Why do we care about design?
We're authorized to reasonably reject bad design decisions for the same reason we care about design in the first place: because of the inextricably socio-normative structure of design practice itself.
I wrote last week about the role of interpersonal justification in our ability to make assessments about good and bad design decisions. Some of you may have noticed that our friend Kush stopped by and suggested that there might be good therapeutic reasons for talking about design in terms other than “good” and “bad”.
I disagree with this, although I think it is likely that our disagreement is at least partially motivated by differing conceptions of what it means for a design decision to be “good” or “bad”. I wrote, in response to his comment, that bad design decision just is one that can’t be justified to a “motivated, reasonable interlocutor.” It’s a fair question to ask, though, why it makes sense to think about badness as determined by a justificatory failure, rather than by some other standard.
The appropriate response to that question is to ask how else it could be determined. It may be helpful here to consider an analogous case.
What does it mean for something to be beautiful? Certainly, first, it means that it is beautiful to us, human beings. Claiming a wider range of applicability for the concept of beauty than that just seems silly.
However, if wider boundaries on the concept of beauty seem inappropriate, so do significantly narrower ones. An individual’s experience of beauty could not be understood as such without appeal to the shared characteristics of this experience by our fellow human beings. If most of us did not experience beauty in some relevant similar ways, the concept of beauty would be meaningless, uncommunicable.
Now, we humans happen to find that certain things outside of ourselves set off this experience that we call “the experience of beauty” in us, and we also happen to find that this experience is one that gives us pleasure. So we come to value it, and the things that set it off. Since we value beauty and beautiful things, and are motivated, rational, tool-using creatures, we attempt to proliferate these kinds of things. Let’s call this practice art. Obviously, the term “art” is normally used in a way broad enough to also account for practices which create and cultivate other shared values, i.e. uncanniness. But for the sake of argument, I’ll use it in a narrower sense.
So now we have art, and we have works of art, which we all encounter from time to time. When we encounter a work of art, we make judgments about it. We decided that the work is beautiful, or is interesting, or is neither. Because of the status of these values, our judgments are themselves kinds of normative claims. Kant thought something like this: when we judge a work of art beautiful, he wrote (more or less), we not only take pleasure in it but demand that everyone else do so, too. In some important respect, then, works of art oblige us to make these kinds of claims on each other.
The point is that the practice of art has an inextricable socio-normative component. Art just wouldn’t be art without it. What’s more, I’m suggesting, if you fail to appreciate this social component, you are unable to appreciate the value of art in an important way. One of the things that makes art something that we should care about in the first place is that it is a way that we human beings engage in an ongoing dialogue about one of our most important values.
Analogously, I think, a designed object obliges a kind of normative claim about usefulness. If a work of art aspires to instantiate experiences of beauty in people, designed objects aspire to be useful. Designers implicitly advance the normative claim that their objects are useful just by designing them. This is because design practice — along similar lines to artistic practice — has a socio-normative dimension already in place.
That’s why we all care about design in the first place. Design is our shared enterprise to create a world that serves, supports, or accommodates us better. We’ve each got a stake in the justifiability of a given design decision because if we let unjustifiable ones pass, we might end up with a world that we like less than the alternative. So in this way, the things about design that make us care about it are also reasons why we’re authorized to call certain decisions good or bad if we can reasonably reject the rationale behind them.
And if that’s all true, I think it follows pretty closely that design comes with some normative ethical obligations built in as well. I’ll pick up there next week.
| Tagged with: | Art, Beauty, Claims, Design, Design Ethics, Justification, Normativity, Obligation, Usefulness, Values |
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Comments on this post
1.
Aha! Thanks for penning my view in your post. Now let me shoot.
Your argument appears to be very Kantian and yet in some instances, it reads otherwise. You argue that the concept of beauty is shared in that the experience of beauty is external to us. Here, you seem to be alluding to empirical attributes, which contribute to the experience of beauty. This is following the eighteenth century British aestheticians like Edmund Burke who attempted to explain the perception of what is beautiful via empirical characteristics such as utility, society and what have you.
But before I could counter-argue saying that you’ve completely overlooked the internal makeup of the individual experiencing that design, which is what the German aestheticians of that same period concentrated on, you bring in Kant, and quite like him complicate the whole picture. :)
You will agree that the Kantian philosophy of beauty/aesthetic pleasure argued against considerations of uni-dimensional utility. Kant seemed to attach beauty to not one, but an array of purposes of which the experiencing subject was also an integral part. He focused on a-priori cognitive faculties, which according to him structured all experience. Kant privileged the mental realm over material (British aestheticians) and the social (not addressed).
When I argued against “good/bad” rational binaries, I was hinting precisely at the otherwise less discussed social dimension. And by social I mean both the deep structures and the social (read individual) construction of what is beautiful.
This leads me to yet another related binary of significance and signification. Between significance and signification of beauty, it is not whether significance triumphs signification or vice-versa. I am keen to propose a dialectical relation between the two - an understanding or a criticism arrived at through a consideration of both and also a critical third moment both formed and in formation (quite in the tradition of Lefebvre, Soja).
The design criticism in this way goes against rationalization or good-bad/subject-object/signification-significance/aposterior-apriori binaries. It keeps things open-ended and most importantly fomrative - which is not to say, what results is is confusion. It is simply to say, there is constructive food for thought both for the critic/reviewer and the student/designer/individual. Neither claims privilege.
Over to you!
2.
Hi Kush,
I’m not sure where you’re getting any claims out of me about apriority. I also am not sure how thinking about subject/object and signifier/signified relationships is productive, although I gather from the rest of your comment that it might be to you because you hold a different concept about what an agent is than I do.
My view is that the internal makeup of individual agents is itself a socio-normative achievement, and that the process of asking for and giving reasons is how we come to understand not only our important values, but ourselves as both rational actors and as appreciators of those values.
On this view, I think that posing the matter in terms of what subject/object or signifier/signified relations obtain is already giving too much power to what are ultimately normative (and potentially unproductive) metaphysical distinctions.
That’s a long discussion, though, and one that I probably can’t have on BlogLESS. By the same token, as long as we agree that good and bad are ultimately socially developed concepts, and that they way in which they’re developed in by a process of individual agents asking for and giving reasons, then I don’t see how one’s view of agency bears on our ability to judge certain design decisions as good or bad ones.
More on this thread in the pipe for Monday.
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