audience. Once you define your audience and shape your design with that information, the goal is to appeal in some sort of way.

This article raises and interesting point saying that taste is objective and depends on person to person. With that being said I feel like it’s quite impossible to please everyone with a design and that you can establish a goal outside of ‘pleasing the audience’. I often think the best designs are the ones that do the exact opposite to the audience because instead of catering to the audience they break some rules, and make the audience feel differently with their designs. It might be a smart move for a product designer to steer away from the traditional path. They’ll create interest and stand out from everything else. It’s risky, but may be worth it in the end.