Does FastCoDesign Hate Design?
This past week, FastCoDesign delivered on their promise to find the world’s most overrated designs. It was a cheeky, provocative project from the get go, and the response has been fierce, especially from designers. I even wrote a bit on the delightful design article that came out of it. But do they really hate design?
I think the real problem here is that the public hates, or has at least grown weary of, a few specific examples of design. While I cannot speak to FastCoDesign’s voting system, or make too broad a statement on how representative of the public their sample is, it is fair to say that this hatred is out there in the world at large and that FastCo tapped into it. In no small part, this may be because of what the public thinks of design itself.
Here are a few of the works they called out and some thoughts on how we can rehabilitate them in the public’s eyes.
Eames Lounge Chair
If you have not seen Ice Cube’s terrific video for Pacific Standard Time, go see it right away. Fortunately, I only just stumbled over it this week. I think it speaks to the Eames legacy and the public in a way better than I could write.
What I love most about the video is Ice Cube speaking passionately and reverently about the Eames constructing their house out of humble materials. The house, he reminds us, should be thought of as “not about the pieces, but how the pieces work together.” It is not the luxuriousness of the product (there really is not any luxury here), but, rather, how the minds of the designers made a compelling and graceful whole out of it.
The Eames have a long history of working this way. In 1942, just a few years before the iconic chair, they created a leg splint for the US Navy. A close friend of mine owns one, so I have been fortunate to see it up close. It is remarkable, the most beautiful medical artifact ever created. And it uses the exactly same bent plywood technique deployed in the lounge chair. Common materials, again, shaped with beauty for a humble purpose.
So, why does the public hate this chair? The FastCo blurb strikes at the heart of the issue: “Today, it’s as ubiquitous in shrinks’ offices as it is in chic homes.”
I do not think this is what the creators had in mind. Yes, it is a beautiful chair and complements any well-appointed home or office. But its material and inexpensive construction should allow it to live in homes far less “chic” than those in which it now finds itself.
I happen to own an upholstered fiberglass DAX Eames chair (and several plastic knock offs.) They are extremely comfortable, particularly the original. They conform to my back and relax in a way that few other cheap chairs can. But their material is no more exotic that those you might find in an auditorium city-council meeting or high-school classroom. It should be out there, should be in the homes of everyone who needs them, and not shuttered in the manses of the rich and the lucky.
Elevating the Eames chair to an objet d’art, fit only for museums and our betters, has done it a grave disservice. Letting the public sit in the chairs, really experiencing them, appreciating the care that went into holding their bodies, would go a long way to getting them off the hate list. Instead, our adoration has made them precious, unfit for the hoi polloi. We have done wrong by the chair, by the public, and by the legacy of the Eames.
Can we solve this? I think so. Maybe we take fewer pictures of it in interior design magazines and more in regular homes, amid our own madness and clutter. Maybe we make a stronger case for “well designed for people” as something apart from “but not for you”. We should make good design something to aspire to without making it merely aspirational.
Instinctively, I think this is what we want: Our best work for the most people. Most of us are a populists at heart, deeply concerned with human beings, their lives, their comfort and growth. We want to make good things and make them for people to love.
And some things we make, like the Eames lounge chair, are too good for a museum.
Netflix and Spotify
The Netflix interface, according to FastCo, “varies wildly from one platform to the next: The difference between watching Netflix on an Apple TV and a Roku is so profound, they might as well be different services entirely.”
This in undeniable, both for Netflix and Spotify. Although every device you use to access these services may have some interface for movie, song, playlist, user, recommendation, etc., they tend to be in very different places, accessible in very different ways, if they are available at all.
It would be silly to say that these two companies don’t have a long way to go toward improving their products across the dozens of avenues through which we now receive them. But consider that for a second: dozens of devices, dozens of platforms, sizes, interfaces, affordances, online stores, legal requirements, design guidelines, and varying human abilities. All those considerations for services, particularly in the case of Netflix, which have no precedent in human history.
The western world has had the movable-type press since 1439. That has not stopped us from arguing about publication design to this day. But we have had music streaming, with or without a social component, for not even a generation (stretching a bit to include Winamp in the evolution of the species.) And we have had instant access to nearly all the movies ever made for far less than a decade.
What’s more, the goal line keeps shifting. What does it mean to play your best friend’s workout music mix from a tiny glass pane on your wrist? How do you display the collected works of Howard Hawks inside a head-tracked 3D virtual-reality unit? And when can we expect some consistency between those and our desktop experience, damn it?
Part of problem is how we talk about our craft. There is now an expectation, in this age of so much really great design, that all designs, everywhere, for everything, should hit the ground fully formed like Venus from the sea foam.
But we know that is not how we work. Everything, from the day you walk into design school, is iteration, iteration, iteration. Somehow, though, when confronting the public at large, we have this need for it to seem effortless and complete on conception, to totally elide the work and the doubt and the month or years of error. Here it is, everyone, the most perfect video service ever created for a phone that was invented yesterday.
We have come a long way since the little red envelopes showed up at our door. But Netflix, Spotify, you, me: we are going to keep missing the mark, making brilliant interactions for the iPhone that flop on the Roku. We should find a way to prepare the public for that, explicitly bring them into the conversation and let them know what we struggle with this, too. We must tell them that we not only see their frustration, but we crave it, because we are as imperfect as our best creations and must suffer alongside them.
We, too, are mortal.
Helvetica
As with Ice Cube and the Eames, there is not much I could add to the history of Helvetica that Gary Hustwit did not cover in Helvetica. It is a masterpiece of a design documentary and, frankly, already answers the question of why the public “hates” Helvetica:
The public has always hated Helvetica.
Oh, and also:
The public has always loved Helvetica.
There have been promoters and detractors of the typeface almost since its creation. And now, it is everywhere. As FastCo notes:
Helvetica is one of the most popular sans serif typefaces of the 20th century, developed in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Miedinger. You’ve seen it in countless logos and brand identities, like American Airlines, American Apparel, and Staples.
Its ubiquity, as Hustwit demonstrates, is both its strength and its curse. People make statements by using Helvetica, and they make equally strong statements by pointedly avoiding it.
I think this generates a (false) perception of the design practice as a whole. There is a sense that, every few years, there is a right way to design things that is not what the right way was a few years ago. Cynically, you could call this fickle trend-hopping or, more cynically, engineering planned obsolescence. Everything you loved is out of style now, dummy. Keep up.
But I do not think that is really the case. Yes, we admire new innovations, take them apart, use their best pieces, share them, steal them, evolve them, and merge them with the next new thing. That is true for product and architecture and interface and type. But we do not throw things away. Helvetica, the little black dress, varnished light pine: they are always there, even in their absence. When we say that orange is the new black, we remember that black is the old black. And it will be the new black again.
We are an historical discipline. We fight with the history, but only because we know, revere it, and want to situate our lives and work in relation to it. We hate Helvetica, too. We love Helvetica, too. We should let the public know how conflicted we are about our foreparents.
We are not just dragging them through to the next big thing, not while we are still finding the direction to drag ourselves.
So, do we forgive FastCoDesign? Maybe. They certainly started conversations among us, probably a few we needed to have. And maybe there were more than a few conversations that we were having anyway if they had cared to check in with us. It is hard to deny that posting a great big list of everything to hate generates controversy (and traffic). But this could also be a wake-up call to us, a notice that we are not communicating who we are and what we do as well as we could.
There are, I am sure, many things that are overrated in the design world. But our capacity for self-reflection has never been one of them.
