What is the age of design?
T he terms design and designers are brought to use in the very latest times. But, the birth of design took place many years ago and people have been creating and designing tools that made life easier. It is believed that design was the first human creation.
Necessity is the mother of invention. — Plato
Ancient man is considered as the first designer logically who designed a stone axe as a tool and continued designing his clothes with leaves and animal skin to solve the problem of protecting himself from exposure, heat and cold and further continued designing for ages by passing it down from one generation to the other. If not because of these thousands of years of discovery, we would have not have had the capability to design cars, machines, styles of clothing etc…
The professional and commercial design we see today started with solving a problem with its functionality. While we speak about Ancient Greeks who designed for ergonomics, Walt Disney who designed Disney Land, we forget the fact that a potter, blacksmith, goldsmith, including our mom who does the Rangoli, prepare multi-shaped food are also designers for a very long time. The design extended its roots along the time in many ways, one being Vaastu Shastra or Feng Shui(Chinese Vaastu Shastra). The evolution of design took place overages.
Stone-Age/Acheulean Hand Axes
This is the first-ever creation of humans which helped the ancient ones to cut, lit the fire, kill prey for food and for many other needs. It was the major weapon for the ancients to protect themselves from all possible dangers.
Ancient shelters:
It is one of the basic need for any living being and according to historians, humans used to have temporary shelters in the caves and then moved on to designing straw, wood and rock huts.
Maps:
As the population began to increase and the humans started travelling. To travel back or to mark their destination, the creation or design of maps took place.
Maps not only help people travel from one place to another but also helped them mark their territories. Archaeologists say the initial maps were created by pigmenting the walls of the caves which later took many transformations till today’s Google Maps.
The Wheel:
One cannot imagine their life without this today. A simple design of it started off as a round-shaped wood with the axle mechanism and later on modified to ring with strokes inside. Today, this design has evolved to one of its advanced from as Tyres.
Script:
The shreds of evidence say that Cuneiform is the first ever written script on earth which originated in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. The written scripts are one amazing designs created by humans in those times which led to communications, documentations etc.
Printing press:
Till before the invention of these printing presses, words and messages were written on stones and later on different types of paper which used to consume time and efforts to copy them and still end up with mistakes. Though the first movable block printing press was invented in China(In the 11th Century), it was Johannes Gutenberg who revolutionized the process of mass printing in the 1400s.
Electronic Gadgets:
All the electronic gadgets which are designed, some simple, some very complicated are again the human designs of the very late centuries which made our lives not just easy but also provide luxury.
If necessity is the mother of invention, conflict is its father. — Kenneth Kaye
The designing capability of humans has not come to an end yet neither reached its saturation. We think, designers as the professionals today who do their job out of passion and earn money but this all started many years back, to solve problems, satisfy needs and live long.
Every great design begins with a strong need…
