Design Awareness

The following post has two questions;

1.Design Awareness

Simon's definition of design: Identify the connections between Simon's definition of design and the story. Make direct use of his definition. Be explicit and clear with your connections. Use critical thinking. Avoid retelling the news story in your own words. Your response should be between 100 and 250 words. The Designing Triad: Clearly identify the five essential components of the Designing Triad found in the story selected. Explain how the content of the story illustrates the interrelationship between any two of the five components. Be specific and use critical thinking. Your response should be between 100 and 250 words.

2.Lifestyle and Consumer Culture

Choose one of the following essay questions: ‘In the post-traditional order of modernity, and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour’ (Giddens 1991: 5). Explain and evaluate making use of examples of your choice. ‘In conditions of high modernity, we all not only follow lifestyles, but in an important sense are forced to do so – we have no choice but to choose.’ (Giddens 1991: 81) Explain and evaluate making use of examples of your choice. The tastes and practices of different classes are meaningful because they are involved in the struggles for cultural power between classes. Explain and evaluate making use of appropriate examples. To what extent are some lifestyles seen as more legitimate than others? Discuss using examples from contemporary British culture. Do lifestyle media democratize ideas about taste? Miller argues that we are becoming a ‘consumer society … one in which commodities are increasingly used to express the core values of that society but also become the principal form through which people come to see, recognise and understand those values’ (Miller 2012: 40). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples. ‘Shopping is not merely the acquisition of things, it is the buying of identity’ (Clammer qtd. in Lewis and Bridger 2001: 130). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples. Lifestyle connotes ‘individuality, self-expression and a stylistic self-consciousness’ (Featherstone 2007: 81). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples. ‘Travel increasingly caters to the predispositions of the new middle classes’. Discuss. Baudrillard argues that the postmodern is characteristic of a universe that ‘has destroyed itself. … So all that are left are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces. Playing with the pieces – that is postmodern’ (Baudrillard 1984: 24). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples.