the end...or the beginning?

Hello everyone, last blog of the year...time flies so quickly.

Topic for the last/final blog-a link between design history and the six cities design project...

From posting up the last few blogs up, I began to realise that there is a link, a link that wasn’t very noticeable but gradually grew.

As I have mentioned before, design is to create an experience or feeling. Looking back to first year of uni, I remember how I made an entry in my design journal about the great exhibition-it brought people’s morals up and made the Britons feel proud after the Second World War. Then again I made a link about how the great exhibition and six cities design festival are very much similar. Both are trying to increase people’s awareness of design-what it is and what design is around them.

From the last blog about the First World War, design was used to create a mood, a feeling in order to help recruit soldiers for the war by using guilt and duty. I guess design for the six cities is the same but instead of guilt and duty, we are looking at pride and future.

Lecture about the Viennese secession, where Vienna is described as a city of wealth and culture. A city famous for its music, literature, café society, liberal minded newspapers and early cinema. Dundee to me is the same. Dundee, widely known as the city of discovery-though how much of Dundee is actually discovered or is Dundee still waiting to be discovered? During reading week, we were given the assignment of creating a design poster for what we have researched so far for the six cities project. Looking back at it now, I feel that such project and design poster is a tool for seeing, which helped us to re-discover Dundee.

Tools for seeing was the tagline for the six cities project. We had to create these tools to help see new worlds. I believe that the project itself was already a tool for seeing and we are already seeing a new side of Dundee as well as the old. Influence is another thing that I believe is a tool for seeing, if not-it certainly did drive us to look for such tools. The future-what do you think of the future? What is the future of Dundee? The new waterfront project? Future is another tool for seeing-ever wonder what Dundee holds for the future or what it holds for you?

415 words already-who said 500 words was hard to write? I mean this blog of trying to find a link between design history and the six cities design project can go on endlessly. The more I type, the more I realise that there has already been a link, waiting to be discovered. Such link lies behind the word design. To design is to discover, to discover is to design, don’t you agree?

Drawing to a conclusion now, I must say-this year have been quite a difficult year for myself and I’m sure for others as well. There are things, which time can’t be turned back to change, but there is time for us to make a change now. This is what the link between the two are-what you can do in the past or what you can’t achieve then, you can do now or achieve now.

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas and a very happy new year.