The book is very wide open, very conceptual, and talks only vaguely about specific prices of art (and it does that very rarely). Add to this the fact that the field of product design was hardly even a thing in 1936, never mind a professional line of work, and it is unsurprising that what we can find and apply from this book is not going to be obvious and literal in the most part.
The book does however, have it's moments, and sometimes descriptions of the way things are, definitions of ideas such as the aesthetic, and remarks about the nature of society, can lead to some startling insights about how we could perhaps take Deweys writings and apply these to design thinking, philosiphy, or criticism. I will summarise some issues core to current design thinking here, but this is by no means an exhaustive analysis on every implication of Dewey's writings on design.
Aesthetic Experience
The visual cohesion we see with AEG is an important, but early and mainly visual, step in the development of corporate industrial design
This is perhaps the biggest single issue in the book, but I actually won't dwell on it too much, because it has become such a central part of design theory that it defies the need for comment. The very idea that a designed piece forms a centrepiece for an experience in time and space is the issue that is raised here. We see it in development when we see Le Corbusiers focus on the 'Architectural Journey' with the Villa Savoye. And since then the idea that an interaction with a product is not momentary and visual (which in some cases could be argued to be the position at the turn of the century, with Peter Behren's mainly visual attempt at the wider design of AEG) to the idea that every part of the experience should have aesthetic value- the shop, the unboxing, the product, and the services. We see this most clearly in the work of Apple.
A much more integrated approach can now be seen in the modern age, with equal focus on visual matters, services, integration with other products, presentation style, marketing and sales
Form and Function
"A good deal of intellectual effort has been expended in trying to identify efficiency for a particular end with "beauty" or esthetic quality. But these attempts are bound to fail, fortunate as it is that in some cases the two coincide and humanly desirable as it is that they should always meet ... A chair may serve the purpose of affording a comfortable and hygenically efficient seat, without serving at the same time the needs of the eye. If, on the contrary, it blocks rather than promotes the role of vision in an experience, it will be ugly no matter how well adapted to use as a seat"
"There is no pre-established harmony that guarantees that what satisfies one set of organs will fulfil that of all the other structures and needs that have a part in the experience, so as to bring it to completion as a complex of all elements. All we can say is that in the absence of disturbing contexts, such as production of objects for a maximum of private profit, a balance tends to be struck that objects will be satisfactory - "useful" in the strict sense - to the self as a whole, even though some specific efficiency be sacrificed in the process" - JD
When we really think about what design means as a profession we do see that, on inspection, Miesian phrases like 'Less is More' and 'Form follows function', as powerful as they are, don't quite do it justice. Take these two chairs.
One is a certified design classic, for the other, the only description I can find is "hard, ugly furniture for the senile and nearly-dead". I have a feeling that if we consider only function, that it is the senile furniture that should ever so marginally win; It's easily replaceable, standardised castors, it's cheap plastic features. What it forgets though (or rather, doesn't attempt to realise) is a harmony of form, of intention, and of consideration of the eye. I could conclude this either way though. Are we being arty-farty in suggesting that the design icon is actually better? Surely the world would be better if we just got over ourselves and appreciate (and buy) what meets our basic needs? But I am not answering the question as a consumer, I am answering as a designer, and we have the responsibility of actually making new stuff.
The answer also lies in this book,
"The word "design" has a double meaning. It signifies purpose and it signifies arrangement, mode of composition ... A work of art is poor in the degree in which they exist in separation ... Only when constituent parts of a whole have the unique end of contributing to the consummation of a conscious experience, do design and shape lose superimposed character and become form" - JD
A very similar answer is also addressed more directly in some of Le Corbusiers writings,
"If my house works well, I am grateful, as I would be to the railroads and the telephone company. But my heart has not been touched. However if the walls, rising up against the sky, affect my feelings, I become aware of your intentions. You were harsh, charming, or dignified. Your stones tell me so" - LC
It considers design as an arrangement of both necessary and plastic things. A chair must essentially afford comfortable sitting, and therefore requires the right shape, and some soft upholstery. And that's basically it. Of course, there are many variations in what the exact right shape is for the most, or a specific group of people, but the final piece in the design puzzle is to arrange the elements of the chair in a way that is clear, useful, and visually compelling. This is not an impure, sly, devious operation; the chair will exist either way, but it need not necessarily cost any more money or use more materials to get it right, and that is what designers can offer.
Aesthetic Perception in life
"Under pressure of external circumstances or because of external laxity, objects of most of our ordinary perception lack completeness. They are cut short when there is recognition ... It is enough for us to know that those objects are rain clouds to induce us to carry and umbrella. The full perceptual realisation of just the individual clouds they are might even get in the way of utilising them as a index of a specific, a limited kind of conduct." - JD
This quote, as a description of the way the human takes in every day experiences, to me resonates as it touches upon a new movement in new-modernism; Naoto Fukasawa's and Jasper Morrison's fixation on the 'Super Normal' - essentially, saying that a chair should look like a chair, a bike should look like a bike.
The quote I have taken from Dewey was to explain the division between what we perceive aesthetically, and what we perceive day to day. Sometimes we blast past hills and fells as part of a laborious commute, sometimes we sit down and take in the exact same scene as something beautiful. The super normal movement, quoting Jasper Morrison, is
"not attempting to break with the history of form but rather trying to summarise it" - JM
this can be compared directly to another dewey quote -
"'in each class of objects there is one common idea and central form' ... The more a work of art embodies what belongs to experiences common to many individuals, the more expressive it is" - JD
and I think in a sense this movement has real power when viewed through Dewey's glasses, as they, by giving us common forms, promote warm collective feeling. These objects also, as per the first quote, do not absorb the mind in absolute aesthetic power, but allow us to get on with our day quietly.
We can see this quite clearly by examining two table lamps, both from the same manufacturer. On the left, the Artemide Tizio, on the right, the Tolemo. Now I actually own a Tizio, and It is a magnificent piece of design, of innovative engineering, and as a pure sculptural form. But sometimes, as I try to get into a bit of work on my desk, I find myself overwhelmed by the pure aesthetic value of it. I look, I play, I adjust it just to feel it's smooth movement. This says wonders about it's value as a statement piece of design, it is genuinely fantastic, but perhaps the Tolemo, in it's relative visual neutrality, would have been easier to live with. Certainly, if i'm to plan myself an office, the Tizio would have to be the only statement peice in the room, or i'd be simply overwhelmed. Not everything can have such aesthetic power, as we are strained, and have little chance of us expressing our own selves -
"The subconscious fund of meanings stored in our attitudes have no chance of release when we are practically of intellectually strained" - JD
Experiments with the future of design
"The 'classic' when it was produced bore the marks of adventure. This fact is ignored by classicists in their protest against romantics who undertake the development of new values, often without possessing means for their creation"
"The limits of esthetic potentialities can be determined only experimentally"
"An environment that is changed physically and spiritually requires new forms of expression" - JD
These quotes actually challenged me quite a lot. I have been very vocal in my hatred of 'new' forms of architecture, and in many ways, in my admiration of both Traditionalism and Modernism, I have probably been very nostalgic in my approach to design. My pet hates in the design world include the likes of Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, the late Zaha Hadid and product designers like Karim Rashid.
But in some sense, these are the very definition of experimental. And on reflection, I think I should learn from Dewey that I should be more open to experimentation.
I can however, form a few arguments from his writings which add a caveat to blind celebration of any kind of apparent experiment. The quote;
"No matter how imaginative the material for a work of art, it issues from the state of reviere to be come a matter of work only when it is ordered and organised, and this effect is produced only when purpose controls selection and development of material." - JD
highlights the importance of being considered when producing art or design. So when we are faced with a genuinely new piece of work, we can ask of it that it should not be blindly new for the sake of being new. It must be selected with purpose and developed with consideration (in designs case, I guess, for the end user) rather than just to having selected the most exciting drawing.
The MVRDV Crystal House serves I think as a good example of the right kind of experimentation, when compared to the above, which are purely attempts at a new signature form. Chrystal House has a complex purpose- to create an open and transparent opening for a designer store, whilst preserving the street scene and the local european architecture. It does this experimentally though the development of a new kind of glass brick and a new kind of adhesive, and besides a rather wonky transition from glass to brick, I think it generally succeeds.
Dewey also gives us a reason in support of our hatred for the Gehrys and the Libeskinds, whilst, I think, suggesting we should carry merely mild scepticism in our judgement of people like Norman Foster, MVRDV, and Bjarke 'BIG' Ingels;
"There is a technique that obtrudes, like the flourishes of a writing master. If skill and economy suggest the author, they take us away from the work itself... They do not take us anywhere in the institution of a unifying unified developing experience ... it is a show off or a virtuosity seperated from expression" - JD
Here Dewey is suggesting that the 'signature touch' a lot of architects employ distracts us from the aesthetic appreciation of a design or a work of architecture. We instead perhaps notice something as a 'Zaha Hadid', and pose for our selfie in front of it, and in the end the architect has not attempted to solve any kind of real solution. We can see this by comparing the five most recent projects from two famous architects.
Bjarke Ingels
Daniel Libeskind
In Ingel's architecture we see, generally, a new aesthetic applied to each piece, which may reflect the situation and location of the building, the functional requirements, or a new ambitious experiment. In Libeskind we see much more of what could be described as a shallow attempt at inflicting his 'signature' style on whatever brief comes his way; namely, jaunty angles. Now, i'm still not 100% on any or all of this new 'random' kind of architecture, I think it will end up creating muddled and confusing cityscapes, but what we can assess, is that there does seem to be in some architects to be a genuine attempt at experimentation, at creating new aesthetic and functional experiences, and this must be to some extent the way forward for architecture. In any case, it is better than giving up a plot to merely a starchitects signature style.
***
What we see from John Dewey in Art as Experience then, is a very wide set of ideas and insights which can, on reflection give us deep insight into not just this field, but practically any, if you put your mind to it. It serves as an adventure through ideas, despite the fact we are given only the vague text in the book itself. This experience, to comprehend the content of the book in terms of design thinking, has actually been much more beneficial than the reading itself as in the first post. It is a real task though. But his writings seem to have in different ways become a core to some real design issues, so it is important that we wrestle with them, and hope to learn something about our current situation. This was by no means a full investigation though, but I find now that I may be keeping this book closely by my side in the future, as it provides at least one structure on essentially which to think about any design issue.
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