Sunday, November 30, 2008

Humor and Function

During thanksgiving I met up with all of my friends in New York. We all come from Korea and we were friends since high school or even before. Since our parents live in Korea and our thanksgiving break is too short to take a visit back to Korea, we just meet up with each other in one place. We’ve been staying at the same place during the vacation as well. When ten boys get together its fun and it feels like the whole world is ours. We Joke and laugh a lot. And I am one of those who laugh but most of the time make funny jokes and make my friends laugh. When my friends laugh, I am satisfied. All my stress from school seems to be relieved.

This is how I am satisfied looking at other people being entertained and happy. And as an industrial designer I would like to carry out this throughout my career. I would like to bring humor to people however this humor is not just “funny” but an emotional experience that would not be forgotten. I often do this with form, color, material, or theme. To set a theme I often create a mood board so I can get a general theme for my final design.

This mood board was created during second semester design principles. Our project was to create a packaging for fruit for a specific user group. I chose “kids” for my user group. However the teachers did not tell us that we were going to create a packaging. They only told us to make a mood board using that user group. So I created a my mood board as if it were a game. “Tommy Pacman” was the game name. Right in the center was Tommy and the Pacman goes along and eats all the candy, chocolate, toys, sporting goods, and etc. (all things that a kid might like) and goes back to Tommy. As the Pacman eats all the “goodies” Tommy’s imagination, influence, nutrition, physical activity, and education points go up. (located on the lower part of the board). This mood board really helped develop my final product and everyone seemed to like it. The most comments I got from my final product was that “it’s fun!”

However, I don’t want to create things that are wasteful and harmful for the world. I am interested in humanitarian design where there is the most potential for the need of humor. I think humor is the best thing that can let the people forget about poverty, at least for awhile. But it seems to be difficult to mingle humor and function together. Function can be something simple, easy to make, and cost efficient. However, humor in design sometimes can be the opposite of function. It can be complex, difficulty in manufacturing, and expensive. Can these two factors work together? Is that an answer that the designer should find out? If these two factors go together then I think this world could be a better place.



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