By Pereye19
1. While I was thinking about what good design is, a recent investment I made that was sorely missing in my home office came to mind. Throughout the years, I’ve mostly had great experiences with products like these, but some of them have had major flaws and been huge money drains. Schools have them, businesses have them, homes have them, and there are companies dedicated to servicing these office appliances. I’m talking about printers.
I remember the first printer we got at home many years ago. I had gotten a camera a few months prior and I was excited to finally be able to print all of the photos I had been taking. They were terrible of course, but nonetheless I was proud of these monstrosities and I was going to make a big wall of them. To my disappointment I realized that this wasn’t going to happen as soon as I wanted it to.
What I found out was that even though this machine did what it was supposed to do, it wasn’t as free, as I’d imagined it. The reason? A printer needs ink and a special kind of paper to print pictures, and they’re expensive. The cartridges that contain said ink, are tiny and you could easily go through almost half of it just by printing out a couple of pictures. I might be exaggerating, but you get the point. It was expensive.
For many years, these ink cartridges were the most common way of printing out your pictures at home and most of the printer manufacturers seemed happy with their designs as it was fulfilling its purpose. It printed out pictures. “One essential tenet of good design, which has existed throughout the ages, is that no design exercise can be deemed worthwhile unless it fulfills its function and does so efficiently” (Rawsthorn 2013, 46). But is that always enough?
This brings me to the printer I bought recently. I couple of years back Epson, a manufacturer of printers started making machines with EcoTanks. Every one of these EcoTank printers come with huge cartridges that you fill up yourself and the bottles contain on average the same as 88 of those small plastic cartridges that had to be thrown away after each use. The focus on climate and using less plastic is an ongoing “trend” right now that probably inspired this, and it is much needed.
My point is this: Good design always fulfills its purpose, but it’s also recognizing when there is room for improvement and needs that might not have been there earlier. While originality is highly praised, good design can and should also be about improving and renovating older designs to counter the problems of today, more efficiently. And for improving a system that has seen few improvements the last 15 years, I applaud Epson. My need for cheap printing with less pollution is fulfilled.
Sources:
Hello World: Where Design Meets Life 2013, Alice Rawsthorn
Making sense of art and design industries 