DESIGNING MOVEMENT: An Aesthetic Investigation of Motion in Product Design
Thoughts on the Design of Movement (or How We Can Make Things Cooler):
When Sony sets out to design a Walkman, it commits vast resources to making the product look “cool.” The form, style, and graphics are all carefully designed with this goal in mind. Yet, when it comes to opening the player, it seems as though innovative design were the last thing on Sony’s mind. When the user presses the “open” button, the case cracks open in an astonishingly uninspired way. If a caveman had to design a hinged box, it would open in exactly the same manner as a 2006 Walkman.
Why do aesthetic design principles only apply to static objects, or objects in static states? Why shouldn’t design also inform the movement of a product's parts through space? Shouldn’t movement receive the same aesthetic attention as form?
Well, yes. Yes it should. But that is rarely the case in today’s design industry.
This observation does not apply only to Sony but to Design culture in general. You don’t have to look far to see examples of boring movement in products—it is the norm. Why has design not come to the rescue? We know instinctively that making things more beautiful and more interesting is harder than making them neutral. At this very instant, designers are toiling away all over the world to make their designs look better. But why is this same attention not also lavished on the animation of products?
As a student, this deficiency on the part of Design got under my skin, so I decided to isolate movement as an aesthetic element and try to figure out how it can be evaluated and designed. Although there are certainly exceptions, literal movement itself is primarily the domain of engineers, and designers are left to make parts and casings.
While engineers are vital to making things move, they are not artists, and their lack of aesthetic sensibility ultimately degrades the beauty of designers’ work. I want to take movement back from the engineers and make it cool. Before Design can pull this off, we need to consider kinetics as an abstract language.