Art, One's Creativity: “Design in Our Lives”

Whether we realize it or not design art is very influential in our everyday lives. For this field trip we were to go to the MoMa and study the topic of design, but because no design is perfect, people’s opinions range in whether; if there’s any use for a design. So while in the MoMa I saw various galleries of artists and designers whose designs range from highly functional and can be used in society to; objects that are less practical and really have no place for people to use it.

Well one may consider the question what is a highly functional design? To fact is that there is no right or wrong answer, but in my opinion a highly functional design is a design where it’s comfortable to use and it fulfills its job at maximum capacity. While at the MoMA is found 2 different artistic designs that I found fit the criteria of a highly functional design. The 1st one that I found was a work called “Puma Bike from the Puma Tribranded Collection”. By Jens Martin. this bike folded up in 3 different places and based on it was made from solid aluminum making it a light weight and compact bike. The fact that this bike can fold also makes it a bike in which is easy to travel with thus making it consumer friendly and “ highly functional”. A other design that I thought as highly functional was a piece created by Joe Colombo named "MiniKitchen" this piece created in 1963 was made so that people could create more space by replacing a standardized kitchen with this mini one. This would be highly effective if you go with the assumption that some people don’t use their kitchen as much so they really wouldn’t need a big one, and this design can be a good alternative.

While these examples are there for highly functional objects; while at the MoMa there were also low functional pieces mean I personally thought they were ridiculous. Personally I consider low functional designs to be something where it wouldn’t make common sense to created something like that or in other words it would be very difficult to use for example if a person made a remote for a tv the size of your bed, it would be a low functioning object. For example of low functioning objects were seen throughout the MoMa. Like the piece named "Paimio Chair" by Alvar Aalto's this chair looks very uncomfortable being that it has no padding and it’s just made from wood. A piece like this will make you consider, why set there when there are other more comfortable places. Another piece that I found to be a low functional one “Carna Folding Wheelchair.” This wheelchair which looks like it has red bubbles on it doesn’t seem as something people would good out of their way to attain. Can you imagine if for any reason you were given a wheel chair and that’s the only you could have. In my opinion it doesn’t look very comfortable. Taking into consideration how much people in today’s day value comfort I don’t see this wheel chair as being functional.

In conclusion whether a person finds something highly functional or low functional all comes down to preference. I believe that art and design goes hand and hand since every design is made to seem appealing to people, but one should remember that theres no such thing as a perfect design