A few weeks ago I went shopping for a new printer. I wanted Hewlett-Packard's model PSC-1610, which also served as a copier and scanner. HP makes good printers, of course, and the one I wanted was affordable, but moreover, it looked good, and as such felt right. It looked like a sleek and rounded, gunmetal gray breadbasket. Plus, the small LCD panel flipped up, and the paper tray flipped down. When both were closed, the printer looked seamless.
At Comp USA, the clerk told me that my HP model had just been discontinued. Seeing my disappointment, she quickly steered me to a retro-futuristic Canon printer. It had a snout like a hammerhead shark and resembled a prop from a '70s sci-fi movie. She assured me the Canon actually printed better photos than the HP, and it cost about the same. I was eager to buy a printer that day, and I didn't want to wander from store to store. As brands went, Canon was fine. I had a Canon camera. A printer was a printer, right?
Right. So I did the only sensible thing. I traipsed to another store, found my printer still on display, and bought it.
Design works its special magic on each of us. Everyone has some kind of aesthetic. For some it's well thought out, for others it's a patchwork of impressions and intuitions. Sometimes it makes sense—we like certain kinds of clothes because they look good on us—but more often it's that unnamable, intangible something that draws us to a car, a piece of jewelry, a new jacket, a building.
We are, it would seem, in the midst of a design explosion. Up and down the TV channels are new shows dedicated to interior design, landscape design, fashion design, body design. Who knew that a whole population of perky, bright-eyed interior designers, home remodelers, gardeners, fashion consultants and other Design-Your-Life professionals were out there in America, just waiting to transform the lives of you and me and everyone we know. Spend any time watching these programs, and you'll realize that most Americans can't cook a meal or dress themselves, and inhabit poorly organized homes full of dark kitchen cabinets, Formica floors and ghastly furniture crying for a makeover. Design has become the better mousetrap on the way to self-fulfillment.
Everybody's a designer. The magazine racks are full of trendy new titles celebrating design in architecture, home interiors, websites, and darn near everywhere else. Magazines like Wallpaper, or Interior Design, or Surface, which promises 240-plus pages of fashion architecture and design. There's Dwell, which is, it confidently announces, "At Home in the Modern World," and celebrating its fifth anniversary. Its circulation has jumped five-fold, and "so, too, has the public's interest in design." Or Metropolitan Home, which features a full-page ad from Target hawking a new line of luggage from renowned architect Michael Graves.
This growing interest in design has moved way beyond scholarly architectural circles or the reliable haute couture of the fashion industry. Web design grows ever more sophisticated. So does design across the advertising arts. Even cars are getting in on the act: Toyota's hip Scion brand is touted largely for the many ways its owners can customize, or in effect redesign, their rides. And car magazines are getting in on the act, too. In the good old days the assessment of a car's design was dispatched in a single, metaphor-rich paragraph. That's been replaced by two-page photo spreads. A recent issue of Automobile, for instance, gives a full pictorial appraisal of a new Bentley, noting that the "subtle pants-crease split line on hood is very elegant," but that the "1920's-era mesh texture indicates Germans trying too hard to be British; other past Bentley grilles were far more suitable." One wonders how many people this review convinced or dissuaded from purchasing the car. (Not to be outdone, GQ recently asked designers to overhaul American license plates.)
This would all seem to be good. There is so much ugly design in contemporary America—just walk around most cities or malls—that even the most indifferent among us will light up when talk turns to a particular brand of hardware tools, or handbags, bicycles, or furniture. About at least one thing, design matters. It's easy to believe that a more design-conscious public would, in a modest way, make for a better society. Maybe we'd have a more nuanced relationship to the many products we buy. Maybe we'd have a better vocabulary to engage with city leaders and developers and architects when they want to build in our communities, or shape our definitions of community. The more people care about quality of design, no matter their personal preferences, the more likely it is to emerge. We have only to look at the struggle over redeveloping Ground Zero in New York, or the long road New Orleans faces to rebuild itself to see how important design can be.
But here's the problem with all that. Design's new high profile is being shunted into the usual place —consumerism. It has become one more refined element of our calculus of class-conscious product identity. It's one more bit of information we can fret over and talk about. This is fine, as such, to keep the wheels of the economy moving. But we're missing a chance to see design as something more than a commodity. We're missing a chance to explore the idea of design itself, and how it influences the way we see the world and what we want from the world. We're becoming savvier about differences in design among countless products; we're not becoming any more savvy about design itself.
I'm writing this essay on a Mac, a white iBook. It's an extremely handsome piece of machinery, with its rounded corners, its symmetry, its slot-loading CD drive, its ports all neatly lined up on one side. Its appearance in total is one of androgynous smoothness, clean surfaces, seamless fit and finish. Like all Macs, mine has a circular white light—an eye—that winks bright and dim when the machine is in its sleep mode. How clever! How cool!
This looks like it belongs in the 21st century, and whenever I see a Mac alongside a PC, that old thought runs through my head. Who in their right mind would own a PC? They are, to look at them, utilitarian plastic boxes for housing motherboards and hard drives and silicon and circuitry. As for software, Windows, is, at its best, competent, while Mac OS X operating system is, both in its use and its looks, superb.
If we agree that both the Mac and the PC—not unlike the Canon and the HP—more or less perform their jobs the same, then why take the system with the obviously weaker design? In that case shouldn't design be the icing on the cake? Yet PCs absolutely dwarf the market for home computers, and Apple's share is—despite the company's inflated press—laughable.
Which may bring us toward a divide we have in thinking about design. Is it the icing on the cake, and do people want icing on their cake? Is the Mac an example of superlative design, necessary design? Or is it an instance of over-design, or intimidating design, an interface that in its very brilliance turns off people who desire something unfussy and plainspoken? Design may not tell us much about the product, but it tells us something about our desires.
Does design reveal reality— help us to better see a building, a car, a pair of jeans, to see its nature, see its particularity, see our relationship to it more clearly? Or does design heighten reality, the way graphics on a television screen can add extra punch to an important ball game? Or does design do a bit of sleight of hand on us and obscure reality, get our focus on flash and fun over function?
Broadly, some people distrust design because they see it as superficial, an add-on, something which perfumes the pig, or comes off like a city slicker with a too-fast sales pitch. No doubt, ours is an age where a Chili's restaurant in Colorado is the same as one in Las Vegas—only the Vegas one has that Southwestern motif and palm trees, and the Colorado one has evergreens. Design becomes a cynical, and wall-thin gesture toward an authentic sense of place.
Others appreciate design because they see it as beautifying or redeeming a disposable world. They see care and craftsmanship, an attention to detail, clear expressions of function and purpose that make interaction more worthwhile.
Both sides can see "bad" design as such, but each draws a different conclusion. For design lovers, the solution is better, richer design. For the skeptics, the solution is putting plenty of distance between ourselves and design.
Either way, companies are determined to give us whichever version of design they think we want. Take Target, which has carved a niche as an anti-Wal-Mart, as a place where you can buy inexpensive merchandise that still make a bit of a fashion statement. Hence the Mizrahi-designed clothes, or the various whimsical kitchen doodads designed by Graves. Wal-Mart's bread-and-butter is based on an opposite notion of design—the bland-looking stores and functional clothes are proof that the company is a straight-shooter.
(Here the winds are shifting. According to Businessweek, Wal-Mart recently ran an eight-page ad insert in Vogue, and the retailer is reportedly in talks to buy marquee fashion label Tommy Hilfiger—all in a bid to beef up its high-design bona fides.)
At the level of consumer products, it seems that designers go back and forth between, in essence, two extremes—unadorned and over-the-top. Fashion shows seem to move from back-to-basics classicism to exuberant, wild and outrageous. As for electronics components, an expensive Bang & Olufson sound system, for instance, makes a fetish out of its sleek minimalism. It's art-gallery-worthy lines read almost like a maxi-minimalism, a minimalism that doesn't quietly go about its business but leaps out at you. On the other end, units from JVC are just as likely to scream at you, but in a more direct way, with turbo-charged Super Bass controls and flashing diodes, reassuring you about its many Cool Awesome Features! These items are so far at the extremes of glorifying design that they practically touch. Somewhere in between is the play-it-safe utilitarian black box of, say, Toshiba.
Personal taste will be what it will be, and no kind of design tells us much about the value of the thing designed. Neither an elegantly simple corkscrew or high-tech wine-opening machine matter much if you don't drink. We don't need a home full of well-designed objects, but we need design itself, because by looking at design, and through design, we begin to see ourselves. At its best, perhaps we can use design to try to unify surface and substance, form and function. Perhaps such a unity will help us, in a small way, see what we need and don't need, and will make us feel like we have control over the many things in our lives instead of the other way around.
Predictably, the tensions about design smash together in a place like Las Vegas. Here, our casinos tend to be so large, so exuberant, and so willing both to flaunt every rule of propriety that they appeal, unexpectedly, to all sorts of people. At the same time, projects like The Venetian or Paris are very concerned that we know the incredible amount of care and attention to detail that went into building these delightful forgeries. Here, style is substance, at least Sin City's version of substance, and the joke is only on those who can't take a joke.
But that Vegas is changing. As design grows more sophisticated in the city, so does our response to it. The risk here is that as we begin to seek better design, we take design too seriously. It's hard to take the Excalibur very seriously—it's an ugly building, but it makes you laugh. It remains to be seen whether the new generation of condo and casino concepts (like MGM-Mirage's City Center), will amaze us with their design sophistication or try too hard and fumble away the essentially, well, irreverent and tacky flamboyance that makes Las Vegas what it is.
It's a fine line between utility and creativity, and even "masters" of good design can easily strike out. For years Apple stocked a sleek one-button mouse, long after the rest of the world had converted to the more useful dual-click mouse with scroll wheel. When the company unveiled a two-button mouse over the summer, Mac-heads got excited, for here was the chance of just such a marriage between form and function. This could be the mouse to end all mice.
As it turned out, it was a dud. The multidirectional scroll bar was uncomfortable to use. The mouse didn't fit well in my hand. But for what it's worth, it looked great.