Droduct Design: Newness versus Novelty (Essay Sample)

PRODUCT DESIGN: NEWNESS VERSUS NOVELTY
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Introduction
The attribution of newness often emerges in interaction with positively valued qualities, usually anchored by the inclusion of criteria such as progress, originality, or truth. From a historical viewpoint, the positive appreciation and treatment of newness can be discerned as consequence of the functional differentiation of modern society. Science, religion, political system, art, and business not only portray different degrees of responsiveness to novelty, but also react to it at varying speeds. Newness is understood as a concept that denotes products, events, technologies, ideas, works of art and processes of coordination or collaboration that result in an irritating impact whenever they occur. Such a working definition inculcates at least two problem scenarios which can lead to differentiated comprehension of novelty and newness. On one hand, a practice or object becomes a novelty on the assumption that it creates new possibilities (Barry 1999). The major concern here lies not only with the novelty of the processes or objects, but also with the novelty of the references, from which new objects attract attention.
An observation of the appreciation of newness can be made, particularly in the domain of fine art towards the end of the 19th century. The establishment of the notion that the value of works of art emerges from the special experience of the artist and the privileging of the original over the copy, directed attention towards a new realm of art (Price 2008). Consequently, the associated appreciation of newness deserted the perception of artwork as a representation of reality and thus demonstrated the self preferentiality of art. As a result, newness assumed a crucial position within the art system both in the sense of evaluation criterion (newness) and in the sense of a product (novelty). Newness performs an increasingly key role in the realm of science and technology. There exists a permanent endeavor in these fields for new technological inventions and scientific insights, which are only perceived to be novelties if they transform or extend scientific and technological paradigms. Additionally, scientific facts and technical objects attain value and visibility by being regarded as “new” thus providing orientation to their users (Carr 2007).
The major question that needs critical evaluation is whether newness can be considered as new any longer. So, does the idea of originality in contemporary art remains possible or even relevant? Whether interpreted as transformative, fresh or backward-looking, the notion of newness appears empowered by people’s idiosyncratic and personal senses of perception, achieved through intellectual, emotional, as well as physical responses to art (Toffler 1972). It is important to question whether it is an encounter with art, coupled with individuals’ overall cultural participation that inculcates a sensation of the new. The collective cultural participation here is one informed by a repetition or familiarity of exposure to the particulars. The resulting voices regarding the idea of newness remain very diverse. While some scholars explore the newness as an embedment of growth- in the artists’ application of conceptual and material explorations- other scholars define developments in regards to their environment, comprehension of history, and the marrying of sensibilities (Alegre 2010). As such, newness becomes a grouping of concepts, ideas, and histories that contextualize each of artist’s work. The idea of newness is challenged and extended by the global extension of information technology. During this process, freshness is acquired through a synthesis of pre-existing and combined elements. Thus, the art-making process becomes the foraging of components and the reconstitution of influence, current moment and history. In the end, it becomes apparent that humans are persistently re-assembling personal and universal lexicons that have been used for countless times in the past, although never exactly combined in the new particular way (Mandeville 2006).
The demand for the new is a complicated undertaking. On one hand, it puts the artists at the whim of a rather sinister consumerism dimension, while, on the other hand, creating a perception that art is devoid of the ambition for innovate the conversation. It is plausible that a work of art is never inherently new, but humans strive to dismantle the methods and concepts in order to digest and reconstitute them anew (Hirsch & Silverstone 2003). Modernism, as a collection of works and as a movement, has become more durable than the post-modernism that was anticipated to replace it.
History of New: Then and Now
The major ways in which individuals comprehend newness, including evolution, revolution, and paradigm shift, can all be tracked back to earlier and simpler models that were initially put together by the Greeks. It is not the case of later thinkers copying earlier ones (Ran 2009). Rather, the mere fact that similar models persist with time suggests that there exists something necessary about them. It can be said that the history of notions about novelty highlights the main point about novelty: that whatever passes for new is actually the old rearranged or revived in some way. It is in no doubt that newness formed the core of modernism. As early as 1936, Alfred Barr came with the theory of the emerging ‘new’ through a complicated engineering-like diagram that depicted a conception that art evolves through a process of reaction and exhaustion. Later on, Clement Greenberg disregarded the diagrams altogether and espoused a new developmental theory based on a liner drive towards ever more reductive purity (Berthoin 2009).
Today, the New is nothing more than old news, the idea that has undergone the way of originality, progress, and beauty. Indeed, newness is less an issue of attempting to achieve something that had not been accomplished in the past than it is a by-product of practices that fuse art with other explorations, disciplines, and fields of study. The attribution of ‘newness’ represents a cultural valuation process that determines innovation together with other constellations. Thus, the idea of newness demonstrates the fact that innovations are not obvious, and they cannot be attributed to individual creativity. Along this line of argument, it is plausible that the causality does not offer an adequate explanation for the models of action in which cultural configurations influence novelty. Thus, cultural sources do not necessarily lead to the emergence of newness. Rather, they create opportunities that people can recognize and act upon.
It is apparent that the internet, the satellite, as well as other forms of information communication technologies will herald the greatest revolution in information since the printing press was invented. The length to which this will happen is not a major concern in an attempt to understand newness and novelty. Rather, it is to discern how change in information technology is evaluated, conceptualized, and manifested in attempts to reshape institutions and laws. Governments the world over are trying to discern how the newness of technology is affecting the capabilities of old institutions to regulate the newfound realities. Furthermore, there are efforts to understand the cultural dimensions that emanate from altered patterns of information and image flows. Then, on the basis of inadequate information, governments are trying to probe methods of managing what are perceived as the consequences (Freeman & Kolstad 2006).
Newness in Technology: Case study
Within the current field of media and technology, the determination of the newness of a new media must possess a description of it, highlighting the points for a factual evaluation. The achievement of such description must incorporate notions of relevance. It has become important for instance that new satellite dish technology could be small-sized, but the fundamental question is whether any reductions in diameter as introduced by the newness can have any constitutional or legal consequences. In societies where the government attempts to assess or monitor the media habits of the public, the smallness or greatness of such satellite dishes may be of significant importance. Thus, what makes a new technology new for legal or constitutional assessment has become a matter of the length to which the new technology sustains, threatens, or even reinforces a particular country’s position in the marketplace of loyalties. In this regard, the subject of technological newness could function as a cover for very contemporary state concerns. Any newness within a new technology could simply be the aspects of the technology that challenge government control or render the prevailing legal doctrine untenable.
Another critical quality of newness is how people describe the social organization through which information comes from the source of original content to those who consume it. The new media technology has portrayed its potential to alter the power of contemporary entities such as political parties, department stores, and television networks. Policy makers and stakeholders who desire for a technology that destroys the current mediators-creating a freer pathway between producers and consumers of information- may be more tolerant in implementing issues than those who harbor the perception that the new technology merely re-mediates (Macleod 2013).
In many industries, new products are same in functional properties though they tend to compete on their unique design. Companies such as Apple, Alessi, and Kartell follow a design-oriented innovation approach and utilize their products’ visual appearance as the major mean of differentiation. Despite...