Sometimes, yes. I would, however, categorize the example you posted rather as a beautiful piece of kinetic art rather meant to surprise onlookers than to really be a solution to closing an opening between two rooms.
JQL: it is rather what the door OUT from the pub sometimes turns into…
It could be the door to the gents!
This door is brilliant nonetheless.
That is what happens when you have everything you need and still your mind doesn’t stop working.
How many different chairs do you know? Why are they all different?
Sometimes you absolutely need design but sometimes need becomes actually desire.
If you think on it, design, in our society, is mostly focused on desire and not need.
And when designers focus exclusively on desire we are talking about two things: luxury or silliness.
However, every form of human production is able to provoke the mind and even the most needless of human products might stir thought, evolution and emotion. We might be talking about Art.
This door is not evolution as you stated and doesn’t charge much emotion, but it makes me at least think therefore it’s not waste. It’s worthy design.
Yes, I know hundreds of chairs, but none of them I need a manual to use. If I had to, it would be making everyday things more difficult than simplifying them.
I do not wrest the merit of the creator, who was actually very creative, skilled, and managed to make a great kinetic sculpture, but that simply does not work as a door, but would be much appreciated in a hipster museum.
Then it became more than it is. It evolved. The evolution of this door was not a functional one.
The thing is how you value things. You seem to value the purpose of things. A door should be a door not something else.
I almost agree with that as I think a door could be a door AND something else.
In this case the door became something else BUT hardly a door so I understand your point.
But what was the purpose of this thing?
I think the purpose was to cause a show and the door was just a starting point. That was very successful.
Things are valid on many dimensions. There are some dimensions that I would find superfluous if they are the only dimensions one is able to take from the object. I tend not to like things that have the purpose of making a show for themselves and their authors so I agree with you on this door.
However I like things that serve their purpose seamlessly, which is not the purpose of putting a show, but they end up putting a show because of how they solve their original purpose(s) flawlessly. They put up the right questions and give the right answers, raising even more questions.
I think the question of scientific versus aesthetic design can be best understood by looking at nature as an example. Nature is built entirely through scientific design where every component and process serves a superlative functional purpose, and yet somehow, like magic, the overall design ends up also being superlatively aesthetic as well.
Or perhaps Nature is merely viewed scientifically or aesthetically since they are human constructs and subject to perception.
That is possible.
What is also possible is that there is no such thing as aesthetic and what we consider to be aesthetic without scientific substance is merely a flawed and silly scientific design. And something that is aesthetic with scientific substance is just basically something that is scientifically beautiful.
I am sure there is a perception that views nature as scientifically aesethetic. It’s hard to say if lower (or other) life forms would agree.
Even nature does not lead to ideal designs. If selective pressure is not infinitely high, useless features/bugs are tolerated as long as they don’t hinder themselves surviving. For example it is estimated that only 8‒15% of human DNA is biologically functional, with the rest mostly being “junk DNA” of no (yet understood) purpose.
A simple design is always in conflict with practical needs and other requirements. For example software users often request more features that cover all rare use cases, so that they won’t have to use a second tool. By contrast, developers want to keep software maintainable and dependencies to external libraries low but on the other side not re-invent/re-implement things.
If a design is well organized, it can be both very powerful/intricate and still very simple at every individual abstraction layer.
I think simplicity is one ideal (you cannot fully achieve) that wants to challenge us to question a design again and again to adapt it to changing (including disappearing) requirements. A good design is then the best compromise between ideals (subject to different perspectives) that does not hinder practical use.
Academics usually teach ideals and theories (and want you to show that)… and real life teaches being realistic.
I think there is no question of scientific vs aesthetic design.
Nature designs exactly as we do. It throws experiments into testing and see if they are fit. It’s almost a random process of evolution that takes millions of years.
This is the way I see it, nature is stupid and that’s what’s really efficient about it. Nature works and finds design through minimal changes to it’s initial idea. It’s work evolves from simplicity to an uninteligible complexity along millions of years, and throws the result into the real lab which is nature itself. The result is then harshly tested and discarded or keeps evolving. It never stays the same it always dies leaving evolved copies behind. The evolution that works keeps going on, the evolution that does not, get’s trashed.
Nature’s own nature is evolution of what works and discarding of what does not. Just as any creative human works.
It’s an harsh brute force design process that has nothing to do with scientific or aesthetic, in my opinion it’s just random. It’s as random as human collective evolution.
Science or aesthetics are just (some of the) methods humans use to understand nature.
There is also epiphany moments. Moments were events in nature collaborate for a stroke of evolution or a great drawback.
It’s the same thing in human evolution, there are humans that, in a given context, feel the need to push through. They risk all they have to create an evolution greater than the minimal which the collective human mind usually does.
Their leap of faith produces genial evolution or catastrophic regression but still they are an unpredictable or random event. Just like in nature.
Definitely agree with this.
The OP’s question seems to be simplistic in it’s nature…and trying to evoke controversy.
The whole thing is very subjective and this simplistic question, to me, feels like the average contractor speaking. The contractor who does not topicality care that much about the design process, does not appreciate details that deviate from the lowest-common-denominator (gyp, metals studs, brick veneer, 2x4 lay-in ceilings…)
Complexity is in the eye of the beholder. And are we talking about complexity of program? Of the plan or the elevation compositions? of the exterior detailing and choice of materials? Of the interior materials and details? Complexity of HVAC approach and implementation? Of maintenance considerations? Complexity of phasing and construction delivery? Of introducing various complexities to meet required parameters of LEED??
You see my point I assume. As educated designers, we are trained to evaluate, frequently, an enormous amount of data, requirements and various parameters, and create designs (as a “totality” in this instance) which meet the client’s needs, respect the community and historical context, comply with all applicable codes, respect the provided construction and project budget, allow for required phasing and site accommodations, maintenance considerations, up-front costs vs life cycle costing, and of course making an aesthetic statement with some defensible and cohesive strategy. Some of those are objective and some of those are subjective. The point is, all of this requires a complex series of balances and compromises. This is not a simple exercise, for the typical moderate to large-scale project at any rate. Perhaps simply adding a vestibule, stair and elevator to a 1960s brick building may be a little more clear-cut.
What is “complex” on a building exterior? Use of more than one material such as brick? Use of anything other than aluminum windows or curtainwall for fenestration? Use of sunshades/bris soleil? Roof overhang that tapers or includes brackets? Anything that avoids surprises or a technical challenge?
It frustrates me as a designer to hears these kind of statements coming from contractors and construction managers when conversing with the Owner, as it creates and adversarial relationship where the contractor appeals to the owner’s desire to have the project cost as little as possible while maintaining their own profit margin…and makes the architect the crazy bad person making everything too complicated.
And yes, I recognize that each of those perspectives tempers the other, and in general the arguments are a healthy thing. But it can, and does, easily devolve into the Owner beginning to dismiss the building design narrative that they have built with the architect as the cost estimates begin to come in. And leads to dilution of the design intent, not only aesthetically, but with respect to several dozen other factors as well. We are building the project to last, in many cases, a hundred years. It needs to be as complex and simple as it needs to be.
How about this example:
Sketchup has a simple interface, so there is no centering command.
-In order to center objects, download and install the plugin “Find Centerpoint.”
-Put centerpoints on adjacent objects
-Go into Xray mode
-Move one centeroint to the other, as many times as necessary depending on the number of objects. Due to issues with the Move tool, move each object once on each axis to actually get them aligned.
-Depending on the size of the objects (thinner sections don’t conceal points as you zoom out) go back in to erase or hide the centerpoints.
Question: is Sketchup’s interface simple, because it has fewer commands, or complex, because it requires more steps and outside help (plugin) to accomplish the task?
Use the built in inference.
Yes, and after you spend all this time producing so many graphic representations of the project for the owner to be happy with it, the pricing discussion is almost all talk. I recently was in one of these talks and finally said, “No more talking. I know exactly what he’s describing. Let me just draw it up for you, and you can decide.” So, I drew the cost cutting alternates in SketchUp and presented them side by side to the owner, and they rejected the extreme measures because they ruined the design they had grown to like. The changes literally made the design too simple. It’s the first real example of architectural renderings I’ve done in the Bidding and Negotiation phase that I can think of.
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That is a very interesting question.
So far its safe to say that the larger a program gets the more complex it is to use. This conclusion would be common sense since an imaginary program with a million commands would obviously be ridiculously difficult to use.
But at the same time, the smaller a program is the more difficult it is to use as well since the user would have to resort to workarounds to get the same job done that would otherwise be much easier with a larger program.
And so that means an expanding program simultaneously becomes more difficult and yet more easy to use.
But how could this be?
Perhaps there is two different properties at hand that determine complexity. One is size and the other is lack of functionality. Just how they differ is certainly beyond the scope of my intellect.
David—
My point exactly— wish I’d picked a better example, I never knew you could pull a centerpoint like that! Maybe mirror images, without scaling to -1— it’s always awkward to re-position the original once it’s ben flipped.
I think there is a synthesis— it’s not just having a million commands, like Rhino, for instance. And it’s not just having the fewest possible, like Sketchup. Part of it will come from how the individual user operates and what type of work is being done. Part of it comes from logically stacking and extending the interface, so it’s easy to understand and use. There are certainly better and worse logical paths to this, but they might be pretty difficult to extend to an application used by millions for different types of objects.
As much as I enjoy SU, and as much as I’ve learned from the Forum, there’s a mindset common to many devoted users, that it’s just a matter of beating your mental process into shape and if you haven’t beaten your brain like I have, you are wrong. Uniting through suffering, I guess. I’ve always felt that in order to be helpful, computers should extend the human mind, not rule it or constrain it.
Jim Lewis
Springwood Studios
(formerly Icarus Furniture)
(518)-429-3909
154 4th St
Troy NY 12180
Surely it’s about learning how something works.
Isn’t that why we go to school? To learn how to learn.
Education doesn’t end when you leave school, educating yourself about everything around you is a natural part of life.
Too often people complain that something doesn’t work as they expect it too, but it does work exactly how it was designed to work.
Would you expect to drive a car like Jenson Button just by getting behind the wheel and guessing what the controls do? My father taught me many years ago how to get to understand a tool and learn what it can and can’t do. I use his lessons every day.
Box—
Certainly there’s that, and I just learned a new trick today. But there’s more. Does the interface make you crazy, or can you efficiently do common tasks?
It was years before I got a computer, because I valued my creative/intuitive mindset, using it professionally every day. I couldn’t stomach the thought of having to work a command line interface, with drives prenamed in all caps. Finally got a Mac, thank you. I knew a PC would change my dreams and did not want to rework my personal creative interface.
Sketchup is like that. It’s got its cranky points, where it makes no sense and chooses to stay that way. Great for boxes, less so for some other things. As a designer, do you want to spend the greater part of your creative energy designing/building, or figuring out how to draw an object? I’ve been using SU for years and have a fair degree of skill at the parts of it I use, yet there are some things I can’t draw unless I do it in a tightly prescribed sequence. Knowing the precise number of line segments that approximate an arc ahead of time, for instance, which will later be measured in some obscure fraction of 360° for accurate measurements.
Can I learn more? Sure. But I also have a life, and many other things I have to learn. Knowing all the ins and outs of SU is not my raison d’etre so much as being a great designer, problem solver, husband, woodworker, wage earner. And I write that knowing there are many on this forum who make a habit of blaming those of us who confess to a lack of knowledge for our inferior study, rather than admit the program could be less opaque. It’s why I pretty much stay off the forum.
Jim Lewis
Springwood Studios
(formerly Icarus Furniture)
(518)-429-3909
154 4th St
Troy NY 12180
