# Aesthetics and Design: The Value of Everyday Living  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jeffrey Petts]] - Full Title: Aesthetics and Design: The Value of Everyday Living - Category: #books - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Jeffrey Petts discusses how aesthetics and design impact everyday life, drawing on Wittgenstein's ideas about aesthetic experiences outside of traditional arts. He emphasizes that good design should enhance personal fulfillment and community living, as seen in the work of modernist designers like Perriand. The text also notes that digital technology is reshaping our concepts of home and design, requiring new solutions for contemporary living. ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > I examine a range of designers’ statements about the nature and aims of their work, including Charlotte Perriand and Dieter Rams. Apologies answer questions like ‘what makes design a good thing to have in one’s life?’ Designers couch their work in the prosaic terminology of ‘need’, ‘function’, and ‘problem-solving’. But I shall argue that their ‘apologies’ for design are conceived in terms of ‘improvement’, ‘fit’, ‘well-being’, and related terms. Furthermore, they are properly understood within an account of aesthetic experience as an adaptive and consummatory experience. In short, when designers talk about the general value of design, they do so on the grounds that it delivers that kind of experience. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mds16b2y7zet2w1vrdmbqj)) > Aesthetic functionalism about design amounts to a cluster of criteria around meeting user needs in fitting ways that improve everyday life, adding things of beauty, of aesthetic value, to everyday lives, and creating built environments and communities that aid the good life. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mdt0dc23tma2xc9kqy38dq)) > So, McCracken notes Albert Borgmann’s contribution to *Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies*, and his contention ‘that designers as the guardians of common practical wisdom … [help] people engage more meaningfully with their daily environment’.[7](#en1-7) He recognizes that design practice is properly the subject of philosophical investigation and asks questions like ‘is design an art or a science?’ and ‘what knowledge does it require?’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j52c4hrvz5t7tvad4qrts20m)) > For Borgmann, the qualitative aspect of design is that it must be ‘engaging’. It must counter the idea that excellence resides in ‘attenuation, superficiality, and even disappearance’.[11](#en1-11) He gives examples, like developments in sound reproduction. Borgmann, writing in the 1990s, anticipated a world when ‘a hand-held device consisting of a small keyboard and screen … allows you to call up whatever and however much music you desire’. The result will be that ‘the designer’s scope will be reduced to making … surfaces as pleasing and the programming device as portable and functional as possible’. Why is this presented as problematic? Borgmann sees in it a move from aesthetic design to engineering design. Moreover, it reflects a shift from user engagement to user ‘disburdenment’.[12](#en1-12) Now, of course, music can be requested as basically as a voice-activated request for a device to ‘play me some pop music’. It extends, no doubt, to our whole ‘just-one-click’ culture of buying and using things. Still, what is practically and philosophically alarming about such design? Isn’t ‘ease of use’, removing ‘burdens’ from everyday living, a fundamental design principle? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mete79njcarrmh6jvf8ghm)) > Borgmann appeals to the idea that our fullest and most rewarding interactions with designed things requires designed things that engage far more than our ability to state what we want, to press a button, and get it. Rather, ‘the most commanding and subtle things engage our talents most fully; and … to employ our capacities most deeply we turn to the most powerful and intricate things’.[13](#en1-13) For example, ‘a musical instrument normally engages a person deeply; a television program typically fails to do so’.[14](#en1-14) And contrast the engagement with a cooking pot’s ‘shape, weight, heat conductivity, surface texture, even the sound it makes when you stir in it’ to using a microwave.[15](#en1-15) Borgmann appeals to the pleasures of cooking with well-designed products. It is the kind of description that often provides the marketing for products: I think of my Sori Yanagi kettle and its accompanying blurb about how Yanagi ‘designed many works which enriched daily life’. Borgmann provides examples meant to illustrate that good designs evidence good engineering for experiential goals: for aesthetic experiences of ‘walking, sitting, reading, eating, conversing, shopping, and playing’.[16](#en1-16) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mew08v6b7ekm730vbqgh6f)) > It is important to note, then, that Borgmann is appealing to a notion of aesthetic experience beyond some appreciation of the form of things. And beyond our pleasure in consumption. Disburdened from any exertion or exercise of skill by engineering design – with aesthetic design restricted to styling and smooth interfaces – our engagement with designs is correspondingly restricted to the enjoyments of consuming ‘opaque and glamorous commodities’.[18](#en1-18) Borgmann’s ultimate appeal is to a notion of aesthetic experience that is beyond the visual. And to the idea that, with that in mind, good design works with the tactile and motile in our engagement with things. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mexsm2zrsy11e45kkeef51)) > One intuition is broadly functional. It understands design work as essentially making things that fulfil their basic function, requiring the appropriate problem-solving and engineering or technical skills for that type of thing. A second intuition is broadly aesthetic. It understands design work as essentially a discrete activity concerned with giving functional things a stylish ‘look and feel’ or form and requiring broadly creative and artistic skills. In other words, the functionalist intuition sees design as solving problems about how something will work, and its exemplary worker is an engineer-designer. In contrast, the aestheticist intuition sets any design problem as one about a functional thing’s form and supposed aesthetic appeal, and designers are essentially ‘creatives’. How far does this basic division take us in the proper philosophical analysis of design? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mf51ckqk4jk4jh09039q6p)) > Parsons’s stronger claim for modernism is doubtful, namely that its stylistic eschewal of ornamentation (after Adolf Loos) further exemplifies (along with its functionalism) the humanist approach and proper general understanding of design. So, consider Parsons’s claim that, for example, chairs can never have ‘expressive power or meaning’.[35](#en1-35) Florence de Dampierre’s history of chairs argues that sitting has been something of a luxurious human activity and that things to sit on were invented for status and comfort, evidence of civilized behaviour.[36](#en1-36) Parsons only sees this as symbolism, as expressive of zeitgeist, never as internal to a design problem’s proper conception and as varied and open as our interpretations of, for example, ‘civilized’ for the object being made. Similar problems relate to Parsons’s defence of modernism’s account of ‘form and function’. In arguing that modernism ‘curtails expression in design and puts function to the fore’ Parsons risks confusing modernist style for a genuine philosophic insight about design work in general. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mfdtv2rg9wj87vr93dx1ad)) > But Levinson’s aesthetic realism, where aesthetic properties are distinct from their structural bases, is surely arguable in the case of designed functional products, where use of a product is properly considered as an integrated experience of ‘functioning well’. But that, I concede, depends on understanding the aesthetics of design in terms of experience of a product’s form in use; moreover that ‘aesthetic’ refers to something more than the trivial, pleasing appearance of a thing, and more strongly to notions and experiences of ‘fit’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mfhnf3bkv9dbx3mwt7m9qp)) > So, Parsons’s claims to scoping, sourcing, and structuring the philosophy of design is exaggerated, even as a ‘sketch’ of the field. The text is, perhaps, better regarded as a piece on the contribution of architectural modernism to the broader aim of a whole philosophy of design. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mfm8saj0p2vn1kdt3e9nc9)) > Designers couch their work in the prosaic terminology of ‘need’, ‘function’, and ‘problem-solving’. But I shall argue that their ‘apologies’ for design work, while properly about human needs, are aims for design work conceived in aesthetic terms like ‘fit’, ‘harmony’, and ‘good living’. So, they are properly understood within an account of aesthetic experience as an adaptive and consummatory experience. In short, when designers talk about the general value of design, they do so on the grounds that it delivers that kind of experience. Designers’ apologies for design are essentially aesthetic defences of design ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mm9hh43jd5pdv52bgfnzvv)) > The purpose of design, set by the UK Design Council, is ‘to make life better by design’.[1](#en2-1) It further characterizes design and states its mission with these statements: > Design shapes the world. Design turns ideas into reality, whether it’s a place, product, service or the systems that underpin how we live our lives. Design is a creative pursuit to make lives better. It uses creativity to collaboratively solve problems, reimagine and propose new ways of living. Design is a critical enabler of innovation and drives industry. It turns ideas into action.[2](#en2-2) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mmrwgg2rb85p4dfzr0byfq)) > when Charles and Ray Eames were interviewed after lifetimes in design and were asked ‘what are the boundaries of design’, they replied: ‘what are the boundaries of problems’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mn0n43gnbt57acp89d9qzb)) > The experiential standard of ‘fit’, of real needs well met, is developed by Dreyfuss when he sets out tenets or a mission for industrial design. These are that design centres on people as users of things and that in that relation there is either ‘friction’ – failed design – or success, indicated by a product being ‘safe, comfortable and efficient to use, and being attractive to buy and giving a sense of happiness’.[18](#en2-18) Ergonomic features are explicable in terms of a product meeting its functional requirements *per se*; but the appeal to attractiveness and happiness are additional normative functional requirements also cohering around concerns with ‘fit’ and experiential ‘rightness’. Dreyfuss’s design apology begins to indicate how meeting real needs for products appeals to aesthetic notions after Wittgenstein’s descriptions and analysis noted in [Chapter 1](#p13). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mnh92s4qz67f5nx3vhj5tg)) > The ‘design ethic’ recognized by Eames is, then, evidenced in *aesthetic* terms by Dreyfuss’s and Loewy’s appeals to the felt and visible in good design. Well-designed products are comfortable in use and simple in their look, in contrast to phoney designs, the merely ‘gaudy’ making false visual appeals to meeting ‘modern needs’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mnnzbg0rxndr1fydnfa7gc)) > Still, Rams does propose that ‘Good design is aesthetic … because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being’.[29](#en2-29) Of course, function is still at the fore: ‘Good design makes a product useful.’[30](#en2-30) With these functional, ecological, and aesthetic principles in mind, Rams concludes that design is concerned with ‘less and less’: that is, with using fewer natural resources and producing less rubbish.[31](#en2-31) More significantly, in terms of the construction of a general design apology, Rams is convinced, therefore, that ‘there is an ethics of design’.[32](#en2-32) He claims that ‘Designers are critics of civilization, critics of technology, critics of society,’ no less.[33](#en2-33) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mnrvkncyem92e23jhqc09x)) > Albert Borgmann, ‘The Depth of Design’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j52c51cdebeg3899we6pqb9t)) > *Design Philosophy Reader*, ed. Anne-Marie Willis ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j52c76y27bdb6f8vhmdam848)) > David Pye’s *Nature of Design* is profoundly sceptical about the paradigmatic account of design in terms of ‘function’, claiming that function is never sufficiently clear or pure such that form follows function, the famous dictum of architectural modernism and scientific functionalism more generally, coined by Louis Sullivan at the turn of the twentieth century. Nor do things ever really work: of designed things ‘we can always say what it ought to do, but that it never does’.[49](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-49) Rather, > in useful design and making there has from the first been a steady insistence on the doing of useless work. We might perhaps expect that early stone implements at least would have been strictly utilitarian, but it was not so. Even some palaeolithic tools are considered to have been made with better workmanship than was needed to make them get results.[50](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-50) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mh0rwbs2253cgsww71g72c)) > So-called ‘useless work’ is in fact, as I understand Pye’s rhetorical stance against engineering design, the good work that designers do if they attend to all the complexities of any design problem they are charged to solve. And that is more than ‘economizing’. When Pye equates ‘function’ with conceiving a design problem in terms simply of ‘cheapness’ and a ‘minimal look’, as he does, then he uses the term in a pejorative or deflationary sense to make a point about the potential richness of designed things (and that they’ll ultimately ‘not really work’ in so far as there is no ultimate, engineered endgame of designed things). Understood otherwise, he is plainly wrong about design work, which clearly is deeply concerned with designing things that function and that work well, here and now. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mh5966sr923z0fnkynwe1n)) - Note: The idea of "useless work" actually refers to the important work that designers do when they pay attention to all the details and challenges of the design problems they face. It's not just about making things cheap or simple. When Pye talks about "function," he seems to suggest that a design is only good if it looks minimal and costs little. He uses this idea to criticize how rich and interesting designs can be, arguing that designs won't really be successful if they don't have a clear purpose or final goal. However, this view is not correct because good design is really about creating things that work well and meet needs in the present. > Forsey does acknowledge the everyday aesthetic significance of design but without sufficient attention on designers and the nature of their work; and of critical appraisals of designs. It is rather, an account of the concept of beauty, exclusively Kantian, and how it applies to designed things like pens and coffee pots as well as paintings and well-made craft objects. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mg50r1r8d1yd69pxzdtms0)) > Wittgenstein observed that ‘it is remarkable that in real life, when aesthetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives such as “beautiful”, “fine”, etc., play hardly any role at all’; rather ‘the words you use are more akin to “right” and “correct” ’.[56](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-56) Design teams carrying out user testing of their everyday products could doubtless make similar observations of the verbal responses of users to prototype products. In the same vein, typical everyday users of products do not possess any rules of design but would suggest improvements to products in terms akin to Wittgenstein’s carpenter who, designing a door, looks at it and says: ‘Higher, higher, higher … oh, all right’ (Gesture) ([Fig. 1](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#figg1)).[57](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-57) They are like, following another of Wittgenstein’s examples, someone who knows a good suit and says: ‘ “That’s the right length”, “That’s too short”, “That’s too narrow” ’.[58](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-58) And how does a user of a designed thing show approval? In ways akin to approval of a suit: ‘chiefly by wearing it often, liking it when it is seen, etc.’[59](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-59) So, Wittgenstein concludes that ‘perhaps the most important thing in connection with aesthetics is what may be called aesthetic reactions, e.g. discontent, disgust, discomfort’.[60](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-60) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mhc82qx075649z9vdedw4q)) > Forsey’s contribution is important though because it does set design in the context of function and experience. And because she identifies our aesthetic experiences in using designed things. But it fails in terms of the theoretic setting of dependent beauty. The experiential richness of engaging with designed things – something noted in Borgmann and in design studies more generally – and the importance of that to personal and social development is ignored in Forsey or treated as an unhelpful incursion of moral requirements for good design.[4](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-47) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mg97j2rav85fct27kp5xzt)) > Moreover, ‘for Scruton, the truth in functionalism is that one cannot abstract from one’s knowledge of a building’s utility in appreciating it aesthetically’.[67](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-67) Also, an aesthetics of architecture is an aesthetics of everyday life; architecture is aesthetic ‘through and through’.[68](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-68) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mhmqvpy0n7s3mvnvfm72q0)) > The first thing to note is that Scruton does not argue that architecture’s function is to produce aesthetic experiences. Certainly, the same is true of design. A designer is, first and foremost, charged with designing things that perform their designated function. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mhhh33ejeegnzyhmh90wkj)) > But a taster is the American designer Raymond Loewy’s comment that to understand design as limited to changing and appreciating the appearance of products would be to falsely reduce it to mere ‘face-lift’ work.[71](private://read/01j3k9awkxtn77e4zkjkbk82nz/#en1-71) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mhjp9mrb8n6xvvp03fhsdq)) > Observations on the general nature of design work like Pye’s and of its everyday aesthetic character like Wittgenstein’s are, however, a promising path to a philosophical aesthetics of design. That route, to start, suggests the requirement to analyse what designers say about their work and thus identify the key concepts – and how they are understood by designers – that drive it. Broadly, I call that the ‘design apology’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3mhz653pfmpwxtg3krrd5xk))