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?/

Layers and connections

Within each country it exists many cities, and
Within a city it exists many different worlds.

Each of this worlds have their own daily routine. Some
people manages to keep a floating barrier between two
or more worlds, but many people never even notice. They
can live a hole lifetime in this world, not knowing anything
else.

This is not mainly only because people don´t want to
know, but that they have now reasons to know. I´m not
saying this is bad or good, I only think that designers
should be aware of this, because problemsolving and
solutions can´t be build on one of these worlds point of
view only. If you see these worlds as layers, you can also
easily see that if you take one away, you would not get the
hole picture.

Of course you should see the layers on their own, but it´s
important to see the connection between.
A phonecompany here had a campain. The campain was to make
people use this phonecompany more, so they made the first 30
seconds of the phonecall free of charge. What happened was that
some people started calling each other saying one word and then
hang up.

I´ve been told the story, and I don´t know every detail, but I´m
shure the phonecompany didn´t think of the worlds that really
can´t afford all this use of phone that exists today, and they
also didn´t think of the connection between the worlds. because
you find friends across the barriers, imagine when your friend
always call you to say one word and you have to call him up,
you will start doing the same. A habbit in one layer is connected
to a habbit in another.

The phonecompany lost alot of money, and had to stop the campain.

Good design? /

The small things in life /

Strange when you see an idea and you think; why didn´t I think of that?
It´s not really all that strange, because it works like this:

Say you live in a city with all the facilities you need around you. When you
go to the toilet you may not remember if you have flushed or not. When
you coock dinner, you don´t really pay much attention to what kind of
tools you use. Of course, you see the things around you, but you don´t see
them in the way you would if it was the first time you saw them. They are a
part of your everyday life, and your everyday life is not that interesting really..

That´s where you stopped beeing curious and started stopping the ideas to
flow freely.

The secret about the design that make you feel "ahh, why didn´t I think of
that",is the secret of curiousness and time. That you take your time to let
things just happen, and let your eyes see what they see. When you force
ideas or look at only the things you think inspires you, you yourself wont
be able to see all the details around you, because your to focused on what
you want to find. And the things you want tofind, is not the things you
thought you wanted to find in the first place.

So, be easy, be curios and wake up everyday with new eyes. Don´t take your
environment for granted.

Just a thought /