Digital Design Essay

Design is something that is omnipresent and affects the lives of everyone. Every aspect of our daily lives has undergone and continues to go through a design process with constant innovations. As technology integrates into our daily lives, the digital design field has grown in popularity. However, what is digital design? Similar to Bruno Latour’s philosophy that contemporary design has shifted into a much broader concept from its modern definition as purely aesthetics, my philosophy is that design in general consists of a synthesis between the production of things and aesthetic design in order to serve a purpose (Latour 2). Digital design combines a technological component to design, whether it is used in the production of the design or as

I realized that art and design differ art is meant to be a creative expression that could have an objective, which is why art is used in design. However, design is always meant to have a purpose. A way to explain this difference between art and design can be expressed by Latour’s idea that the modernist design philosophy saw design as merely an aesthetic like art sometimes is used for. However, design has shifted to a broader term of “things” that should help approach a “matter of concern” (Latour 2). Design can be utilized to bring awareness to an issue in society or as Antoinette Carroll states, it can provide an “approach” to the issue (Miller 4). Also, design should not be used for malicious intentions or discrimination even though Lena Groeger’s article cites numerous examples of discriminatory design city planner Robert Moses design choices that still affect New York citing the low bridges of Long Island used to block the poor (Groeger 2,3)

Design workshops can be created and for individuals to express their ideas and converse in the forms of knowledge pieces similar to the workshops for the Body Games Project. This form of participatory design is influenced by the design research movement, which bridged the gap between science and design (Bannon 45). By combining technology with children’s play research with design, the groups could communicate using basic terminology in the form of knowledge pieces to address the issue of childhood obesity (Kjærsgaard