Design and Darwin, Part 1

Design is a ubiquitous human undertaking. Nearly every human artifact is touched by someone involved in its design. Buildings are designed. So are newspapers, corkscrews, business cards, road signs, home interiors, web pages, freeway interchanges, tools, furniture, software interfaces, golf clubs, coffee pots, and so on.

But what actually is design? Is it a professional field? A craft? A philosophy? Why isn’t design alone a discipline in academe? People studying design almost immediately break off into balkanized and narrow fields, such as graphic design, interior design, furniture design, automotive design, human-computer interface design, among many others.
Perhaps most important, Why is there so much BAD design?

Look around and pay attention: printed pieces you can barely read, uncomfortable (and homely) chairs, lamps with the switches hidden out of sight under the shade, buildings that lead one to believe a door is where there is none, car dashboards with important gauges hidden by the windshield wiper lever, electronics with all the connections in the back, voting machines/ballots in Florida, among thousands of others.

Like beauty, bad design might be in the eye of the beholder, but bad design is more easily and widely agreed upon than, for instance, bad art. It also seems to me that bad design is more prevalent than good, the opposite of what one would think or hope for. In other words there is no such thing as “Design Darwinism,” i.e., only the fittest survive. With the law of the Design Jungle, most of the strong survive, but lots of the weak make it as well.

One reason that Design Darwinism (unfortunately) doesn’t hold true is that design is inherent in everything; it is a natural part of everything made by humankind. And, unlike its cousin art, it is an activity that can be performed by nearly anyone. But because it is a bifurcated concept, with one part accessible to anyone and the other not, failures happen with alarming – and often unpleasant – regularity.

The two parts of design are necessary for good design to occur. I call the two parts functional/structural and aesthetic. Neither is sufficient alone. They are two parts of a greater whole, as with the two halves of scissors. One without the other is virtually useless. Useless for good design, that is; bad design uses only one.

The problem with bad design is that it focuses on the functional/structural and ignores the aesthetic, or sometimes vice versa. The chair I am suffering on as I type is structurally just like the Eames Lounge Chair: splayed out legs with a central pedestal supporting a seat, a separate back piece and two arms. Aesthetically, however, the two are miles apart. Mine was no doubt created by no more than a journeyman. Charles Eames was a master.

So bad design is usually created by people who understand only half of good design, and there are many, many more of those than good designers. Sort of like an architect who understands all the engineering aspects of a building – load bearing capacities and the like – but has no ability to please the eye. Unlike art, which is largely hidden away in museums, designed artifacts are all around us and we all are forcibly exposed to the bad choices made by “one-legged” designers.

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