Your Design, My Design

design |dəˈzīn|: do or plan (something) with a specific purpose or intention in mind

‘Design’ is the word we heard a lot, but it is hard to really explain what this word means.  Even us architecture students still could not define it specifically.  But I think the meaning of the word ‘design’ can be many things according to each person’s interpretation.  If we look at the typology, it composes of the prefix ‘de-’, which could be translated as ‘remove’ or ‘decrease’, and the word ‘sign’.  This, I think, could mean decoding, decomposing the sign and reading it in a deeper perspective.

Some signs, like road signs, show their obvious meanings, because they are meant to be easy to read and to make everyone understand the same thing.  But there are signs that invented by personal preference, such as the “V-sign” by Winston Churchill.  It is the sign made by raising index and middle fingers, parting.  It looks like sign for “two” and can also be confused with “the finger” as an insult.  Nevertheless, Winston designed a brand new sign, which later became popular worldwide.

In my own interpretation, design is not just innovation; it could mean to improve the existing stuffs.  Since signs are representation of objects, there is freedom for everyone to play with the possibilities of their meaning, whether to change the whole understanding of that or to use our common understanding of the sign.  When we look at a pentagon shape, a familiar shape that, I could say, everyone drew when we were kids, we all could see that it represents a house.  Herzog and de Meuron played with this shape in their storehouse by extruding the simple pentagon shapes and stack them together.  People who pass by can see the glowing sign of a ‘house’ and interpret that this is a store for house products.