Eat Your Peas
Elements of Design by Gail Greet Hannah touches on the life and work of Rowena Reed Kostello, a gifted design educator who practically wrote the book on Industrial Design in the states (or at least attempted to). from Elements began as her attempt to articulate the discipline and reoccurring design problems inherit in the design of abstract three dimensional forms. The book includes both visual examples and explicit problem statements she commonly presented her students with such as the task of creating a beautiful (visual compelling) arranging of three intersecting rectilinear forms. Like many foundation design projects you’ll find in design schools anywhere they might seem a little inane to the uninitiated. The value here though is in the doing. By restricting designers to fundamental formal qualities these and similar projects allow designers to build up a foundation of experiences applicable to almost any future design problem. The result is designers with intuitive problem solving capabilities who can spend time on the specifics of the problem at hand.
Not enough time and attention are given to the designer’s first responsibility: to find and develop the visual solutions for living in our environment… Our goal is the training of a designer so familiar with the principles of abstraction that he automatically thinks of a visual problem in terms of organized relationships the feels free to study other aspects of the problem or to confer with specialists i related fields.
-Rowena Reed Kostello
No comments yet.