Explain and expand on the following

60
Text 12. DESIGNING TO COMMUNICATE 
 
Pre-reading Tasks 
1. What is communication? What role does it play in our life? What are the 
main means for communication? 
 
2. Practice the pronunciation of the words from the text. When in doubt use 
a dictionary. 
Scandinavia, Jean Heiberg, Paris, the National Academy, Oslo, Britain, Ekco, 
the Japanese, Sony, the German, Braun, Sony. 
 
3. Find the following words in a dictionary and memorize their meaning. 
acceptance 
accommodate 
advance 
bakelite 
cabinet 
communal 
complexity 
contemplation 
device 
dial 
emblem 
eminent 
ergonomic 
headphone 
hook 
kiosk 
outlet 
overtone 
pattern 
physical 
plywood 
predecessor 
psychological 
purchaser 
solitary 
subsidiary 
thief 
valve-receiver 
vandal 
4. Read the text. 
Outlets for communications systems provide the contemporary designer 
with a great deal of his work. It is so often forgotten that a telephone, or a ra-
dio, or a television set are meaningless objects in themselves and meaningful 
only if we think of them in terms of organizational and technological com-
plexities.
Of the three objects, the telephone has the longest history. It also bridges 
the gap between objects that have to accommodate themselves to the shape of 
the human body, and those where ergonomic considerations are only secon-
dary. Early telephone designers thought of speaking and listening as two quite 
separate activities, and designed accordingly. In addition, automatic exchanges 
were not yet in use, and they did not have to think of ways to accommodate an 
additional feature, the dial. 
A revolution in telephone design took place in the early 30s, and was pio-
neered in Scandinavia. The engineers decided to use bakelite, as plastic made 
it easy to achieve complex curves which were harder to make in metal, but the 

61
actual design was the work of a young artist with no engineering background. 
Jean Heiberg had recently returned from Paris to become Professor at the Na-
tional Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. The design he came up with had architec-
tural overtones, but the total concept was so successful in gaining acceptance 
from the public that it was exported all over the world, and in Britain various 
versions of it have continued in current use until the present day. 
Telephones brought a number of subsidiary design problems. The most 
complex of these were connected with the public, coin-operated phone. There 
was first of all the need to devise a coinbox mechanism sturdy enough to resist 
thieves and vandals and simple and reliable in operation. There was also the 
question of independent housing for public telephones, when these were not to 
be installed in buildings that already had a major role of their own. In Britain, 
telephone kiosks evolved from the early 20s towards the 1935 design which 
until recently remained standard.
The radio-set gives the consumer a way of linking himself to a different 
kind of communication system. During the pioneering days of radio in the 
early 20s, listeners used headphones linked to crystal sets. Listening to the ra-
dio was a solitary experience, and sets themselves looked like laboratory 
equipment. 
The invention which brought the industrial designer into the picture was 
the valve-receiver which could be used to power a loudspeaker. This turned 
listening into a social act – indeed, for a long time people always faced to-
wards the set when they listened, as if it were another person in the room, talk-
ing to them. In the late 20s, a radio had come to be regarded as a standard item 
of home furnishing. 
In the 30s the British firm of Ekco began to use distinguished modern ar-
chitects to design cabinets. Serge Chermayeff did a notably simple design in 
plywood in 1933, and this was followed the next year by Wells Coates's revo-
lutionary design in bakelite.
The real transformation of radio design came about, not through the efforts 
of eminent industrial designers, but through technological advances that in 
turn brought a fresh wave of changes not only in how radio-sets looked, but in 
how they were used and in purchaser's attitudes towards them. The invention 
of the transistor made it possible to miniaturize the set to an extent that the de-
signers of the 30s would have found unimaginable. In August 1955, the Japa-
nese firm of Sony introduced the world's first mass-produced all-transistor ra-
dio – the TR-55. The innovation swept the world market. The German firm of 
Braun, for example, produced two notable designs that combined a radio and a 
record-player in a single unit. A battery-operated pocket-size version was de-
signed in 1959 – the two parts coupled together for carrying, but could be 

62
separated in use. This was the predecessor of the combined cassette player and 
radio designed to be hooked to the belt and listened to through lightweight a 
headphone that has become an emblem of a free, youthfully independent life-
style in the short period since it was first introduced. Another notable Braun 
design dates from 1962, and also combines a radio and a record-player.
During the past 20 years the design of television sets has followed the 
same general physical and psychological pattern as that of radios. The first all-
transistor television set was introduced by Sony in 1959 and started the trans-
formation of television from something used for communal viewing into an 
object of solitary contemplation. Combining a radio and a television set in the 
same housing gave the way to another contemporary trend – that of bringing 
together two or more functions in the same electronic device.

жүктеу/скачать 0,79 Mb.

Достарыңызбен бөлісу: