Howdy, Well, its been a few days and I have been trying to think of what could possibly be surprising for a product designer to come up with – which I think will be quite a difficult feat. I have been collating a list of ideas which I feel would be areas that had potential to surprise. I have 4 main areas that I feel would fit this; 1. Challenging the Ethics of Product Design 2. Exploring features that consumer wouldn’t want or didn’t know they wanted 3. Exploring products that had no use or solved no problems in any way 4. Creating dangerous products that could cause harm to the user or others   My main idea is based on the idea of  ethics within product design. I want to challenge the ethics of product design within education and create a product which definitely not be expected as a […]

Howdy, Today was our second introduction to the ‘Surprise Me’ module. Theo and Steve basically re-affirmed the concept for our project and gave some interesting examples of surrealism. Surrealism isn’t an area I have much knowledge in, so it was interesting to learn more about it. The idea of surrealism and its dream like perversions of reality are quite bizarre and I have to admit, in my opinion, they were quite surprising. Although surrealism seems to follow a more artistic route, I do find it to be quite amusing and I think it would be interesting to explore its use within design, though I don’t quite know how one would achieve such… When we moved on to surrealist games, I was brought more delight due to absurdity of the humour and the lack of any sense with regards to their structure and rules. We were told to create a new surrealist […]

Howdy, Today was my first day on my new ‘Surprise Me’ project. I was unsure what to expect from this module because my main factor for choosing it was that the lecturer – Steve Thompson, had delivered some interesting lectures to product design last year. My uncertainty wasn’t helped when I realised the theme of the project. Essentially, Surprise Me is about beating the paradigms of our subjects to create unusual and abnormal projects as well as thought experiments. This hit me as something I’m not a massive fan of, especially due to the theoretical connotations. I don’t really like designing for design’s sake, I far prefer designing beneficial products that solve real world problems, not one off pieces to make people question theories…   Both Steve Thompson and Theo Humphries talked us through the first lecture, informing us that this module had no learning outcomes and little structure. There […]