What is Design? - GD03

There are two very different definitions of design, 'Design with a capital 'D'' and 'design with a little 'd''.

This year, we are being asked very explicitly to define what it is we think 'great design' is. A good first step is to look upon the dictionary, where we can find a definition of design in a very loose sense.


Dictionary.com:

Design:

Verb (1) to prepare the preliminary sketch or the plans for (a work to be executed), especially to plan the form and structure of.

Noun (1) an outline, sketch, or plan, as of the form and structure of a work of art, an edifice, or a machine to be executed or constructed.

So to design is to plan or sketch, the result is the design. But this is a very limp definition of design; what man-made things are not either art, machine or edifice? The conclusion here is that design is the plan, and the outline of anything, and also the planning and outlining thereof.

What we must also remember however, is that despite design being seen as a process in itself, it more often occurs as an intuitive and direct part of the production. When we make a cake, or dress ourselves, organise our desk, make a cup of tea or write a memo we are planning and structuring the form and the arrangement of the following decisions; we might prefer a cup with 80% tea water brewed for 1:30 with 1.5g of sugar and 20% semi-skimmed milk, and these considerations are 'designed in' at every stage of the process. design is a component of basically everything we do.

Can we design the perfect cup of tea? The modernists probably think we can.

So there we have it, design is one, but such a definition is very unhelpful. In this context, 'great design' is anything that anyone wants, which might be the one truth at the basic level, but it carries little of instructive value. The above is what I will term 'design with a little d' - design as a process and result to meet certain external ends.

The reason I have approached a split in the definition comes from a number of sources. I was quite annoyed by Nikolaus Pevsner when, in An Outline of Eurpoean Architecure, he opened by saying:

"A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. The term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal"

But in the context of him writing his book, this is an essential statement, he aims to write about proper, fancy buildings and their development over time. This will tell us a very different, higher-class version of philosophical history than a study of vernacular building over the same period.

Peter Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects was once angry that design criticism focused too much on political correctness:

In a way, he is right: 

"as if the delivery of social justice is the architects competency" 

being a key quote. One way of looking at design is first asking what is the designers core compitency? A proper Designer wakes up in the morning, makes themselves a coffee in their Bialetti Moka, puts on the all black Yohji Yamamoto gear, drives to work in their Audi TT, arrives at their Richard Rodgers office building, picks the Moleskine up from the Vitsoe 606, sits in the Herman Miller, gets out the LAMY, turns on the Tizio, and gets to work. But what are they there for?

For that, we must look at some more aloof definitions:

Le Corbusier, 

"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"

John Dewey, 'Art as Experience'-

"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"

Bruno Munari, Design as Art

"What is a Designer? ... He is a planner with an aesthetic sense ...  He gives the right weight to each part of the project in hand, and he knows that the ultimate form of the object is psychologically vital when the potential buyer is making up his mind"

Paul Rand, Conversations with students

“Design is relationships. Design is a relationship between form and content.”

What we can garner from these more academic, authoritative statements is that the Designer's job is to control the aesthetic experience of any given solution. And I don't take the word aesthetic very lightly, I don't mean mere styling. Yes, the look of the product is a big part of the end result, but to be a completely controlled experience one must take into account the weight, feel, impact, sound, and most importantly the user experience too*.

A design that focuses on delivering aesthetic experience as one of it's core goals is therefore an example of 'Big D' design. At the start of the year I came to school with the following piece of paper.

Here, Great Design is considered something of philosophical purity. And that is what we see when we consider most of the 'icons' of academic Good Design. It is the result of such a complete process where style, production, feel and use have all been considered with the aesthetic experience as the final goal.

In class, this ruffled a few feathers. The Tizio is flawed, masculine and overly expensive, but is is also aesthetic, which was really it's only job. This is why the split between design and Design was necessary.

'design', that is, design-with-a-little-d, has many factors; these are the factors concerned with production in a wider sense: Financial concerns, Marketing, Legality, Safety. There are, more viscerally, the Ethical concerns of design: mass second-world labour, the environment, the emancipation of the poor and the disabled. Victor Papanek is our greatest source on such Ethical issues:

"Only a small part of our responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics."

"Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer."

The above are totally true, but we flip-flop back to Peter Schumacher.

"as if the delivery of social justice is the architects [designers] competency" 

In fact, both are true, and I look to belittle neither point of view. Having said that, Peter Schumacher is obviously the candidate for the 'most evil man in design' prize.

With two definitions of design, we can have two definitions of 'great design'.

From the view of 'design' as a tool, design is a process and a capability with which we get from point A to point B. The question here is what do we do with this ability, which is an ethical question. In little-d design, 'great design' is 'great' done via 'design'. This is what Papanek advocates. The problem here is that there is a very, very large field of 'great' possibilities, most of to which Designers are not directly in a position to help; their solutions are Political, Financial and Charitable. 'Great' but not 'Design'. We could spend all day doing directly good things, but then why did we even bother becoming designers in the first place?

From the view of 'Design' as an aesthetic end in itself, we are in a clear, but more ethically ambiguous place. We all enjoy good food, music, art and so on, but what is their real value? In this context, it doesn't matter. The designer, artist, architect and chef are here to make great things, that is what they are for. Is a phone worse because a seven-year-old child died mining the cobalt for it? Most of us have one and enjoy one regardless. 'Design' is fenced away from these concerns. 'great Design is 'Design' done well' that is all it can ever hope to be.

***

Why didn't I just call one of the 'designs' planning, or aesthetics? Because I am not yet ready to relegate one of them to 'not-design' just yet. Clearly there is a very tightly strung network of concerns around the whole subject, the subject-matter of design is one that can be delighting and horrifying in equal measure.

Notes:

*The common assumption is that user experience design is necessarily the practice of 'good' user interaction. This is not always the case. A well-thought-out and aesthetic negative user interaction is just as valid.

What is Luxury? - GD02

One of the questions that has been thrown up at the start of my new design project, one focusing on selling items in a rather middle-class shop, is this; What is Luxury? Anything aiming for added-value sales must go beyond meeting functional requirements (or ignore them) and seek to extract value in some other, more mysterious way, one commonly defined as 'luxury'.

Google image search is no help:

What we see here is actually quite a maximum of variety in style, from ultra-functional aeroplanes and sports cars to ultra-modernist building to classical architecture and car styling. What we do see is a range of images that stop at nothing to display wealth. What comes first, style, luxury or wealth? Is it possible to obtain luxury on the cheap?

In a more rounbdabout way, I get close to this question in one of my series of kettle posts (it still isn't over!), my answer being that the price gap between functional product and anything more expensive is by definition design, or at least the result of 'Design' with a capital 'D'.

A key theme of one my often-referred blogs, Misfits Architecture, goes more accurately to the question of wealth and luxury by considering the history of canonical Architecture and Design (classical - gothic - modernist - high tech - postmodern.. ect..) as a history of styles that are necessarily expensive displays of wealth and ownership.

“Aesthetics give shape to our values and aspirations. This is not necessarily a good thing.

An aesthetic loses its usefulness when its connotations of status are lost, and any process of refinement stops.

Buildings require money and land to build. The history of architectural aesthetics is the history of articulating the ownership of wealth and property.”

It considers the canonical history of ‘meta-aesthetics’ - movements such as high-modernism, high-tech, post-modern and minimalism as styles that contain inherent status as they yearn towards results that are neccecarily expensive. We can observe ourselves that nearly every canonical 'Design' style of the last century overt displays of wealth:

The awe-inspiring Looshaus in vienna, despite being a rejection of traditional form and style, is gladly assisted aesthetically through it's use of ostentatious marble cladding.

Corbu's Villa Savoye, despite it's enthusiastically poetic interior, is assisted externally by the fact that it has a 'stance' which dominates and indicates ownership of a large, flat piece of land, and in it's day would have presented ownership of the river-view as well. These might not be the core reason for it's aesthetic value, but they are certainly what mark it out as an object of luxury. The same can be said for FLW's Fallingwater.

http://cf.ltkcdn.net/interiordesign/images/std/210787-769x450-memphis-room.jpg

Postmodernism isn't hard to debunk as a style of materialism and ostentation, but it's easy re-emergence into relevance on dezeen these days tells us a lot about how it gains it's weight as a cerebral, intellectual adventure into 'fun' expression. If this was the natural style of human expression then it would be what all the chavs would be doing. No, it relies very heavily on it's middle-class understanding as something of artistic and philosophical merit, and it is this potential for subtle bourgeois inter-communication from which it derives its value.

https://artsation.com/images/johnpawsonhouseinside_0.jpg

Minimalism seems to perhaps be the antithesis of showy 'Design', but look deeper, what does it rely on? Fundamentally it relies on lack of panel gaps and honest, plain materials; removal of the real, inconvinient details such as mechanisms and handles. Rumours suggest that an apple store table in all it's solid-wood, seamless glory costs in the region of $10,000 - 20,000. Seamless 'extrusions' of real stone cost orders of magnitude more than Corian, not to mention the half-assed coated chipboard that we have to put up with. Imagine being able to actually keep a house clean too, no John Pawson house could last 5 minutes past it's photographed state without an army of housekeepers, think of the status that demonstates.

High-Tech is another style that has failed to keep to it's socialist roots, the star-status of Rodger's NEO Bankside is enough to make it premium property on it's own, not to mention the well-communicated view over the thames (despite stares from Tate Modern guests) afforded by it's expensive massive plate glass windows and it's probably-useless exterior 'structure'.

Brutalism proved (up until the last few years) as something which legitimately was a canonical 'Design' style which avoided luxury. It communicated honesty to materials, but the subject of that honesty was thick pre-cast concrete, decidedly cheap and ugly (especially in wet climates). It managed to make this into an aesthetic, but due to the medium, the only aesthetic available was one of strength and despair in equal measure. It found it's outlet in social housing schemes in and in monumental public building, the heavy hand of the government giving us what we want? Maybe, but certainly not luxury until millennials realised that any dream of housing at all was a luxury and decided that the only way to retain their self-identity was to re-brand brutalism as aspirational.

A guide that will take us away from the already-done architectural criticism and towards a more Product Design scale is the good example of car interiors. These are all designed for exactly the same human interaction, but do it in completely different ways. All still communicate 'luxury' but their version of what luxury is is "same same but different". We also all have a well established internal hierarchy with regards to the social degree of car brands, as these have been heavily enforced by marketing during the course of our lives.

BMW - Premium Materials, but notably the prentention of ‘attention to detail’ and ‘german engineering’ conveyed by it’s accurate detailing.

BMWi - Luxury because it uses premium materials and new technologies.

Rolls Royce - Luxury because it uses premium materials, is hand-crafted, and would be inconvenient for anyone who had to maintain the cleanliness of the car themselves.

Range Rover - Luxury because it uses premium materials and because it is an fetishistic object of functionally overconstrained overkill.

Ferrari F40- Bare bones, but obvious overkill, and the weight savings are the result of things like carbon fibre and Kevlar, which were ridiculously expensive.

Ford by Marc Newson - Okay, not a production car, but we can clearly see another example of hard-to achieve minimalism identified by lack of panel gaps. More importantly it was ‘Designed by the guy who made the lockheed lounge’, giving it middle-class cultural relevance.

Now this isn't the most mainstream study of luxury design ever, one could focus on Rolex, Mulberry and Burberry, all of which are on an even more basic level defined by 'craftmanship' and 'quality (read: cost) of materials'. The question gets more tentative when we introduce Etihad first class flights, Four Seasons hotels and Vegas Casinos but in the same way that Design is an added cost that pays for itself, so is 'premium customer service', always.

Is it possible to generate real luxury with cheap materials? Plastic leather, diamonds and chrome are actually considered cheaper than honest use of real materials in my opinion. If there was a very cheap way of making shiny, seamless, polished, hard, cold and strong door-handles then such an idea would be relentlessly copied in the lower market and would quickly lose sight of any concept of exclusivity. Therefore, luxury is not a style or an objective in itself, but any style which is honest and, more importantly, doubles over on making sure that the end result is expensive.

In conclusion then, Luxury is about display of wealth, however subtle. It is the pursuit of expensive materiality, service and production.

* * *

What does this mean for the definition of good design then? Well, the question really is of what we want to use design for. Strictly, effective 'Design' is something that creates a complete aesthetic whole, but only in the context of that whole adding value and being good value for business.

I make clear here my separation in the use of 'design' and 'Design' (with a capital 'D') there are no two words that say these things more effectively, but there is a massive difference between 'design', which I believe to be mainly a planning, productive process; and 'Design' which is the target and pursuit of aesthetic ends in a functional context. The exact graphical definition of these terms will be saved for a later date.

Everyone 'designs' whether they like it or not - they make a cake, they write their signature, they paint the walls - the question is, what do us Übermensch who have developed the ability to bring 'Design' to it's fulfilment do?