While reading through chapter 3, I felt that it is structured slightly different than the previous two chapters, since the majority of the principles were listed at first, before we delved into a series of examples. Learning about the examples actually provoked more thoughts in me than I expected, which was a fun experience. Therefore, in this week’s reading response, I will mention a few principles that resonated with me, and then proceed to discuss some thoughts about two of the examples.
To begin with, I resonated with principle 3.3: Imbue Personality. Whether it is daily life items or musical works, I found that the designs that left me a deep impression often came with certain “personality” that are unique to the designer.
This reminds me of a term that I learned in my high school psychology class: “schema.” It is originally used to describe a conception that is common (or seems common to the individual who holds the schema) to all members of a group, whether it is good or bad. I remember having extensive discussions on how this could lead to stereotypes, inaccuracies, or other not-so-good things. But afterall, our teacher pointed out that its greatest advantage is in fact its simplicity – something that could potentially save our lives in extreme circumstances.
Thankfully, for the majority of our lives, we don’t have to deal with extreme circumstances, but learning about schemas has given me an explanation to why we prefer simplicity in many things. This led to principles 3.5 and 3.15, because they all stress digging the most out of some simple elements in our design, and the time and effort that designers must spend in order to make them simple yet thoughtful. I believe that good designs should contain “easter eggs” that grow out of their simplicity, making us “WOW” when we finally discover the thoughtful way that the designer hid them in. (This is why I like escape rooms so much, btw.)
Reading through the examples, SNDPEEK left a deep impression in me. (I think this is partially because of how much time I spent just staring at sndpeek.ck while trying to figure out what my audio visualizer should look like). But I remember spending a good amount of time making different sounds into it. I especially appreciated the FFT spectrum history, because that is what gave us reference to the passing of time, hence motion to the whole design.
Similarly, I found Golan Levin’s YELLOWTAIL also a great example of design with motion. Perhaps as humans we have an instinctive affinity to moving objects and would associate their movement to their “personality.” Therefore, it is essential to incorporate that into our design. In fact, I think most music that excites people has a very meticulously designed sense of motion regardless of its genre, be it Beethoven, John Adams, or Eminem.
I want to end my reading response with the quotation of the last paragraph of the chapter (p.159). I consider myself very inexperienced and unversed in philosophy, but I was really touched by it to a point that I typed it out in WeChat and sent it to myself:
