Culture And Culture: Design Is Everything In The World

1598 Words4 Pages

“Design is everything. Everything!”, said once Paul Rand. Design is everything that surrounds us, every visual outcome, every visual experience, every solution created. Design is everything; design is everywhere. Even though is said lightly, the ramification of stating that “Design is everywhere” brings within a bigger picture: design is everywhere because of its relationship with culture, society and the people who is part of it. Without even noticing, design defines and is defined by individuals, their beliefs, their aesthetics and their culture.
The term “culture” conveys the actions, values and ideologies manifested in a society, and therefore, transforms itself into the expression of their political, artistic, literary, economic, technological and musical outcomes. In this sense, design has contributed to culture in the creation of objects that define the norm of behavior by which we live by, establishing a process of interdependent relation where one is affected by the other, and vice versa. In this context, design represents more than just the visual objects created to satisfy an audience; it is also about the construction of systems that meet within the visual, intellectual and material world.
My main thesis is that, within the framework of culture and design being dependent of each other, contemporary culture has influenced and promoted experimentation and the creation of new technologies and techniques in design, and therefore, defined the visual language and style of today’s society. In this sense, the word “experimentation” will be used as the process of innovation and discovery of new methods applied in the design field, to create and develop new solutions to emerging problems. This exploration will be conducted ...

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Contemporary design is context dependent, and when this is ignored, design fails to perform its social purpose, and converts into an independent craft or art form. Many sociological factors within each culture, have had an important role into defining the direction where design is and moving towards. In a way, it can be said that the objects of design may be the last tangible reminder of what a society once was: in a sense, it has the power to perpetuate a significant ideology and a visual expression of the changes and evolution our culture has been gone through. Technology has been a crucial factor as contributor to culture’s evolution, and therefore design’s own experimentations. The history of design is as filled with peculiar attempts to reconcile inherited formal models and new technologies as it is with the spontaneous invention of appropriate styles.

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