Beautility

TOO FANCY?

Irecently attended a Library Journal webcast: “Designing Libraries to Meet Evolving Community Needs.” One architect said that libraries are one of the few shared community places and emphasized how important and necessary they are today. The panel presented some beautiful library designs. Some looked like posh hotels. Too fancy, I thought. Too much of the wrong kind of design? People would have to be careful in such spaces—like they are in a museum. Some might feel uncomfortable or even unwelcome. Or worse. They might consider themselves outside the community that built them, making the buildings another obstacle to participation in their civic life.

Is Too Much Design Possible? When designers preach for more design, non-designers often think we must be mad! Because sometimes designers’ attempts to make the world better backfire, making things worse for some people. Like gentrification, Esperanto, or those cool white Eurostyle Braun appliances by Dieter Rams. Rather than our designs being seen as beautiful forms for everybody, they become exclusive status symbols for elite connoisseurs. That’s how modern architecture and design became the International Style—the symbol of corporate colonialism. Was the style meant to camouflage their intention for world domination? Or was business a spreader of invasive good design? Was form following function? Or just oppressive?

Although parents love the impressive new New School University building in New York City, the building is too pristine. Students have to go across the street to the funky new makerspace to spread their crap around, create a mess, and make models. A funky studio fosters creativity because people can be sloppy. They don’t have to worry about making mistakes or letting loose.

How do we make a place feel accepting to the public? What are the conscious and subconscious signs we design into spaces and products?

During World War II, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a temporary research building: Building 20. Since it wasn’t going to be permanent, hardly any design went into it; they didn’t even name it. Since it was just a plain temporary place, students and professors squatted in the free space. Thin wood-stud sheetrock and plywood walls allowed the engineers to literally hack the building. Those “bad” or un-designed things make an ideal petri dish for spontaneous collaboration and innovation. Its lack of design was what made it good (proof that less is more). The hodgepodge mash-up of disciplines with equipment jammed together led to a lot of creativity and accidental discoveries, like the development of high-speed photography, modern-theory linguistics, single-antenna radar, and the physics behind microwaves. They say that in its 55-year existence 20% of physicists have worked there. Six Nobel Prize winners came from there and Amar Bose invented his speaker there.

Thirty years ago (yikes!), I wrote in an essay for the British magazine Design that while designers are taught how to do something, where do they learn that sometimes doing nothing is good design? “Although there are plenty of things that need to be designed or redesigned, we should remember that among them are many things that do not really need to be made, things that we would be better off without and things that are better the way they are already. And it is part of our job to find them and save them so we can spend our time on things that really matter.” That’s the opposite of the Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, motto: “Never leave well enough alone!” It was the beginning of the post-industrial era, so I started calling myself the “last industrial designer!”

By the time I wrote that essay, Victor Papanek had already proclaimed industrial design the most dangerous profession. His point was that mass producing bad products multiplies the harmful impact. So doing nothing is certainly a lot better. His books like Nomadic Design and Design for the Real World, from the 1970s, show that he was an early proponent of socially and ecologically responsible design. His teachings are even more valuable today during this crisis of social justice and climate disaster.

Unintended Consequences The Industrial Revolution segregated design as a special profession. Industrial design was born to feed the mass production machine (thus “industrial”), and the profession had been driven to design things to appeal to mass markets—stereotyping customers in an attempt to create products that appeal to all the people, from the lowest common denominator to the top of the vanilla bell curve. The products we design supply comfort and wellbeing to a lot of people. And the design process itself can be inviting to all. But do people feel that the designers care for them as much as we care for our designs?

Loewy cracked the code; the consumers’ sweet spot was MAYA—Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. He said, “The adult public’s taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.” In 1934 he published charts to show the evolution of product form, like how the telephone’s archetype evolved from an electrical science contraption to a Victorian cyberpunk candlestick to the ergonomic Model 302 mechanical plastic device by Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA. Although he couldn’t include the minimal digital platonic 2001: Space Odyssey monolith glass-slab digital phone, he predicted each step erasing decoration and personality by simplifying and cleaning up the form. (Remember the exclamation from Dan Friedman, a postmodern new wave

graphic designer in the ’80s, that he didn’t want to be a janitor cleaning up corporate identities?)

While ubiquitous smartphones are bulging with every conceivable function that can be crammed onto a silicon chip, the old phone lives on only as a pictogram, a wayfinding icon, a symbol, an app graphic that is recognizable by everyone. What could be more mass than international symbols?

Expanding the market to include the widest range of abilities necessarily homogenized functionality and individuality. As we wake up to the social injustices we have designed into our environment and gain deeper empathy for the impacted generations, it is good to reconsider systemic approaches and those little details that can magnify both good and unintended consequences.

Before OXO Good Grips, there was no such thing as universal design. These kitchen tools became the most significant Smart Design project I worked on. Noted gerontologist Patricia Moore, FIDSA, helped sensitize us to older people’s declining physical abilities, which led me to ask, Why not design beautiful things for older people that work better for everyone?

In 1990, Betsy Farber was beginning to suffer from arthritis, and she and her partner Sam Farber asked us to create a potato peeler that was comfortable for her. Dan Formosa studied the ergonomics and physics of the problem. Led by Davin Stowell, we determined that large flat-handle shapes spread stress and increase leverage, so we created forms that are flexible (literally made from rubber!) and provide multiple options that are tolerant and equitable to more users.

A transgenerational icon, OXO Good Grips kitchen tools transformed the housewares industry and are universally revered in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, and received the highest awards from the Industrial Designers Society of America, the Smithsonian National Design Museum, the Tylenol Arthritis Foundation—and are in almost everyone’s kitchen drawers.

More inclusive by not excluding anyone, universal design is very good. We mass produce one thing that fits everyone—accessible everywhere—and makes the world a better place. Does universal design create paradise for all or replace natural diversity with artificial uniformity? Look how the fiberglass Eames chairs replaced all the seating in airports, schools, and pizza parlors with a shared seating experience everywhere.

“When we think of a product for people of such diverse backgrounds,” Raja Schaar, IDSA, asks, “How can one product possibly be perfect for every person?” Could the unintended consequences of good design for the most people be corporate colonialization and culturally inappropriate? Founding member of the Disabled List, Liz Jackson says, “Nothing is universal.” She says that what she is “trying to get away from is this idea of normal. I’m worried that universal reinforces it.” Does universal design erase distinctions and make individuals invisible?

Yin and Yang The idea of creating good things for more people has the same effect as cultural appropriation or cancellation. Instead of building a huge pigeonhole for everyone to fit into, designers can be agents helping to express differences— extreme inclusive design co-created with the individual for themselves. DIY. Even though it’s not so efficient, we need more inclusive design teams at every level: across the user landscape, tapping sustainable materials, creating meaningfulness for production workers, harmonizing with the whole biosphere. In the post-industrial (and hopefully post-COVID) era, it’s possible for everyone to become their own designer and, like Buckminster Fuller says, to act VERY locally!

Michael Kimmelman, the critic for the New York Times, writes in David Rockwell’s new book, Drama: “Every space we are in affects us in ways we may or may not be conscious of. This happens whether it’s a building designed by architects or if you’re walking through some trees into a field.” Today, designing or redesigning those experiences makes our work more critical. Like those libraries that are unintentionally unattractive to a lot of people, every little move affects social equity and the climate crisis. Those slick modern spaces, products, and services are not the only products of design.

“Design is a language,” says Carl Gustav Magnusson, IDSA. The design process is a verb, a great tool for welcoming participation and leveraging the crowd, taming a messy process leading to less messy results. (Beautility is a verb too.) Because just like with democracy, the more people who are engaged, the better answers they’ll find, the more they will trust the consequences, and the more they’ll fancy the results.

We need more of that kind of considerate and sympathetic design to repair and make a better world for everyone. Shouldn’t everyone be able to peel a potato comfortably?

Beautility for all!

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com