Hello Dubai: September 2009

As addressed in class in Wednesday (9/23/09) the purpose of this post is to reflect and explore the purpose behind our first reading assignment (Do Good Design, By: David B. Berman pgs 1-96).

When I first picked up the book and read the title “Do Good Design” I had no idea what the book was going to address. When I thought about it further I started to think, “will the book try to identify what good design is?, or will it expose the process of designing?”

After making it through this reading assignment my thoughts were completely different. The common thread through the book so far is, how do we be responsible designers and the role we as designers play in the global environment. More specifically, I feel it addresses the morals and motives behind the designing odyssey. The book has been valuable to me because it surfaces many of the underlying, everyday design traps that most people in the common day society are not aware of. For example the book identifies the business of branding and name recognition. They use the example, that most Major League Baseball stadiums have a company name attached to it (AT&T Park – San Francisco Giants). In this example, they state how it seems like easy money for the company, but what is often not brought to people’s attention is the cost to a third party who is not involved in the direct transaction. This cost is not related to the almighty dollar. This cost is directed towards the local population. The branding of the stadium makes money but also creates a loss of culture and history in that area. On a final note, the book states this third party cost is where the “local culture is traded for homogeneity.”