- Designs (14)
- Misreadings (16)
- Permusations (38)
- Recommendations (3)
- 19. April 2009: Drifting with Dieter at the Flea market
- 9. April 2009: Imperceptions
- 29. March 2009: To Mail or not to mail
- 6. March 2009: Blogging while delirious
- 27. February 2009: A study in contrasts
- 22. February 2009: Southern Hospitality
- 10. February 2009: Surly Signs are Done
- 9. February 2009: From the Mouths of Babes
- 5. February 2009: Toast
- 26. January 2009: Hogan's Heroes-The Movie
Good design doesn’t need to be justified
Or so it seems. The other day I was flipping through Architectural Digets’s latest design issue. They had quotes from designers and architects and such on good design. Two of the major themes I gleaned from the quotes were: Good design seems inevitable and good design doesn’t need to be explained.
The first theme harkened me again back to the Tao of Pooh where “Pooh just is.” I thought it stood to reason then that, “Good design just is.”
The latter theme reminded me of a line from Flannery O’connor’s novel Wise Blood: “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” I immediately altered it to be “Nobody with a good design needs to be justified.”
Satisfied with having translated these design platitudes into quotes I had more personal connection with, I immediately hestitated in mid-thought to wonder what exactly it was that I was gaining from this exercise.
Though good design might just be, I deep dpwn still want to know why or what it is that makes it good so that I can when necesssary use it to my advantage in my own work. Though I fear that any deep analysis will really only lead me to academia and dogma that may be as difficult to apply as it was to figure out.
One option to pursuit of knowledge in that very left-brained manner would then be to approach it not from an all too obvious reactionary right-brained manner, but from a position of intuition. That all too powerful and yet all too nebulous gut feeling that the design is right.
The process is then to explore good and bad design. Allow the emotional, gut reaction you have wash over and through you without an immediate attempt to analyze. Let it sink in and become part of you. And then later when your whole mind and conscoiusness have had a chance to absorb the interatcion you can try to analyze what about it caused the particular reactions.
And maybe I’ll be able to verbalize and maybe I won’t, but as long as I can take that and create things that elicit in an observer anything even remotely close to the reaction I had intended then I will take that as a success.
That perhaps takes us back to the beginning. And though maybe good design might need to be justified, perhaps it need not be explained.
9. June 2008 at 12:08
I too have always wondered why I like a particular piece of furniture over another. In trying to figure this out I did some reading about proportions, the golden rule, and mathmatics. After applying some of these theories to furniture pieces I liked I found that an overwhelming number of them fit with the golden ratio proportions. This leads me to believe that while good design shouldn’t need to be explained, perhaps it can be thru mathmatics and the proportions of natural things around us. It would be interesting to see if “good” proportions are the same worldwide or die they vary from region to region. If they remain constant than perhaps there is more to this scientific approach to design.
9. June 2008 at 21:56
Darren,
I suspect there is something to a scientific approach or at least scientific explanations (I am sure not even scientifc explanations are all in agreement).
I don’t have enough exposure to enough different regional styles to know if natues proportions repeat themselves but I again suspect the answer is yes since nature would be at least one of the major constants worldwide. I do know that cultural and societal ideas of beauty do change over time. My hypothesis would be that even as mechanics, mediums, themes, presentation and so on change over time, the structural and conceptual design elements remain.
So even if we can’t come up with the grand unification theory of design (or at least I know I am not going to come up with it), we can perhaps learn enough to know our intuition is correct and be able to put it into action.