Design in Resonance
What is resonance design? To what extend design and resonance can benefit people during this pandemic, in times of flux and uncertainty? To answer these questions, we have to focus on what is the means of resonance and how it functions first.
Resonance is like a gene built on the human’s body. It is like a part of our living mechanism. We are born to resonate with nature, beauty, and of course, humans. If one is unable to resonate with others emotionally, he might be considered mentally ill, or some physical defect in the brain.
Therefore, if the resonance mechanism is biologically rooted in our instinct, how might we extract it from the deep of mind? How does it work in the human-sharing context? How might design achieve the ultimate goal of resonance in terms of the purpose of problem-solving or future speculating, in short, to achieve a better world?
Here are some of the example to narrate design in resonance.
One is on the emotional level, called Security Moms by Ogilvy Brazil. The context is in the Brazil football stadium. Every year, there are hundreds of young people injured during the football contest fighting each other for supporting their teams. Even some of them get killed. So, what designers did, is not strengthen police forces, or lay down severe penalties. They tried to resonate with the emotion of those younger. They found the adolescent’s moms, tried to invite them to join in the football stadium, as the role of the security guard.
This measure keeps the peace at football matches and decreases the number of injured dramatically because young people don’t want their mom to watch them fight. And that is the brilliant design intervene of not just focus on the surface phenomenon but to resonate with people who you want to target.
The other example is on the natural level, an international designer named Tokujin Yoshioka, who has created designs/installations/art pieces resonating people’s inner sense about nature. How to present the atmosphere of humans perceive nature? How to catch the abstract feeling about humans to the natural world, make the invisible tangible? Maybe just replicate it.
Like <Water brock benches> in 2002, or the installation <Snow> in Nature Sense exhibition, 2010. Tokujin Yoshioka nudges nature power into human space and design artifacts, awaken people’s understanding of nature, resonate the primitive connection between human and nature.
Same as the world-famous artist Olafur Eliasson, who used to create the rainbow in the museum(Rainbow assembly, 2016) or installed a giant waterfall at the Palace of Versailles.
In conclusion, design in resonance is not such ambiguous and unreachable, the methodology is always human-centered based. To dig deep into what people perceive, what people feel, what people care, is the only path to achieve resonance, and connect one another.
