Assignment requirement page: 🔗 https://artful.design/etudes/files/artfuldesign-etude-1.pdf
<aside> ✏️ Take note of three things in your day you find beautiful and that you recognize to be design.
</aside>
The roundabouts on Stanford campus. They looked cute and seemed functionally unnecessary at first, but I realize it's actually an interesting and thoughtful design after giving it more thought.
Notion, which I am using to build the website and blog pages for this class. The features that this tool provides serve both functional and aesthetic purposes.
<aside> ✏️ Perform a functional-aesthetic analysis on the three things from Part 1
</aside>
Aesthetically, these drawers look minimalist, clean, and smooth. The wooden material gives a very natural look and touch to them. I recognize that the wood material is both a practical and an aesthetic choice because wood is sturdy, long lasting, and visually unique. The same drawers could have been made with plastic or metal and work the same way, but plastic might break more easily and metal might be too heavy for the drawers to be easily movable, which is another important feature of this product. The special design on the eight corners of each drawer allow us to stack one on top of another, aligning and locking them in place. Functionally, this feature enables us to customize the number of drawers we wish to have in a dresser, while the dresser we make with the drawer makes a stylish furniture piece in the room because of its light color, natural wood patterns, and straight lines and flat surfaces.
I have to admit I was quite confused about how to navigate the roundabouts that are so prevalent on campus when I first arrived. My initial thought was that they must serve more of an aesthetic purpose than practical function because, while the greenery in the middle of the circle looked cute, there are other ways to deal with four-way traffic that seem to be more "straightforward." A major difference between the roundabout and a cross intersection (with either stop signs or traffic lights) is that no vehicles can directly turn left - instead, they have to enter the circle and go in the counter-clockwise direction until they reach the road they wish to turn to, which would be the last one in the circle. This definitely seemed counter-intuitive at first since presumably it would save time and distance to simply turn left. However, after I have personally used the roundabouts as both a pedestrian and a bicyclist, I am able to recognize and appreciate the design. In this design, everyone simply needs to look to their left to tell whether it is safe to enter the roundabout, and they would always just make a right turn to enter the circle and another right turn to exit. I believe this design of traffic flow takes off some chances of head-on collisions as well as accidents resulting from forgetting to check all directions of traffic. Although the circle and the greenery in the middle are visually pleasing to look at, the flow of vehicles along the circle is itself quite satisfying to see because it just looks so smooth as opposed to what happens at an intersection with all-ways stop signs.
I have used Notion for some personal projects and information tracking before and it was the first thing that came to my mind when I learned that we need to post our weekly reflections on a website or blog. I think the features that Notion provides for page layout and text styling blur the lines of function and aesthetics. Or rather, when it comes to text organization, we might generally consider clear and clean sections of text and their layout to be both functionally good and visually aesthetic, especially when we view the page as a whole. For example, the three different levels of heading I can easily set in Notion (by typing #, ##, or ### and then space) serve very practical purposes - to define a new section of information and hints at the level of importance of the section in relation to the whole page. Having headings in a page with a lot of information makes the page look organized, and, content aside, good organization is pleasing and satisfying to the eyes. Notion also provides ways to easily arrange the positions of images and text blocks, allowing us to easily organize the page by content to increase readability (functional) and make things look good as a whole (aesthetic). In addition, we can set a cover image for every page in Notion and the cover image can be entirely there just to make the page look more aesthetic and interesting, which one can argue is also a means to an end because it can increases the reader's desire to read the article.
<aside> ✏️ Add aesthetics to something that doesn't seem to need it; infiltrate daily life with design
</aside>
What object totally doesn't seem to need aesthetics?
A toilet.
We have to use it whether it looks cute or not, and whether it looks cute would not have an effect on how we use it and how often we use it. But seeing as anything is possibly worth adding aesthetics to, I'll try to add aesthetics to the toilet in my studio apartment which I had just had to deal with it the other day when the water wouldn't stop flowing.