IV. Discuss the following question: Which adjectives from the list below can describe the design process? Give your reasons.

interesting difficult creative unusual

easy various constructive surprising

boring intensive laborious engrossing

trivial hard mysterious common

V. Now read Text I and see how many of your ideas are mentioned.

TEXT I

THE DESIGN PROCESS

Design is not just the object you take off the shelf for checking and discussing – it is about and error and a series of decisions that starts before you even know your objective.

The design process is not a mysterious activity designers carry out behind a cloak of secrecy, magically emerging with a sparkling new market-beating product or service. It starts when decisions about why, how and even whether to go ahead with a project are being taken.

Although designers provide a particular blend of skills and creativity, the design process works best when it is a collaboration between the design team and the people it works with and for, either in-house colleagues or clients.

Design work begins with a brief setting out the aims and objectives of a project and outlining certain targets and parameters for its completion. But, ideally, the design team needs to be involved before the brief is even written for two reasons – first, its members will understand the brief better if they have had a hand in composing it and, secondly, the customer-focused, creative skills that designers possess can help decide the direction the project should take.

An organisation and its designers need to ask certain questions right at the start - why is design work needed? Is it to respond to changing markets or to customer trends? Maybe new competition has appeared on the market or the company just wants to increase its market share. Perhaps the organisation wants to make its service more efficient, or perhaps it faces a decision between improving an existing product or service or launching something completely new. By understanding both the organization's strategic objectives and customer needs, designers can define the problem before working towards a solution. The reason for the design will inform how the designers go about conducting research.

Research needs to be carried out both before and during the design process, especially if the project will take some years to complete. Market research includes trends analysis, scrutiny of competitors' products and wider research such as the state of the economy, upcoming legislation and relevant social changes such as birth rates and patterns of prosperity.

Design research centres on the user. It makes use of information about customers supplied by the organisation but also takes a more hands-on approach in the form of user testing and prototyping. Observing customer behaviour not only makes it easier for designers to create something that fulfils a need, it can also provide creative inspiration. Along with visualization, it also helps to represent the designers' ideas to the organisation at a large scale.

To plan a project effectively, companies and organizations need to take into account all the internal resources, people and information the project will require, from materials to customer-service support. The design team will need to be aware of these too. There is no point in a design requiring a certain manufacturing techniques or tooling, for instance, if these are not available.

The relationship between the designer and the organisation or department that has commissioned the design work is crucial. The best relationships are a two-way street, where each party is receptive to the concerns of the other. Communication needs to be maintained throughout the design process. The need for communication was summed up by designer Wayne Hemingway during the Design Council's Design in Business Week 2002: “There is no point sitting designers in a room and letting them design. They have to work with you and be a part of the business”.

The final stage is implementation – by manufacturers, engineers, IT (Information Technologies) experts or service providers – but that does not mean the designers exit the scene. It is important to allow for redesign and the designers also have a vital role to play in representing their ideas to all those involved in executing them.

 

NOTES

_____________________________________________________________________

Brief– the design documents that encapsulate all of the specification and to which the design team will work.

VI. Reread Text I, write down the sentences with Participle construction and translate them.

VII. Find in Text I words or phrases which mean the same as

 

to have a number of just at the beginning

definite co-operation take into consideration

to know goal (3 words)it is useless to

well-being for example to leave

to let essential clientage

 

VIII. Look at the way the following terms are used in Text I and try to explain them according to the model:

 

Model

Implementation is a final stage of design process when an idea becomes a product.

Collaboration is a design work together with in-house colleagues and a client organisation.

Brief, creative, skills, competition, design, team, customer-focused approach.

 

IX. Look at the way the following words are used in Text I and then circle the correct part of speech:

work (par. 4) noun verb adverb

aims (par. 4) noun verb adverb

right (par. 5) adjective verb adverb

faces (par. 5) noun verb adverb

centres (par. 7) noun verb adverb

concerns (par. 9) noun verb adverb

exit (par. 10) noun verb adverb

 

X. Answer the following questions:

1. When does the design process start?

2. When does the design process work best?

3. What questions must be asked right at the start of the design process?

4. What kind of research is it necessary to conduct?

5. What do companies and organizations need to take into account to plan a project effectively?

6. What is the final stage of the design process?

 

XI. Fill in the gaps with the words from the box.

strange testing right new successful impressive innovative prototyping

 

Creativity

A design doesn't have to be 1 …, different or 2 … to be 3 … inthe marketplace, as long as it's fulfilling a need, but design methods do lead to 4 … products and services.

Designers learn that ideas that may seem 5 … are worth exploring and that the “common-sense” solution is not always the 6 … one. Designers often hit on (находят правильный путь с помощью) intuitive concepts through methods such as drawing, 7 …, brainstorming and user 8 …. Watching users in real-life situations especially gives insights into their behaviour that leads to ideas that would not have formed if the designer simply had thought about the situation, or relied on generalized market research.

XII. Read Text II paying attention to the words and phrases in bold.

TEXT II

GRAPHICS AND DESIGN

Types of graphics software

Computer graphics are pictures created, changed or processed by computers. There are two categories.

1. Bitmapped graphics represent images as bitmaps;they are stored as pixels and can become a bit distorted when they are manipulated. The density of dots, known as the resolution and expressed in dots per inch, determines how sharp the image is.

2. Vector graphics represent images as mathematical formulae, so they can be changed or scaled without losing quality. They are ideal for high-resolution output.

There are different types of graphics software.

■ Image manipulation programs let you edit your favourite images. For example, you can scan a picture into your PC or transfer a photo from your camera and then add different effects, or filters.

The original photo

has been processed

with adobe Photoshop

using effects filters

■ Painting and drawing programs,also called illustration packages,offer facilities for freehand drawing, with a wide choice of pens and brushes, colours and patterns. One example is Windows Paint.

■ Business graphics programs,also called presentation software,let you create pie charts, bar charts and line graphs of all kinds for slide shows and reports. You can import data from a database or spreadsheet to generate the graphs.

■ Computer-aided design (CAD) is used by engineers and architects to design everything from cars and planes to buildings and furniture. First they make a wireframe, a drawing with edges and contour lines. Then if they want to colour the objects and add texture, they create a surface for the object; this is called “filling the surface”. Finally, the design is rendered to make the object look realistic. Rendering is a process that adds realism to graphics by using shading, light sources and reflections.

■ Desktop publishing (DTP) is based around a page layout program, which lets you import text from a word processor, clip-art (ready-made pictures) from graphics packages, and images from scanners or cameras, and arrange them all on a page. It is used to design and publish books, newspapers, posters, advertisements, etc.

■ Digital art,or computer art,is done with applets that use mathematical formulae to create beautiful bright shapes called fractals. A fractal is a geometrical figure with special properties, e.g. the Koch snowflake or the Mandelbrot set. Fractals can also be used to model real objects like clouds, coastlines or landscapes.

■ Computer animation uses graphics programs (e.g. digital cartooning systems) to create or edit moving pictures. Each image in a sequence of images is called a “frame”.

■ Geographic information systems (GIS) allow cartographers to create detailed maps.