The world as it should be

(continued)
Virginia Postrel, in her 2003 book The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetics Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, said that we are living in an age of aesthetics. She said that, because of improvements made in mass production technologies and distribution, products could go beyond initial monotony in general look and feel to variety, from an emphasis on sameness and quick production to one of meeting various aesthetic tastes (good and bad).

Customers obviously wanted that. Product differentiation based on function and quality gave way to one based on aesthetics. As Postrel points out, this led to aesthetics taking on marginal economic value in our mass culture. For many, this meant that they would rather pay more, for instance, for a computer with a cool case than one with increased power or functionality. As Postrel put it, for a manufacturer, “adding pleasure may be more important than adding performance attributes.” So in our postmodern age, this has meant that everyone’s personal idea of beauty is valid and it thus has value in the marketplace. There is no absolute standard of beauty. My idea of beauty is just as good as anyone’s.

This increase of attention on aesthetics has given a fairly recent cultural focus on simply looking good. Postrel notes the increases in personal beauty enhancement products, day spas, nail salons, and so on. It has also meant that businesses give customers not just a handful of choices of some products, but hundreds, though not all of them truly attractive. It has meant that “designers” can give us 12-point, shadowed, underlined brown type on a deep purple background. (If it is on a web page, the type will blink next to 17 animated GIFs.) Postrel also insists that aesthetics should not be left to the professionals, thus implying that expert opinions are worthless and that everyone has the same level of expertise when it comes to separating the good from the bad. Give customers what they want, she says.

This is where we differ. Economically speaking, I think she is spot on. The best example I can think of is the iPod. A large part of its success lies not in its functional quality — which many believe has not always been up to the level of its design or of the functionality of its competitors — but in its aesthetics. iPods simply look cool, and the marketing pushes that angle, not how it works. There is no doubt that playing to a variety of consumer tastes makes good economic sense, but is it good for design and designers?

I think not. What has happened is a lot of bad design work has succeeded in the marketplace, even if it falls short of the standards of the professionally trained eye. This is where Design Darwinism has failed us. The Galapagos Islands finches survived through adaptation of the beak size and shape to the particular environment they were in. If your beak didn’t meet the “standard,” or the needs of the environment, you didn’t make it.

In today’s design world, the marketplace isn’t so cruel, the cultural environment not so unforgiving. A capitalist economic system allows anything that sells, and it doesn’t care if it is well-designed or not, as long as there are enough people who are willing to buy it. If bad design can find even a small corner of the market, which isn’t hard today largely because of the power of advertising and marketing over the minds of the great unwashed, it isn’t driven out by the good, as Design Darwinism would posit. It may even prosper. That’s why we are surrounded by not just the good designs, but the bad and the ugly.

Design, unlike art, can be good or bad.

Art is (or it should be) a value-free creation. It merely is. The artist had a vision of something and created a physical manifestation of that vision. Because the artist had no particular goal in mind, just the act of creation, no one truly has the right or ability to say art is good art or bad art. In that sense, what’s hanging on the fridge is equal to what’s hanging in the Louvre.

Designs, on the other hand, can be good or bad largely because of the functional nature of the concept. Looks aside, a chair, for instance, can be well-designed or poorly designed, good or bad, in terms of its ability to function as a chair. Art has no such functional component.

Here is where design gets interesting in a way many in the various design fields may not consider, and it brings us back to my previous point (below, Aug. 11 and 22) that design is not a single concept, but a bifurcated one. I want to expand on my earlier ideas.

Design includes both a functional component and an aesthetic one. Art is concerned only with aesthetics. I heard an Infiniti commercial recently that touched upon the idea that the car must be both functional and beautiful. But I don’t hear the functional/aesthetic split discussed much, at least not among the graphic designers I hang around with. I think it helps explain, however, why we see so much bad design.

First, all designs must attain a certain level of functional competency before they can be deemed good or even acceptable. Going back to our chair example, it must be able to function at least minimally at holding up a bent human form to even be called a chair. If you can’t sit on it, it isn’t a chair. In a sense, this functional aspect of design is integral to any concept and in fact arises instantly with the observation and naming of it. In other words, just by saying or even thinking chair or fan or ad or shoe or building, the functional nature of the item is in play. Everyone can have the ability to judge a design as good or bad on its functional characteristics.

Judgment of the aesthetic side of design is where it begins to get interesting.

Aesthetics, or the theory of beauty, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is a huge field that has been around since antiquity. It didn’t really blossom until leisure activities became more prevalent in the eighteenth century, and modern discussions only go back to about the 1960s. I’m no philosopher, and I don’t want to play one on the web. I also don’t want to get into any of the various philosophical arguments about aesthetics, but I do want to side with those who believe it takes a special sensibility, not shared by all, to see beauty. Again, anyone can judge whether a chair or a brochure or a building is good in terms of its functional characteristics and maybe even whether it is gaudy, dull or elegant, which some consider secondary aesthetic characteristics. But the ability to recognize beauty in physical forms is simply a trait that not all possess.

It is, however, a trait that people believe they possess. When someone says a design is good (and most people include both the functional and the aesthetic when they do so), he or she doesn’t believe a personal, subjective opinion is being shared, but that an accepted Truth is being illuminated. When they say, “That is well designed,” they don’t think they are saying, “I like that design” or “I think that is a good design.” In other words, anyone who utters such a statement believes that their personal recognition of beauty in the design of whatever they are looking at is universal and that they are merely stating the obvious. This brings us back around to the plethora of bad design in the world: the marketplace has found it can exploit the notion that everyone has good taste.

Virginia Postrel, in her 2003 book The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetics Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, said that we are living in an age of aesthetics. She said that, because of improvements ….(more to come)

Part 2 –  http://robertbohle.com/blog/2006/11/28/why-we-have-bad-design-part-2/