Beauty and Design
How does beauty relate to good design?
I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
When it comes to design and beauty, something fishy is going on.
If you ask a random person what good design is, they will almost certainly appeal to beauty. A pleasing arrangement, a lovely poster, an emotional ad, a beautiful object.
But if you ask a technology designer what good design is, they will almost certainly make no reference to beauty. For example, Gould and Lewis, in their groundbreaking 1985 paper defining user-centered design, make no mention of beauty or aesthetics. Don Norman, who coined the term “user experience,” seems outright suspicious of beauty in his classic The Design of Everyday Things. He writes of troublesome doors: “Attractive doors. Stylish. Probably won a design prize.”
Have the professionals lost the plot?
To be sure, the past two decades have seen a growing corpus of research looking at the link between beauty and usability. In short, the results have been mixed and debate continues. Still, there has been identified an aesthetic–usability effect, which says that “users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.” But even in the writing on this effect, there’s an implicit idea that beauty is something different from usability—that beauty can be a mask or strategy to overcome poor usability.
Yes, there is something to the idea that beauty and function can be separate. Imagine a controller with a set of buttons. We could use different colors and shapes while keeping the number and behavior of the buttons the same. Some versions might be more beautiful than others. In this case, “beauty” really is a mask. And of course people would prefer a beautiful controller over an ugly one. But in this case I would suggest that whatever beauty is there is fairly superficial. And anyway, cases in the real world are rarely so simple.
Christopher Alexander writes that, in good design, functionality and beauty both spring from the same source. It’s not a question of either/or. If beauty and function seem separate, you’ve gone astray. (And he says all of architecture and design went astray during the 20th century.) To telegraph his argument, he says that the goals of a design are internal to its form, and beautiful forms will best achieve their goals. In the best designs, the different elements help and strengthen each other to do whatever the design is supposed to do in the best way possible. And by helping and strengthening each other, they also become more beautiful.
The Value of Beauty
Saint Augustine said of time that he knew what it was until someone asked him to explain it. It may be the same when we ask about the value of beauty. At first, it seems like one of those questions so inane only a philosopher could ask it. But when you try to really articulate the value of beauty, suddenly it’s a struggle. Beauty just is valuable; it’s tautological.
For help, we can turn to the wonderful book On Beauty and Being Just by literary scholar Elaine Scarry. In that book, Scarry argues that beauty is neither dispensable nor a mask. Rather, beauty is tied in with the human search for truth and justice. Alexander, I think, would very much agree.
Beauty has an interesting relationship to truth. It’s not that beauty simply is truth, necessarily, but that truth and beauty sometimes converge. Think of how mathematicians describe certain theorems as beautiful, and same with certain scientific demonstrations. Just as truth is certainty, beauty feels like certainty.
But beauty isn’t just a standalone certainty. As Scarry points out, beauty prompts us to search for more truth elsewhere in life. Beauty “creates, without itself fulfilling, the aspiration for enduring certitude. It comes to us, with no work of our own; then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor,” Scarry writes. That “giant labor” is the quest for knowledge.
In this insight, Scarry finds the whole point of education. Teachers are supposed to show their students beautiful things, and doing so will fuel their continued search for truth. “One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.”
Further, Scarry argues, beauty helps us move toward fairness and justice.
When we see beautiful things, we want to protect them. That goes for paintings—think of all the climate control and security in art museums—as well as rainforests and ice floes.
And not only do we strive to protect beautiful things, but beautiful things help us see more beauty in the world at large. Beauty compels us to look for other examples of truth and beauty elsewhere. “It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.”
Here in Philadelphia, spring has sprung. There are colorful flowers on the ground and in the trees. Spring is a beautiful season, perhaps one meant to prepare us for all the giant labors to come this year.
Ports of Call
On Digital Afterlives: The digital afterlife industry has gotten new life in this age of large language models. This recent episode of Hi-Phi Nation, a highly-produced philosophy-through-storytelling podcast, gives a wonderful panoramic overview of the different perspectives in this space. How might chatbots of the deceased help or hinder human grief?
On Outsourcing Virtue: A nice follow-up to my post from last week, the tech philosopher L. M. Sacacas has a new article in The Point, a magazine of public philosophy, on virtue in the digital age.
On AI Hype: Perhaps we’ve all fallen prey to the hype, whether we think it’s a new dawn for humanity or the apocalypse. Might the hype be unwarranted? This week, I found this essay from January by Iris Van Rooij some good food for thought.
On Human Fertility: Last year I read the book Count Down by Shanna Swan, which was an eye-opener. In short, the human race is not only having fewer children for socioeconomic reasons, but also for biological reasons: we are becoming less fertile. This week, I came across the article “Fertility Collapse Demands New Cultures,” which has me reflecting on what it will mean, concretely, for the human population to decline as it will over the coming century.
To go along with this and the Paul Graham essay you linked in the last post: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
Glad you mentioned Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things"! I remember reading about the doors section in your INFO 508 class at Drexel University and the discussions we would have online about the book and "design". I'll be going over it again and in more detail!