Saturday, February 22, 2020

The significance of a designed product (Product Design) Essay

The significance of a designed product (Product Design) - Essay Example Normally, product designing is being carried out by engineers and highly-skilled designers and usually engages with the people in the marketing, business, or even in military in order to gather inputs that would help build the physical product. Product design is a component of a much comprehensive term called â€Å"product development†, which comprises the creation or organization of the product requisites, the basic idea of the product, and product evaluation. Product has long been resorted to as a means of systematically creating a physical product. As a matter of fact, it is being employed during the earlier eras to help plan the overall design and functions of artifacts. The significance of a designed product can be dated back as to the Mozambique period or even earlier. Thus, there is a rich historical importance the ties up product design and artifacts together. Today, the influence of product design has thrived even more. Product design is widely used in STEM fields, es pecially in the natural sciences and engineering. Today, many technology companies around the world are investing huge amounts in product design in order for them to increase their value in the market (Chitale and Gupta 2005). They are also using product design to influence or indirectly manipulate revenues. However, this revenue-focused design is largely applicable to computer products and not significantly on artifacts. This paper focuses on the significance of product design or designed product in the creation of artifacts. In particular, we will focus on a piece of furniture known as the â€Å"Throne of the Weapons† – an influential design made to order by Bishop Dinis Sengulane of the Christian Council of Mozambique, and was designed and created by Kester. Thus, the â€Å"Throne of the Weapons† is also called â€Å"The Kester’s Chair.† We will look at the nooks and crannies of the design of this amazing piece of artifact and draw inferences an d insights on how product design helped work out the entirety of the product. History of the â€Å"Throne of the Weapons† The â€Å"Throne of the Weapons† is a piece of artifact built by Kester from abandoned firearms. He created the sculpture by attaching different types of firearms together. Since 2002, the sculpture is under the care of the British Museum. Many considers it as the British Museum’s most expressive piece of art judging from the perspective that the object has been presented in a more extensive myriad of ways than any other piece of artifact (BBC 2013). The majority of the sculpture’s composition is composed of decommissioned weapons from the Mozambique Civil war that took place between 1977 and 1992 (BBC 2013 2013). Just for a historical background, the Mozambique War killed nearly a million lives and internally dislocated 5 million people. Thus, in essence, apart from its form is the significance of its historical background: the sculpt ure resembles both the unnatural catastrophe of the war and the victory of the people. The

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Cognitive Linguistics Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Cognitive Linguistics - Term Paper Example 24). In his classification the â€Å"symbols† refer to the arbitrary signs, while â€Å"indices† and â€Å"icons† refer to the motivated ones. Arbitration is the process of giving the objects the titles that have nothing to do with its features and nature, while motivation is the process that is based on cause and effect relations between a referent and a sign. According to Pierce, the example of a â€Å"symbol† can be the word â€Å"table† – the sign does not reveal any outward or inner features or functions of the object. However, his indices and icons are more or less motivated. Indices represent the signs where the sign is determined by proximity or causality. The examples here are the smoke coming from the building – that indicates fire, the movement of the pointed finger at any object is also an index. The relation here is based on causality, common knowledge and traditions of people’s culture. Studying icons Pierce distin guished three types of icons. Image is a kind of sign that either visually, audibly or in any other way resembles a referent. The examples here include paintings, photos or onomatopoetic words. By copying something with gestures or mimics we also display images. The second type is metaphor that has a more elusive nature, though it is still based on the abstract resemblance of a referent. Using some gestures of non-verbal communication can also illustrate the metaphor, since it is based on a kind of meaningful transition. For instance, while discussing some problems a person can show the size of the problem with the hands. Certainly, the size is abstract and relative but it has the beginning and the end. In this case the intention of a person to demonstrate the seriousness of the problem is the main factor that refers it to the â€Å"image† sign. The third type is diagrams that show information, tendencies or figures in absolutely another way, but still they do not represent t he very object to us. A wiring diagram demonstrates the relationship between â€Å"the parts of a circuit, but neither the general form of the diagram nor the indexes of the certain parts need to look like the physical circuit† (Hinton, 1994, p. 34) In the history of linguistics scientists tended to focus more on arbitration than on motivation. Though, it cannot be but mention that the most part of the signs in the language are of the arbitrary nature, but still the motivated ones are not to be neglected. As mentioned above all our gestures that go with our verbal speech are sure to have the motivated nature. The language of the deaf has a more iconic implication than the spoken language. The examples of early written languages Sumerian, ancient Chinese and Egyptian bore the iconic nature. The language in this case was carried out through the pictograms or signs that represent exactly an icon. Unlike the study of Saussure the signs of the spoken language do not have only arbi trary nature. The motivated signs refer not only to onomatopoeia and sound symbolism but also to some syntactical structures. A man has many various forms of communication, though it is possible to mark out two basic forms of it. It is necessary to understand the development and importance of motivation signs and for translators and interpreters it is necessary to differentiate them in the process of communication. Our two most typical forms of communic