design your future

Helen puts her fingers to her best friend's mouth to comprehend.

During yesterday’s lecture, the intention of Kevin Henry’s display was to inform us about the concept of design and the background behind it.  Kevin talked about the actual physicality behind design, and how the brain sees things before we interact with it.  He was not very entertaining, but I think he had a lot of mind boggling information about human functions. I was intrigued by the lecture and the only thing running through my mind the whole time was, “how would we be able to look at an object and understand the concept of how it is functional to us?” There are ways this can be done and it has been proven. Helen Keller, as we all know was deaf and blind. She was extremely successful after she learned how to use her hands when she was young. Teaching Helen must have been extremely challenging because of her blindness. She could not see the objects she was using in everyday life, and she didn’t even know what they were since she couldn’t talk. Her teacher Anne used the sense of touch to ultimately teach Helen how to communicate.

 We use our hands 98% of the time. Human touch is the most important thing we experience when we are first born. Without the touch of a mother's hands as a newborn can effect a child negatively. Their developmental growth would not be as successful as someone who was held and loved by their mother. Going back to Dr. Aimes lecture, she quoted, "When we do something with our hands, it changes the way we think." This relates to us as adults, and as newborns. There is a relationship between our hands and the objects we interact with everyday, just like the relationship between our brain and nerves in our neck. Our brain tells us what is able to be used, and to use the sense our touch. 

Have you ever wondered why people say "keep in touch," ?

Kevin Henry's lecture was not to teach us how to design a car, but rather how we "design" things with our senses everyday as human beings. We "design" how we are going to interact with our friends, we are "designing" how we are going to type our papers every night, and we "design"our path to success here at Columbia. We design EVERYTHING. Take a look at the outfit you have on today. You may have not designed it but you DID design how you are wearing it! Kevin explained that everything we see is designed by someone, somewhere. Without sight, touch, sound, etc, we would be lost.