The Intentions of Design
I’ve been thinking about design—its merits and its effect. I know nothing can escape it since, in its natural expression, design is everywhere—the rock, the potato, the wisps of cloud formation. But what changes a thing from being whole unto itself into what we might rather it become? More specifically, I wonder when it is honest and when it serves to betray?
Let me step back to the source of my inquiry. I was driving in a car with a friend who spoke about the need to teach people how to see. How without instructions we are prone to bad design, ugly design, bad color choices and scale. That without being taught otherwise, we are lost to a world of dumbed-down aesthetics and flimsily created goods that speak more of the disposable than the enduring quality of craftsmanship. I understood exactly what she meant but wondered where the well-made tool for a farmer stood in this debate. When did it go from being exactly what it was, a thing of utility, into a thing of beauty unto itself and would the farmer ever see it that way? Yes, perhaps beauty in its function, in the trust that it will be there to do its chosen task whenever one reached for it, but beauty in its relationship to form and line? I did not think so. At least not within the context and language she, I, and many externally referenced, high-design babies might imagine.
Take the toaster for example. Just as I object to its passage away from the handsome machinery of yesterday (who can love a white plastic appliance?), I object to it becoming an opportunity for Michael Graves. Who needs this in a toaster? Who wants it? Better it stay with what it has become and wait till it burns out so I may go back to toasting my bread in a skillet. Logic and utility rolled together to create a perfect design of necessity. Now that is its own sort of beauty.
Take matched plates or, in the bizarre hybrid value of intentioned un-intention, a set of mismatched plates and I begin to wonder when plates become anything other than something to serve a meal on. Forgive me, I’m not trying to be contrary because I love aesthetics and am every bit a woman born of defined sensibility, but at some point the effort becomes burdensome. Eye wear, hats, sneakers, fonts, stationery, cutlery, buildings, and books. In fact, name a thing and it has been taken over not just by design in itself but by a sort of understated uber-design, the worst design of all. The design that says we are not designers but creatives in touch with the cultural zeitgeist of the moment. Enter the wizards of brands and websites, of marketing and subtle high-ground messaging. That is when design gives me the greatest fatigue.
Take, for example, the coffee table book I saw the other day. Farm to table living, complete with aprons, eggs, and near-perfect skies. Oh the love of it all, oh the pretty pictures. Oh the thoughtful placement of copy, the perfect font, the exalted sensibility gone to press. Better I tell you what this living is more like—tired and often overwhelmed, hoping more for a good tool than a photo op. And that, too, is when I wonder how we have turned everything into a design charrette and whether we have replaced the thing unto itself with the thing wholly unto our imagination.
Of course it is not always so evil, never quite so thoughtless. Space, line, color, and shapes feed off of each other in an authentic way and if we are merely replicating nature’s own brilliance we are creating more an homage than an intervention. But here is the real point, when design serves to sell something, to convince, to manipulate and to deceive, in any manner great or small, it is so much less than it could be. And that becomes the dividing line for me. That is when I know it has betrayed, rather than advanced, the cause of its creation.
About Harriet Fasenfest
Born and raised in the Bronx, Harriet Fasenfest has lived in the Northwest since 1978. She teaches classes on food preservation at Preserve (http://www.portlandpreserve.com) and lives with her husband and children in Portland.
28 January 2010 | Posted by Harriet Fasenfest in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
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Commentary
A year ago I read Virginia Postrel’s Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Culture, Commerce and Consiousness and what I mostly got from it was the idea that it is misleading to think things are either beautiful or useful, that something can be smart and pretty. But while I enjoyed reading it, I missed the sort of thoughtfulness you put into this—that sometimes design is tyrannical, sometimes it deceives, that sometimes it becomes a projection that interferes with authenticity. I like your dividing line, because it seems essential to the critical examination of our lives and culture to ask “how is the design here manipulating me?” Design can make our lives easier, I think of how many websites have great content that I cannot stick around to read, but when there is style without substance, when I am persuaded to behave in a way I wouldn’t otherwise, to buy something I don’t need, then it seems like a perversion of the value design has.
Mara Collins | 11 Feb at 10:18 AM
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