JANGSEOKIN

Impetus – Why Am I Making It?

I am lost in thought when someone asks me why I am a designer. It is a very basic and foundational question, and it looks very simple to answer. I need to tell you my environment in childhood. I grew up with an artistic family; my father and sister were graphic designers, and my mother was good at decorating the house. There were always art materials such as brushes, paints, and papers around me. These were all my toys. Design books were my fairy tale books, color boxes were my Lego boxes, and the airbrushes were my air guns. Moreover, I liked to taste each color. I remember yellow and orange color flavors were better than black color. Someone might think my childhood drove me to be a designer. That is right. It made me to be familiar with art materials. However, because of this special environment in my childhood, I did not have any chance to think about any other areas that I might be interested in. That is reason why I tried to find different new world because I thought there are more things I can do better and am more interested in. Therefore, I had tried to get the various experiences indirectly as many as possible such as an actor, a car racer, a doctor, or a writer through the media. However, I realized what I do well is what I am interested in. If you hard to find what you are interested in and what you want to be, I suggest you to think what you are good at. Sometimes it is good way to find your future job. In retrospect, I believe my toys which were my father’s art materials, drove me what I am today. Nobody even me could guess that the toys were the starting point to be a designer.

I have been interested in universal design, which is all design for both people without disabilities and people with disabilities, silver designer, which is for elder people, and green design, which is for our environment, when I was in undergraduate level because I have lost interest in the design, which is just looking pretty unnecessarily without innovation. Moreover, I was really impressed when I see some brilliant and innovative designs for poor people. And I realized this is what I want to do. Let me introduce some great designers what I got impressed.

Design is not only for making nice to look at, but also to contribute to the society, to help people, and make a better life for all. There are some designers that inspired me as a designer. Piet Hendrikse is a designer who designed Q-Drum. The Q-Drum is a large, circular container with a hole in the middle. It contains more than 13 gallons of water, and is easy to carry. Moreover, “Lifestraw” and “Peepoo Pack” are the design for the other 90% of the world who do not have modern conveniences. There is another design that I found few days ago, titled A Litter of Light. The guy who called “Solar Demi” designed the solar bulb, which is made by the empty plastic bottle. He punches a hole on a piece of metal roofing, and slips in a bottle. And he applies some sealant, and fills it with filtered water with some bleach. And then he installs it on the roof. It is for poor people who donot have electricity in Philippine. Their home were too dark to be active, but the trivial empty plastic bottle changed their whole life. Like this, contributing the to society and helping poor people in the world are definitely an attractive job to me.

For my thesis project, I would like to contribute to the society that we live in. The experiment that I made was named “Smoking Free Zone”. This is about drawing one single line with water-soluble chalk on a street, in front of the entrance of the building (parsons 2 west 13th street), and then observes the reaction of smokers. Did they follow the NYC smoking law? Unexpectedly, many smokers smoked outside of the smoke free zone. Therefore, all people are satisfied because non-smokers can avoid from the second-hand smoking, and also smokers do not have to read other faces.