-- Haohan Product Design Co., Ltd. Chen Wenlong
The rise of the Internet has revolutionized human life and accelerated the advent of the era of the knowledge economy. When everyone is talking about the era of knowledge, how should we look at our own profession as an industrial designer? I think that design is due to having The characteristics of integration, experience, countermeasures, and intuition are just like the description of knowledge in the book of knowledge management: the intuition is "enriched professional knowledge." The sorting of knowledge is still mainly art, not science; this is an area of ​​people's heart. Instead of machinery. It seems quite consistent with the definition of certain features of our profession!
Knowledge also has a very important characteristic. It is the ability to collect data and organize it into information, and then convert it into a value of decisions, proposals or countermeasures; industrial design is a complex transaction that can handle complex transactions. - Aesthetics, engineering, and business are tangled up with information and needs that are too tedious to transform the market's consumer-pop intelligence and company's strategy into visual creativity. It is definitely a "knowledge" job. . In the framework of knowledge, knowledge is divided into two levels: "Explicit Knowledge" means that you can use the skills and objective facts imparted to others by text, such as reports, analysis, manuals, operations, and software instructions. Another level is “Tacit Knowledgeâ€, a skill that human beings possess but cannot easily describe, judgment and intuition; such as countermeasure force, insight, Know-How. By this definition, industrial designers It is a "knowledge worker," and it is still necessary to emphasize the Tacit Knowledge Creator.
Now that computer networks have a strong ability to “communicate†and “storeâ€, making computers a weapon of knowledge, even the fields of knowledge management and digital technology have been drawn to some extent on the equal footing. In the workplace, all class employees with good knowledge should have the skills to apply digital hardware "hardware" and master their special "soft" qualities. How industrial design can use endogenous knowledge to enhance its benefits and value through computers, and as a tool for information collection and conversion, it should be an ability that must be enhanced! From the perspective of knowledge work, industrial design must be practiced on the one hand. The operation enhances their professional skills, judgment and intuitive insight. On the other hand, these capabilities need to be applied to new technologies and tools. Taking the creation of aesthetics as an example, when the interface for creation changes from hand-made Mock up to an application computer to directly construct a 3D model, working on the monitor requires the simultaneous determination of "aesthetic aesthetics" and "constructive amendments. "These two capabilities can be synchronized and interact with each other at any time to be able to complete the construction of a 3D model with true, good and beautiful! Same as the design. The creation of the beauty is of course a kind of "internal knowledge" work. The Italian designer Giugiaro used to have experience in practice. Talk about the concept and application of “Trends and Treatments of Forming Surfaces†in automotive design. This is a case of how to shape the professional knowledge of industrial beauty and convey narratives. Change.
In Italian design studio, I discovered that when designers define or detect the smoothness of complex continuous curves and continuously changing surfaces, they use a uniform density rod (usually ABS rods, acrylic, or Bars). Applying strength and fixing to the ends of the bar, plus one or more points, can produce curves with different curvatures. This will allow you to detect and determine the smoothness of the modified continuous curve. Place it on the surface to be tested, and then apply more than two points of pressure, you can also see whether the detection surface is completely close and determine whether it is smooth. Depending on the size characteristics of the varying curvature, rods of different diameters can also be selected for detection; this Know-How is an application widely used by Italian industrial design offices even before the CAD/CAM system. It's still! (And later, the computer has some similarities in the way the construction of the line and the surface is smooth).
This method reminds me of Bending-Moment of material mechanics. The formula can be used to calculate the bending moment value at each point on the beam and quantify it graphically to obtain the most effective beam shape, that is, the structural principle on which many bridge designs are based. Many forms of ecology in the natural world can use the same concepts to explain the reasons for their curvature changes. The skeleton of an animal is like a cantilever beam, but the stress and bending moment change is more complicated. Take the horse's vertebrae as an example. Observing the changes in its shape, we can understand that the sites with the greatest tension have the highest and strongest vertebrae, and thus cleverly produce organic morphological curves. Such curves are in common human visual experience. Represents the meaning of power and certain dynamics.
The curve of the human body is also the same; the curve of the athlete's calf, the curve of the calf of an obese woman, and the curve of the so-called sexy calf, there is a clear difference between them. The reason for the formation of curves is that in human visual experience, the meaning represented by these curves is directly related to judgmental instinct, so we can easily feel solid, obese, lightweight, heavy, tense, relaxed, and advancing. In the same way, the embryos formed by pulling the embryos, the flowers and leaves of the nature, and the shapes of the automobiles and arc-shaped home appliances produced under the aerodynamics are carefully observed. There are similar principles and truth!
From the above point of view, although the United States is a common visual standard, to convert it into an intuitive professional knowledge, continuous practice, comparison, and insight are needed. In addition to actual operations, we must learn and communicate with others. The information and experience can have the ability to create beauty and value!
Of course, these aesthetic experiences must become more sensitive visual judgments of designers than others, and they must be converted into their own knowledge capabilities. That is to say, they must be able to make conclusions, and the process of completion must be continuously judged. Amendments can be made to improve and achieve better results. At the same time, outside of the category of modeling, it is necessary to add other considerations; such as engineering issues, the popular demand of the market. For a design organization, it is even more necessary to construct a network system for knowledge exchange, so that people with knowledge and those who need knowledge can combine to form a framework for knowledge work, and to add different skills through the interaction of internal and external knowledge. People with ideas and values, after deliberate combination, inspire more creative solutions. Because ""innovation" exists on the edge of the idea between people, rather than in a single area of ​​knowledge or skills." Especially for industrial design work should have such characteristics!