The aesthetic divide.
I got an email from Niko on my post about operations as marketing that pointed me towards this great interview with designers Kenya Hara and Naoto Fukasawa. In particular it was this quote from Fukasawa that Niko pointed me towards:
“For example, if a client asked me “Please design a chair” while sitting in a good chair, I might go so far as to say, “Why? You’re already sitting in a nice one!” That’s almost it. People think that design is about making new things, creating new stimulations. But what about the good relationships that already exist? Why abandon all that and make things all over again? If there is already a relationship with a chair that is 95 percent good, then all that has to be done is to adjust the remaining 5 percent to suit the current needs. The client might persist and say “No, no, I want you to design it, Mr. Fukasawa.” But what I’m trying to say is that the important thing is how much design you can do with the remaining 5 percent of what has been 95 percent completed, how you can make the best out of the design that has already been developed and improved, and make your design along with what’s already there, instead of just throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Of course, to design that 5 percent is not as easy as it sounds because you have to further improve what’s already a great design.”
Later in the article he goes on to say:
“I’m not interested in designing something that is design-ey. Or maybe I’m just not interested in doing design-ey design. I like something that feels like maybe it was designed, maybe not, but just makes me say, “Hey, that’s nice!” Lately I’ve been designing things like the runners on the ceiling and the wooden pieces that fit in to connect the wall and the floor. When those small things are designed nicely, the whole space becomes really beautiful. I’m also working on designing soaps and Japanese paper. I want to design the unnoticeable.”
I think there are a lot of aspects of this mindset that really resonate with us here. In particular, the idea that the best design or the best solutions aren’t always built from scratch, but that they are often things that make other work more complete.
In many ways I think this was one of the tenets that the partners came together around. We’ve always been proud of having figured out a creative way to use a client’s existing assets in our work rather than always wanting to scrap them and start over. We’ve always preferred social media ideas which run on top of existing social media platforms rather than ones that try to create brand new social networks. But I think we’ve also had to unlearn a lot of ingrained thinking from our advertising lives as well.
In our advertising lives we had to fight for attention so hard that we made being attention-grabbing and disruptive a basic, fundamental building-block of everything. It was a filter through which we ran everything from strategy to execution to channel.
However, this mindset is positively damaging in the creation of services or things that are useful. Things that are designed to help you do something can be beautiful and elegant but shouldn’t necessarily call attention to themselves, otherwise that interferes with their real purpose.
I think this is something that we’ve figured out gradually through working on projects and through seeing what really works. I hadn’t been able to articulate it properly until recently. But I think it’s also why we made design such a big part of the company (33%) and we’ve not drawn from advertising agency creative departments at all.
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Tags: conservation, elegance, solutions
o.s Says:
October 9th, 2008 at 5:13 amThis, to me, is web 2.0. But I don’t want to call it web 2.0 because it’s not only about the web – and web 2.0 is about frame of mind, handling old truths (economic models, distribution models and rights models – Hulu for example) etc, and not much about technology. Anything can be done with the technologies – thinking it up, the idea, is the web 2.0. I think new ways of thinking, that might have begun online with open source, APIs, social networks and likemind mentality – is spilling off into the flesh world (or maybe this is not even a question of).
A big part of web 2.0 is, of course, meshing, open source and building from what is already there (Youtube distibution and upload function, unbranded, via API for example). This means ideas are produced faster and better. The article seem to apply that on the “un-digital” world as well. Sounds right. Feels like there’s a loose connection to unproduct/unbrand too, doesn’t it?
Adrian Ho Says:
October 9th, 2008 at 9:08 amI think you’re right, there’s definitely links to web 2.0 in this type of thinking – or at least the best of web 2.0. However, because web 2.0 business models are based on advertising many of them are still torn between allowing you to do a task and drawing attention to themselves.
links for 2008-10-12 « zero influence link blog Says:
October 12th, 2008 at 3:00 pm[...] From The Head Of Zeus Jones » Blog Archive » The aesthetic divide. Things that are designed to help you do something can be beautiful and elegant but shouldn’t necessarily call attention to themselves, otherwise that interferes with their real purpose. (tags: design aesthetics service advertising unproduct) [...]
brianwaka Says:
November 24th, 2008 at 10:32 pmThe need to be disruptive and “new for new’s sake” isn’t just ingrained in the advertising world. It’s a part of our culture in so many different ways. We are trained as consumers to demand the new, to wait for the next generation product, not just the next incrementally 5% better version. Perhaps the ad men created this behavior and way of thinking, but it is now just who we are as a people.
Perhaps this is changing now, however. More and more people are now starting to wise up that we can’t be insatiable consumers forever. I’ll truly believe it when my carbon cop friends realize that easing up on hyper-consumpution and living “green” means buying the used ‘93 Honda Civic, not the 2009 Smart Car.
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