Design Darwinism, Design Morphogenesis, and Memes
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 importantly, 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.
Good design, obviously, has both legs and one other attribute that I call Design Morphogenesis. One good definition of morphogenesis is “The process in complex system-environment exchanges that tends to elaborate a system’s given form or structure. Examples are …evolution and learning. A morphogenic system is capable of maintaining its continuity and integrity by changing essential aspects of its structure or organization.”
Rather like Darwin’s finches, good designs follow the dictum of form must follow function, i.e., the form (or design) must spring naturally from the functional needs of the artifact, whether it is a chair, a web page or a newspaper. And also like the variety of finches on different Galapagos islands, good design must adapt as functional needs change.
Since I work mainly in the field of newspaper design, allow me to go there for an example. Years ago Long Island’s Newsday went with the tabloid format, despite its bad reputation for “yellow journalism,” because most of its readers wanted to read it on the train into Manhattan each day. The tab format is much easier to read on a train than a broadsheet, like the New York Times. Form follows function.
One can see this good/bad design dichotomy all around: sticking with newspapers, let’s compare the design of The Hartford Courant, The Boston Globe or Germany’s Die Zeit with that of the local fishwrap. It is clear that (a) functionally/structurally they are all alike, and (b) aesthetically, there is a wide gap. You can see the design gap everywhere you look: buildings, advertisements, cars, clothes.
The problem is that too many people involved appear to be missing the gene for aesthetics. But because the ability to design is so widespread, Design Darwinism doesn’t have the chance to operate: the hordes of bad simply overwhelms the good. How does this happen? That brings us to memes.
According to memecentral.com, “Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life.” In other words memes extend Darwinian evolution to our culture and our minds. Once a mutant meme, or idea, enters our culture, it can spread like a virus, especially in today’s techno-mediacentric world.
For instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was considered good to be pale. Having a sun tan meant that you were a poor, lower-class soul, doomed to work outside as a common laborer. Then somehow the meme mutated and the opposite became true. Now people try purposefully to get as tanned as possible, using tanning salons and tanning creams, both of which would have been incomprehensible a century or so ago. Culture adapted to the needs of the new meme, spread largely by the media.
For my money, the worst recent design meme was desktop publishing. Once the Mac and PageMaker hit the world, everybody – even the “one-legged” people – truly believed that they could design quality print pieces. Soon, the ugly overwhelmed the good and the world of graphic design has never been the same. The equivalent has happened in other design. Not that I am a neo-Luddite, but I lay the blame at the feet of technology, that great leveler of true talent. Technology has allowed the bad to surpass the good by putting tools in the hands of people who shouldn’t be allowed to design.
Darwin’s finches wouldn’t have survived, despite their impressive adaptability, if a competitor had the tools to drive most of them off the island. Good design has failed to drive out the bad because technology allows its greater numbers to overwhelm.
And we two-legged designers continue to shake our heads and suffer.
Written by d/visible contributor Robert Bohle. Visit his site.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
[…] Art is (or it should be) a value-free creation. It merely is. The artist had a vision of something and created a physical manifestation of that vision. Because the artist had no particular goal in mind, just the act of creation, no one truly has the right or ability to say art is good art or bad art. In that sense, what’s hanging on the fridge is equal to what’s hanging in the Louvre. Designs, on the other hand, can be good or bad largely because of the functional nature of the concept. Looks aside, a chair, for instance, can be well-designed or poorly designed, good or bad, in terms of its ability to function as a chair. Art has no such functional component. Here is where design gets interesting in a way many in the various design fields may not consider, and it brings us back to my previous point (Aug. 10 article) that design is not a single concept, but a bifurcated one. I want to expand on my earlier ideas. Design includes both a functional component and an aesthetic one. Art is concerned only with aesthetics. I heard an Infiniti commercial recently that touched upon the idea that the car must be both functional and beautiful. But I don’t hear the functional/aesthetic split discussed much, at least not among the graphic designers I hang around with. I think it helps explain, however, why we see so much bad design. First, all designs must attain a certain level of functional competency before they can be deemed good or even acceptable. Going back to our chair example, it must be able to function at least minimally at holding up a bent human form to even be called a chair. If you can’t sit on it, it isn’t a chair. In a sense, this functional aspect of design is integral to any concept and in fact arises instantly with the observation and naming of it. In other words, just by saying or even thinking chair or fan or ad or shoe or building, the functional nature of the item is in play. Everyone can have the ability to judge a design as good or bad on its functional characteristics. Judgment of the aesthetic side of design is where it begins to get interesting. Aesthetics, or the theory of beauty, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is a huge field that has been around since antiquity. It didn’t really blossom until leisure activities became more prevalent in the eighteenth century, and modern discussions only go back to about the 1960s. I’m no philosopher, and I don’t want to play one on the web. I also don’t want to get into any of the various philosophical arguments about aesthetics, but I do want to side with those who believe it takes a special sensibility, not shared by all, to see beauty. Again, anyone can judge whether a chair or a brochure or a building is good in terms of its functional characteristics and maybe even whether it is gaudy, dull or elegant, which some consider secondary aesthetic characteristics. But the ability to recognize beauty in physical forms is simply a trait that not all possess. It is, however, a trait that people believe they possess. When someone says a design is good (and most people include both the functional and the aesthetic when they do so), he or she doesn’t believe a personal, subjective opinion is being shared, but that an accepted Truth is being illuminated. When they say, “That is well designed,” they don’t think they are saying, “I like that design” or “I think that is a good design.” In other words, anyone who utters such a statement believes that their personal recognition of beauty in the design of whatever they are looking at is universal and that they are merely stating the obvious. This brings us back around to the plethora of bad design in the world: the marketplace has found it can exploit the notion that everyone has good taste. Virginia Postrel, in her 2003 book The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetics Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, said that we are living in an age of aesthetics. She said that, because of improvements made in mass production technologies and distribution, products could go beyond initial monotony in general look and feel to variety, from an emphasis on sameness and quick production to one of meeting various aesthetic tastes. It’s clear to me that this has happened with no regard to quality. Customers obviously wanted the choices. Product differentiation based on function and quality gave way to one based on aesthetics. As Postrel points out, this led to aesthetics taking on marginal economic value in our mass culture. For many, this meant that they would rather pay more, for instance, for a computer with a cool case than one with increased power or functionality. As Postrel put it, for a manufacturer, “adding pleasure may be more important than adding performance attributes.” So in our postmodern age, this has meant that everyone’s personal idea of beauty becomes valid, at least in the marketplace, and it thus has value. There is no absolute standard of beauty. My idea of beauty has become just as good as anyone’s. This increase of attention on aesthetics has given a fairly recent cultural focus on simply looking good. Postrel notes the increases in personal beauty enhancement products, day spas, nail salons, and so on. It has also meant that businesses give customers not just a handful of choices of some products, but hundreds, though not all of them truly attractive. It has meant that “designers” can give us 12-point, shadowed, underlined brown type on a deep purple background. (If it is on a web page, the type will blink next to 17 animated GIFs.) Postrel also insists that aesthetics should not be left to the professionals, thus implying that expert opinions are worthless and that everyone has the same level of expertise when it comes to separating the good from the bad. Give customers what they want, she says. This is where we differ. Economically speaking, I think she is spot on. The best example I can think of is the iPod. A large part of its success lies not in its functional quality — which many believe has not always been up to the level of its design or of the functionality of its competitors — but in its aesthetics. iPods simply look cool, and the marketing pushes that angle, not how it works. There is no doubt that playing to a variety of consumer tastes makes good economic sense, but is it good for design and designers? I think not. What has happened is a lot of bad design work has succeeded in the marketplace, even if it falls short of the standards of the professionally trained eye. Design as a profession has been cheapened because now anyone can call himself or herself a designer. This is where Design Darwinism has failed us. The Galapagos finches survived through adaptation of the beak size and shape to the particular environment they were in. If your beak didn’t meet the “standard,” or the needs of the environment, you didn’t make it. In today’s design world, the marketplace isn’t so cruel, the cultural environment not so unforgiving. A capitalist economic system allows anything that will sell, and it doesn’t care if it is well-designed or not, as long as there are enough people who are willing to buy it. If bad design can find even a small corner of the market, which isn’t hard today largely because of the power of advertising and marketing over the minds of the great unwashed, it isn’t driven out by the good, as Design Darwinism would posit. It may even prosper. That’s why we are surrounded by not just the good designs, but the bad and the ugly. November 07th 2006 Posted to In-depth, Graphic Arts, Culture […]