2007/04/24

Design as a new language

While traveling with the Dean of my faculty
I learned quite a lot. He's Islandic and he
told me good stories from the island.

One is that they try to give all new words
that dosn't exist in the islandic language,
an islandic word. While working with issues
as carbonprint, he and his friend came up
with the islandik word sotspor.

It made me think of design to everyday life
as a new word to a language.
If the design is beeing used, it meens it works.
It dosn't really mather who came up with the idea,
because the point with design is that it will be
used, not who used it first.

It dosn't mean we all have to like it. Like in the
norwegian language people have started saying
shcøkken instead of kjøkken. I don't like it, but
for 100 years ago they probably said tjøkken. It's
develpoment, and it works.

As designer we have to think about all aspects of
the new design, like invironment issues, conseptual
issues and contextual issues. In the end, the
design it's only a new word that people will choose
to take into their grammar or not.

I will try to get sotspor into the norwegian language

help me?/