The Steve Jobs biography was a very interesting read, I thought it was going to be a rather rushed compilation of meaningless chronology (the Jony Ive biography obviously left a bad taste!), but no, Isaacson had obviously put a lot of research into the book, with a surprising amount of design insight, although it did little to calm my dogma.
Living with Complexity, the newest new Donald Norman book was OK. Yes, system design and the basic idea of the book, that there is a distinction between Complexity and Complication, are great principles. But I get the feeling that this could be done in an extended blog post, and didn't need a full book.
The Interior Design book, Design after Modernism, by Judith Gura, although, now I notice, the wrong Design after Modernism book, was actually very interesting, as interior designers are more likely to see design for what it really is, and not just look at individual products. It was good to see the variety of 'After-Modernism' we have at the moment, seeing the difference between Decontructivism and pure Postmodernism, or assessing the re-Modernism of the contrasting High Tech and Minimalist lines of thought.
As part of PDE, we went on a choice of industrial visit, of which I chose to visit the Mitsubishi Electronics factory in Livingston, Scotland, it was great to see the variety of production techniques, the clean production line, and to see something serious being made in Britain.
Projects wise, we had a project called 'Movable Feast', which asked us to design a solution to the problem of people eating without a table. And a group project based around an RSA competition brief. I will trickle a little intro to the Movable Feast project in the near future, but the RSA project will have to wait for a while, assuming we submit it to the competition. Watch this space in the next month! i've got a bit of free time!
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