Design your life with Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton has been Cooper-Hewitt's curator of contemporary design since 1992. Her new book, Design your life, the pleasures and perils of everyday things is co-authored with her twin sister Julia. Design your life takes an irreverent and realistic look at everything from toasters, bras and pillows to housekeeping. Speaking to readers who are both design-conscious and consumer wary. Design your life taps into the popular interest in design as well as peoples desire to make their own way through a mass-produced world.

Ellen Lupton has held public programmes and exhibitions at Cooper-Hewitt's for the last 16 years. The first exhibition that she did was called the mechanical brides it was all about woman, machines and technology. In 1993 Ellen was 29 years old and didn't think she was a mechanical bride she had no kids, hardly cooked, but 16 years on its a different story. The book started from a website that her twin sister Julia and herself had created. the website was used to comment on trends and anything that would interest them both.

Ellen brings out the point that the toaster is made for cooking toast, not made to cook anything else, simple is better. It doesn't have to be elaborate it just has to cook toast. Designers always want to make a great product better but it doesn't always work out that way it can make the product worse and consumers wont catch on because its to elaborate and hard to use, also cost is a big factor.
Ellen talks about how computers involved in the kitchen to help house-wives and people over the age of 50 in the kitchen. Consumers never caught on. The media refrigerator has a screen that delivers ,t.v, the stock market, and the weather but it wasn't a big hit. There was numerous web-only computers designed for kitchen use and appeared during the Internet boom.

The visibility principle: "Piles" of paper on your desk is good thing. The piles that you have is a visual stimulation of what you have been working on and what you have done. Ellen gos on to say that having an open office is better you can see whats going on around you which is more stimulating for the brain therefore a more productive person. There are 3 main places you can work from, home, work or a coffee shop. Ellen says that the coffee shop is the best place to work, it is busy, lots of people around giving it a productive working atmoshpere.

This was an interesting video which showed the modifications of everyday products. In my opinion, I think that keeping a design simple and straight to the point is the best way to go about a design situation. I enjoyed watching this video and seeing Ellens point of view on product design in the everyday world.