SPACE/MATERIALITY: HABITAT
HOMEWORK-GunsGermsSteel Necessity’sMother (Reading Question)
Jiahuan Cheng (Eric)
In the thirteenth chapter of Guns Germs Steel, the examples of inventions in modern history were invented based on what people actually had already made, in another word, those revolutionary inventions were improvement of its early generations. The author gives examples of Watt, Edison and Wright brothers to prove the fact because their inventions were all came from what people had already built. One sentence in the last paragraph of page 245 says that “My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rathe than in isolated heroic act, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.” It shows that the developments of technology are all based on what people had done before. There is no specific invention that is invented by someone because the inventor must gain his idea or inspiration from other conditions. Also, the second part of this sentence shows that inventions were invented without any aims, their using areas were given to them after they were invented. From my point of view, the first part of sentence is relevant to design fields because the process of designing a subject needs a lot of research and investigation which will select some key elements and combine them together to get a perfect product. So the design project is the way of accumulating what people like and have done in life. However, I do not think the second part of the sentence where it says that great inventions were built with unclear aims can be used in area of design. The process of design is to clarify how the product is going to be used and how it is going to fit whether people’s daily life or the natural environment. So design with no aim but let people to explore how it is going to fit our life will make the product be abandoned by the market.
The chapter spent a long space to demonstrate how the ability of acceptance affects the development of that society. The author points out that generally groups that are comfortable with accepting new technologies develop better and faster than those who hardly accept import of new technology. And among design region, it is hard for me to say that this option is fully relevant relate to resign but in most situation, this law works in design. In most parts of design, revolution or innovation is always the key words. To achieve the purpose of designing a revolutionary product accepting new ideas and technologies will make the design product closer to the society. Designers will have more options of materials or skills to create something that have never appear in history. This is important when designers want to get attention from crowds.
