The Big Smoke that is Dublin

Week 4 in contemporary design, we visited Dublin city. 7 am, we all packed into the bus bright eyed and bushy tailed for our 3 hour journey. The trip began with us visiting the Eileen Grays museum. Although I had previously heard of Eileen Gray, I never truly knew the background behind her work. I found her work really fascinating, I love how she used different materials from the norm and style techniques at the time which really add to the uniqueness of her work. I admire how crafty she was, always working with her hands, seeking new materials and constantly challenging herself. It made me think If you don't challenge yourself, who else will. I particularly admired how she began looking into architecture at a time when architecture was more male dominated. As well as this, I appreciated how she designed her house to be open space and very different from the traditional houses at the time, I found a lot of her furniture designs very unusual, however, the posture design and form of them weirdly made so much sense and it left an impression. Posture and human interaction was a big interest of hers. She even designed a very famous table that assists you to eat breakfast in bed, That is certainly something I could do with.

We then moved onto the Science Gallery Tour. This, in my opinion was almost like travelling into another dimension of products. I genuinely felt like I was living in West world or the land of iRobot. Everywhere you looked there was a different robot each with a different purpose. I found this really cool but also rather daunting. One of the first things I saw was a children's toy robot. This toy had a face on it which showed emotion for children to play with. I will admit, the idea that someday I may possibly have kids who will be spending their early childhood years playing with robotic products and building relationships with them, really did freak me out. When I imagine children growing up its usually using their imaginations to play games, using their creativity drawing and colouring, reading books and making friends. I had a sudden horror that our future could be heading into a decline of real human interaction. I must ask, Is all these new developments possible dampening newer generations creativity? If they will have everything at the touch of a button, where would they learn real initiative, resilience or physical interaction. Aside from all these crazy thought processes which I'm still trying to juggle in my head, I understand it is important have to have a certain acceptance to all of these futuristic behaviours because a technology orientated future is basically inevitable.

The final place we visited was The Design Partners company. The interior of the building was a lovely open space, very clean and really nice use of colour inside. It seemed like a perfect space for such an innovative environment. It was fascinating the products this company had designed. I particularly liked how their medical device designs were designed to be so user friendly. Everything from their workshop to their kitchen was very impressive and looks like an amazing company to work for.

Overall, it was a very interesting field trip which really opened my mind and and consider so many different aspects of design even if it did make me realise my small fear of robots.