Design is inextricably linked to our lives, from the toothbrushes we clean our teeth with in the morning, to the roads we navigate en route to work, to the chairs we sit in at our desks, to the beds we sleep in at night. This is what I look forward to exploring in this space over the next several weeks.
I was saddened to learn of the passing of industrial designer Bill Stumpf over the weekend. He’s best known for the ergonomic Aeron chair (which he designed with Don Chadwick), a genre-defying piece of office furniture that for a time was emblematic of the excesses of the Internet economy but is now firmly ensconced as a museum-worthy icon of modern design. Equally significant was Stumpf’s thoughtfully articulated philosophy on the purpose and importance of design in our culture, exemplified by his collection of essays on how design shapes our lives in his book, “The Ice Palace That Melted Away.”
When lecturing or writing about design, I’ve often referred back to a particular quote from Stumpf: “If your shoes are comfortable you’re not aware they’re on. If the water is pure you can’t taste it. Similarly when a chair is a perfect fit for your body, it becomes ‘invisible’ and you’re not aware of it at all.” This is advice on buying a chair, but it can apply to just about anything.
Stumpf opted to demystify design. In both his words and the objects he made, he highlighted design’s potential — to do good, to be socially responsible, to be comfortable, to have a sense of play, to be useful — while avoiding its perils. Is it fair to say that his approach was in some ways, as solid and Midwestern as he was? Take, for example, Stumpf’s notion of sustainable furniture: not something crafted from sunflower seeds or wood reclaimed from a high-school gym floor, but simply something beautifully designed and well-constructed that you’d enjoy for years before passing it down to your children and they to theirs.
Inspired by Stumpf’s clearheaded perspective, I’d like to share some examples of design in my own daily life:
Over the Labor Day holiday, my husband Bryan and I took our 8-month-old daughter on her first camping trip in our Airstream trailer. Bryan and I share an obsession with trailers. (We even collaborated on a book about them, “Airstream: The History of the Land Yacht.”) I’m aware how bizarre that sounds, but trailers so perfectly illustrate Charles Eames’ famous maxim, “good design comes from constraints.” Every inch of space is exploited to the fullest. Every domestic need is addressed: Our Airstream is only 22 feet long yet it manages to contain a sofa (that converts to a bed); a bathroom with a combination bath/shower; a galley kitchen with a three-burner stove and oven, refrigerator and sink; and more storage space than I had in my studio apartment in New York — including a skinny vertical cabinet for a barbecue grill that collapses to the size of a briefcase. The trailer’s streamline shape is attractive, but it was made that way for its aerodynamic properties. Streamlining, observed the Hungarian-born engineer Paul Jaray (1889-1974), designer of zeppelins, Tatra cars and Mercedes chassis, was “a secret learned by listening to nature.”
Our daughter slept great on her first camping adventure. But “great” for her often means a 5:45 a.m. wake-up call for us, so when it was time to make our way home, we stopped for a little caffeinated sustenance. I contemplated buying two coffees but then decided we’d share one. Why? Because of this:
I have a great car. It drives well, it gets good gas mileage, and it looks good. It tells me the title of the song playing on the radio and lets each front-seat passenger regulate his or her own temperature and seating positions. But it has only one cup holder. That I could live with — I’m not big on Big Gulps — but what I can’t live with is the utter lack of thought that went into the cup holder’s design. See the way the back of it angles forward? They should have drawn the little cup icon with the straw at an angle — or, better, showed the cup with liquid flying out of it, because that’s what happens to any beverage placed in the holder. The cup pitches forward, dispensing scalding streams of Peet’s coffee on the dog curled up in the passenger seat, and staining the upholstery. (Bottled water is a safer choice.) This is a perfect example of design gone wrong.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The most banal of things can be both functional and playful, as perfectly illustrated by this light switch panel from the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento, Italy, designed by Gio Ponti in 1962. As a frequent business traveler, I’ve stayed in countless hotel rooms where I simply have not been able figure out temperature controls or light switches (or the damned digital alarm clocks). Ponti, apart from conjuring an environment that expresses all that is beautiful and calming about the sea, created beautiful informational icons for the light switches that are eminently readable.
Note the floor lamp in the hotel room (right) and its corresponding switch (left). Perfect.
The antithesis of Ponti’s elegant solution is a parking sign in San Francisco (below left) that stands as one of the worst examples of information design since the hanging and/or dimpled chad. This sign is about a half mile from AT&T Park, the city’s downtown baseball stadium. It effectively deters people from parking during games, but only because it is impossibly complicated. Even if you did happen to know that the blacked-out dates correspond to the Giants’ home games, you would give up trying to make sense of the sign and opt instead to pay $20 to park at the lot by the stadium.
As designers Lella and Massimo Vignelli once proclaimed, “If you don’t find it, design it.” Their point was that one should not design without a true purpose — whether it be utilitarian or joyful. To wit: on that same trip to Italy when we experienced Ponti’s magical hotel, my husband and I also spent a few days in Rome. Wandering through one of the city’s bountiful farmers’ markets, we came upon this fellow sharpening knives for customers on a stone-sharpening wheel powered by his moped engine (above right). His ingenuity is inspirational: he simultaneously performs a service, earns a living, exercises and socializes. And at the end of the day, he packs up his sharpener, stand and bag and scoots home where, at least as I imagine it, the simplest, most perfect portion of — penne al pomodoro — awaits.
From 1 to 25 of 40 Comments
Bravo Allison. I thought I was the only one who noticed all the terrible designs out there, and appreciated the nuances of the terrific ones. I look forward to many more columns! Maybe you should tackle cell phones next…
— Dave HoughtonEven your column is well designed with appropriate photos to illustrate your points. Well done indeed.
— Bob SchererThank you for this blog on design. When living in NY, one of my favorite museums was the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design (I remember a great Eames exhibit a number of year back, among many others). I have lived many years in Paris as well, and have always observed that Europeans in general (and Italians, in particular, as attested by your two examples) seem to pay more attention to design and its role in making our daily lives more beautiful, elegant, joyful, and at the same time, serving a useful purpose.
— Juliana PigeyHow important is design to me? I was willing to pay 3 times the price for my toaster (Siemens, designed by Porsche), which in addition to making toast, very well, is also a beautiful object to grace my kitchen, so providing visual pleasure as well as a purpose…
Thank you again for this blog and I can’t wait to read on in the next weeks..
It never ceases to amaze me how user UN-friendly so many everyday objects are! Our first response is to think there’s something wrong with us, that there’s some kind of early onset senility happening when we try to interact with bad design! We turn the object over in our hands, trying to find the ON button or get the thing to open. Or we stand and stare, waiting for divine intervention to tell us how to interpret the jumbled keys and extract the information we need. We are locked in a stand-off with bad design and say, “it shouldn’t be this hard!” And then we realize the absurd fact that the designer never even bothered to sit in the user’s seat, never picked up the prototype, never tried to read with fresh eyes. If only all design could be conceived with the clarity and purpose of a parachute rip cord!
— Brian FassettThank you for a beautifully designed and thoughtfully executed column. If only the principle of “less is more” could be comprehended by more people (I almost wrote “the masses” but that wouldn’t be PC would it?)
— Ned SmithLooking forward to more.
Great post, Allison. I strained my neck from the vigorous head-nodding as I was reading it… I can tell from your cupholder photo that we have the same make of car as yours; although possibly a different model. Our cupholder, thankfully, doesn’t pitch forward that way. Although, frankly, I don’t think I would trust any cupholder in a moving car with a cup of hot coffee! Now if someone would only redesign the plastic lids of takeout coffee containers. Speaking of cupholders, I thought you might be amused by the design of one that a friend of mine encountered recently:
http://www.catalystgroupdesign.com/cofactors/?p=142
Congrats on the new blog. I’m looking forward to your future posts.
— Nick GouldLooking forward to this column!
— Steve PortigalAllison – So glad to see you blogging for the Times. I’ve been a fan for years – your perspective on design is always refreshing and unified. I look forward to gaining continued insight and inspiration from your columns.
— Marit SaltronesGreat blog. I’ll have to check out Cooper Hewitt. What often frustrates, however, are designs that are ingenious, even attractive, but then executed in a way that skimps on resources or materials, leading to unnaturally short product life or function failures at critical points in a process. I guess knock-offs are known for this….Grrrrr.
— Andy BernsteinOh, I am so bummed that you are already married…
— Rollo GrandeGreat article, although I was ( and still am) dying to see what Bill Stumpf is “best known for”- The Aeron chair. Having worked with numerous start-ups I have about 5 versions of this chair sitting in my head.
— Stephen WachterWhat a wonderful and elegant comment on design. Even though I’m an avid computer and Mac fan, I’ve watch how design has devolved to templates and non-functional flourishes that tries to pass for inspiration.
As you’ve pointed out good design is timeless, functional and has the added benefit of enriching the soul. Besides Herman Miller, BMW and Knoll, only Steve Jobs and Apple understand how integral good design is to good business.
Thanks for a great column.
— Terry Nakagawagreat article! I am a magazine editor working in Taiwan. We’re planing to buit up a new Design Topic bi-monthly magazine in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. Is it possible to publish your brilliant article in our magazine?
Looking forward to hear you soon.
wagon Huang
— wagonI especially appreciate that you characterized designer Bill Stumpf’s sense of how to overcome disposable products with a sustainable ones — not by recycling but by building in re-use by making something more permanent. Of course, in a culture nose-deep in trash, now might be the time for products “crafted from sunflower seeds or wood reclaimed from a high-school gym floor” that also are “simply something beautifully designed and well-constructed that you’d enjoy for years before passing it down to your children and they to theirs.”
— Bob MercerThis is a very welcome column, and hopefully represents design coming of age in our country. Manufacturers should be motivated to constantly improve their product design, and when they put on the market anything like the beverage holder cited above, boiled in oil.
— Michael diCanioIn our household we have expensive cameras that will never be used because of their incomprehensible interfaces, and infant bottles and juvenile furniture that have brought us to the brink. I would love to see someone, somewhere, pillory the companies that are indifferent and even hostile to good design in the name of profitability.
What a gorgeous column. Thank you!
— Les ThornburyI have been impressed by details in Nagoya, Japan: The sidewalks whose surfaces provide, in relief, guidance symbols so the blind can navigate curbs and keep track of direction; the mirror over the bathroom sink in our modern hotel, where a rectangular viewing area stayed free of steam (must have had a heating element behind it); when we needed prescriptions filled, the pharmacy’s printout with life-size graphics showing each pill’s name, dosage, color and size.
— Mary MeikleYour blog is quite fortuitous for our family. Our son is just now applying to colleges to study Industrial Design. While we have several of the classic chairs by Eames around our house, and try to by useful and beautiful objects for our house, and intuitively enjoy well designed & useful objects, several of us still sometimes have a bit of a tough time wrapping our minds around how to define Industrial Design. This certainly helps. Thank you!
— Sam JackendoffGreat article Allison………always inspiring when purpose and design become partners………looking forward to more or observations.
— Barb AikenThe cupholder you display is also found in my high performance sportscar. You are correct, there is no reason to trust that a cup placed in this holder will remain standing. I concur, this is an example of very poor function.
— Carl DockeryWhen I read something like this, I can’t help taking a step back and looking at the tasks we want to accomplish through these pesky interfaces. Like drinking coffee in a car. In the past, cars didn’t have cup holders at all. People drank beverages sitting at tables, often with real meals, often with (gasp!) their families.
The Stumpf quote is revealing. “If your shoes are comfortable you’re not aware they’re on. If the water is pure you can’t taste it. Similarly when a chair is a perfect fit for your body, it becomes ‘invisible’ and you’re not aware of it at all.” Good design essentially makes us one with our technologies – the connection is seamless and we don’t even think about it. But, while I’m all for comfortable shoes, I think we should think long and hard about the technologies we connect ourselves to, because too often they serve to isolate us further from one another, by making isolation more comfortable.
The cup holder lets you drive for long periods in a sleep-deprived state. But why on earth would you want that? Instead of downscaling your ambitions and not trying to take an 8-month-old on a camping trip, or scheduling your time so that you can take a nap before you leave, you believe that cup holder when it tells you that you can do it all. A well-designed cup holder (and other common car amenities) might even lead you to think that spending hours in the car each day could be a satisfying way to live. After years of this lifestyle, your body, tired of screaming for exercise and rest and human contact, gets sick, forcing you to rest and reassess. How convenient is that?
— D. KreuzeYour article sums things up so elegantly that I feel you would be doing us all a service by posting it ubiquitously and encouraging the spreading of this infectious content! (Perhaps it would also be a great way to generate awareness of your new blog…?) Very much looking forward to more of your design insights and commentary, and will be telling my “intelligent design”-starved friends & colleagues to check out your new blog.
— Lis SoderbergNature is pretty good at combining stunning beauty with complete functionality. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative to good design in nature, anything less becomes extinct. I’m sure the durability of man made design is subject to similar mechanisms of evolution. It would be nice if good design equalled good quality but unfortunately not every good design is lucky enough to find a good manufacturer and not every bad design is badly made, which is a complicating factor in the evolution of good man made design. On a side note: Cup holders really don’t belong in cars. When Walter Da Silva designed the Alfa Romeo 156 which is one of the most beautiful (Italian) cars in recent history he pretty much left everything out that didn’t have to do with beauty and drivability, I never missed the cup holders.
— Michel MeewisseI recognize the cup-holder in your picture as that of an AUDI, the same car I drive….and I completely agree with your assessment of it…great car, horrible cup-holder, many coffee / tea/ water cups already spilled on the seats….
— Paolo PasquarielloWhat a terrific article. To me design is almost as important as if the thing works. It amazes me that people are not aware of the pleasure one gets from looking at something simple and beautiful..
I often think that if more women were consulted about the design of household articles we would not have so much ugliness in the world and stuff that doesn’t work.
— Terry Zogby