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What is a Designer?

Posted January 27, 2003 4:50 PM.

From What is a Designer? by Norman Potter:

"In the field of product design, the professional extremes might be said to range from studio pottery and textile design at one end of the spectrum to engineering design and computer programming at the other. This is a very broad spectrum and clearly there are serious differences at the extremes. In the communication field, a similar spectrum might range from, say, freehand book illustration, to the very exact disciplines of cartography or the design of instrumentation for aircraft."

Comments

Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.

I'll go back to figuring out how on earth to install Moveable Type now. I wish I understood computers.

→ Posted by: Celeste at January 28, 2003 8:32 PM

I don't see the value of this particular quotation.
As far as I understand it the more important
principal which Norman Potter lived by was
one of humility as a designer and as a person. As a maker he hoped to be sensitive towards tools and inherent properties of materials,to teach, to make useful and beautiful things for a wider community and for their own sake, and to avoid the pretensciosness, elitism
and egotism whcih might sometimes be part of the design world.

→ Posted by: charlotte potter-powell at October 26, 2003 5:54 PM

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