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UGLY: How Unorthodox Thinking Will Save Design, by Tad Toulis

By Core Jr - October 30, 2008

Maarten Baas' 'Clay Furniture - Stacking Chairs'

Is 'Good Design' an asphyxiating dogma? Design is a peculiar activity: It's a creative process, but a process that subscribes to and reinforces certain restrictive attitudes. It can be rigid and self-policing, since a profession that earns its living by discerning what is good and bad must necessarily become judgmental. Ultimately this judgmental nature creates and enshrines certain points of view, which left unchallenged, become dogma. Today, one could argue that this dogma, generally predicated on longstanding ideas of 'rightness' and 'beauty' is choking the profession down, and worse yet, stifling its creativity as it faces some truly great problems—problems which if handled with new thinking and true creativity, will define the substance, practice and contribution of a generation of designers.

Embracing the word "ugly"—so readily identified with everything popular design claims to have been a reaction against—seems a logical choice if we are to create a vision for the practice of design freed from the restrictions and prejudices of its past.

Pretty: Right priced beauty But wait. Truth and beauty are good things, right? Not necessarily. Design's traditional preference on establishing 'order' has had the consequence of driving a collateral and unchecked pursuit of beauty. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, of course, and as such is subject to the vagaries of cultural bias and popular opinion. By degrees this pursuit of beauty has gradually been replaced with the much more predictable and less admirable accomplishment of achieving 'pretty'. And while consumer culture, planned obsolesce and design culture in general have benefited soundly from the creation, production and documentation of pretty things—the pursuit of pretty hasn't pushed the discipline of design into the tighter, less comfortable and ultimately more rigorous inquiries that outside forces (sustainability for example) are aligning to demand of us.

How might product designers better position the discipline to take on the hairy problems of sustainability, economic uncertainty, global competition and the like? Well, one thing is for certain, simply co-opting present patterns of consumption into activities and services linked to conservation won't get us there. That path might work if the world population of 6.5 billion was to stay fixed, but with an additional 3 billion consumers arriving to the party by 2050 we'll need to find more expedient (read: more creative) solutions.

Tjep's 'XXL Chair' and Front Design's 'Sketch Furniture'

PrettyUGLY: The case for 'UGLY' thinking in popular design Whether attributable to a crisis of faith or economic malaise, High Design's recent fascination with the aesthetics of the unorthodox has given rise to some of the freshest design proposals of recent memory. It's too early to tell whether these musings signal a genuine turning point in the evolution of design, but the newfound acceptance of UGLY as a legitimate voice in design sets the stage for some interesting possibilities at a time when the profession faces deep challenges.

Longtime anathema of design circles, I'd like to suggest that design capitalize on UGLY's present arrival on the scene to boldly re-imagine itself and its future. Appropriating UGLY affords a latitude that would serve to liberate design and design thinking, expediting the introduction of new voices and ideas that might stimulate and revitalize the practice of design. Embracing a word so readily identified with everything popular design claims to have been a reaction against seems a logical choice if we are to create a vision for the practice of design freed from the restrictions and prejudices of its past.
UGLY thinking: Where do we look for it? There are three contemporary developments I believe are already starting to re-characterize design; three developments that when mingled with the liberating effects of thinking UGLY offer potential insights on the future practice and content of design. These developments are: the impact of Computational Culture on design, lessons of Centralized and Decentralized Structures, and the implications of DIY/Hack Culture for product design.

Top: Rapid Prototyped Graffiti by Yale Wolf. Left: 'Cinderella Table' designed by Jeroen Verhoeven for Demakersvan, The Netherlands. Right: 'Type&Form' by Karsten Schmidt for Print Magazine's August 2008 issue.

Computational Culture That the computer and its attendant culture are influencing design is clear. Less clear and certainly less often considered is the specific manner in which the computer is mutating the practice of design itself. Fueled by the power of algorithms, computation culture is radically democratizing and retooling how we execute design. In the visual domains of rule-based systems, dynamic graphics and algorithmic art, new aesthetic vernaculars are being forged. On the process front, the computer's penchant for iteration is formally migrating a generation away from the idea of 'a solution' to the notion of 'a range of' solutions. In so far as these tools anticipate not one but several potential solutions, they are cementing into design the power of the 'happy accident'.

Similarly, the relative ease and economy with which the computer permits us to blend, splice, and mix across source material enhances design's natural inclination to branch and sub-branch into multiple lines of inquiry. In that so much design happens inside the act of iterating and refining, computational culture is empowering the single greatest domain of design: the process itself, or more specifically the 'flow' of the design process. It permits us to slowly relinquish our firm clench on aesthetic expectation, let go of our visual prejudices, and 'give in' to what the process offers up.

'Stacheln' from Shapeways. This Netherlands based company allows users to customize design from its online database.

Computational culture is also changing design by breaking down long-standing barriers to fabrication and distribution. Rapid prototyping services such as ZapFab, FirstCut and Shapeways offer professionals and non-professionals alike the tools necessary to execute and disseminate their work. Accelerating the situation, an ecosystem of sites like Ponoko and Etsy stand ready to provide these 'blackmarket' results a very real pipeline to consumers. The relatively low barrier of access to these tools in terms of cost and resources means that larger numbers are now able to bring their specific needs and ideas into discussion alongside formal design (aka big D design). While there is no guarantee that the increase in participants will elevate the quality of design work, it does suggest that the small and relatively exclusive core of design culture will be increasingly confronted with new and divergent points of view. And that's a good thing.

Failure to appreciate DIY/Hack Culture is to risk having professional design become as irrelevant to the contemporary landscape as record labels and network television are in the age of iTunes and YouTube.

Centralized and Decentralized Structures The lessons of Centralized and Decentralized Structures are important to design's future because they bring into discussion the interrelated concepts of platforms and systems—concepts which are essential to the future practice of product design because they invite us to think holistically.

One consequence of computational culture has been to deliver us a shared mental model of the web and an accompanying appreciation for the merits of networked systems. This common understanding is important because it equips all of us—consumers and designers alike—with a scaled model for the forces at work in the environment at large. The forces at work in the node/web dynamic are important because they mirror the forces at work in local/global relationships. In both cases the strengths and weaknesses of networked systems become readily apparent. A virus introduced to a network can start at one node and threaten the health of the entire system. Similarly, pollutants generated in China can cross the pacific and rain down on the western seaboard of North America. Or (borrowing from today's headlines) an economic system built on credit can be felled by the introduction of one flawed instrument: mortgage backed securities, for example. In both models nothing exists in a vacuum; for every action there is a reaction somewhere, sometime, someplace.

The lessons for designers of centralized and decentralized structures aren't just in regard to sustainability and global credit; they also lie in the insights they offer into models of manufacturing and distribution, of resource management and economic compensation. Kiva's Microloans, Zipcar's shared vehicles, Netflix's mega-management of DVDs and a host of emerging service models succeed because of the way in which they leverage the power embedded in networked structures. That the power of these systems is intimately wed to their fragility is a critical lesson for product design as it attempts to address increasingly interconnected problems. As designers we flatter ourselves when we forgo understanding the context of our design efforts or when we lend our professional talents to producing thoughtless iterations of old ideas. Thinking within systems will force us to operate in more responsible ways; to consider both agreeable (easy) and disagreeable (hard) factors as we work to gain understanding of a problem. Mainstreaming resolution of design problems across such contradictory filters is essential if we are to evolve as a profession and as a practice.

DIY/Hack Culture: Voices of the Amateur DIY/Hack Culture yields its lessons to design through evolving notions of popular aesthetics and consumer behavior. Informing these movements is a dramatic change in the consumer's stance relative to product: a shift from a 'read-only' model of consumption to a 'read-write' model of consumption. The participatory relationship between user and product has always been implicit; what is new is the degree to which consumers can now modulate the performance of products once thought too complex to be modifiable. Like 2x4s in a lumberyard, an emerging generation of consumers sees the shipped product as little more than a jumping off point for solutions that better support their own specific needs, tastes and whims. So much for the voice of the consumer; say hello to the will of the consumer.

The elevation of hack culture from a subversive activity to a pedestrian preoccupation also casts a light on changing notions of propriety. Websites such as LifeHacker, ThinkGeek and Inventables routinely categorize and publish burgeoning catalogs of top hacks. Reviewing these sites frequently, one can catch a glimpse of a new species of product design emerging. Alice Wang's Tyrant alarm which drunk dials your friends if you refuse to turn it off, or ThinkGeek's SnuZnLuz, which threatens to donate your money to the GOP offer up something truly new in consumer electronics: product with a soul layered atop its physical design and functional OS.

ThinkGeek's 'SnuzNLuz' and Alice Wang's 'Tyrant' alarm.

DIY/Hack Culture is also significant because it starts to break down the neat partitions between consumer and fabricator upon which contemporary product design has found its present place as arbitrator. Regardless of your position on amateur culture, it is clear that formal design will need to reevaluate its positioning if it is to continue to act as mediator between these converging groups. Failure to do so is to risk having professional design become as irrelevant to the contemporary landscape as record labels and network television are in the age of iTunes and YouTube. In a marketplace where designer, manufacturer and consumer finally meet on an equitable plane, the tools of specialization we've inherited will need to be rethought. If product evolves to accommodate the consumer's ultimate modification and final purposing of the object, what is the design process that supports this new definition of product?

What does it all mean? Design has long been about solving problems. Today the problems we face are in part problems created by our own professional activity. In such a climate, continued reliance on the practices and behaviors that led us here just won't do. New solutions need to be found. New practices identified. Let's take a look at what an UGLY methodology might look like:

General assumptions of UGLY:

- Question existing assumptions (i.e. is beauty intrinsically admirable?).

- Utilize intellect as well as intuition; temper your muscle memory with intellectual rigor.

- Don't rely on what you can anticipate; believe in the creative power of experimentation.

- Change: expect it, embrace it, understand it, leverage it.

- Sustainability: stop segregating it into a class of problems separate than the one you are currently working on.

Process notes for UGLY:

- Iterate Iterate Iterate: work to get it right, respect the resources required to execute your solution.

- Cut/Paste/Slice. Don't get locked in, draw upon sources from outside of your core discipline.

- Move in, out and across mediums frequently. The change in perspective will serve you and your ideas, forcing connections that might otherwise remain hidden.

- Be prepared to walk away from the problem you are tackling, but come back.

Behaviors of UGLY:

- Don't know, Do. Invest the time to vet out your ideas and assumptions.

- Listen to those you don't agree with, you'll learn more.

- Try things that scare you, you'll grow and your tool kit will as well.

- Co-opt an opposing point of view: live in the skin of another viewpoint.

- Disagree early and frequently, the debate will add depth to your solutions.

UGLY is about fundamentally recognizing the role 'popular' design has played in creating the culture of disposable consumption. UGLY seeks to utilize design's unique position as co-conspirator and change agent to help evolve a practice of consumer design that goes beyond stylistic achievement in its effort to seek out new techniques and processes that can progress the profession toward an offering better aligned with contemporary problems. While UGLY finds its name in a word seemingly at odds with aesthetic achievement, it does not reject aesthetic achievement. UGLY rejects aesthetic achievement only when it is arrived at to the exclusion or disregard of contemporary factors such as environmental impact, excessive cost or redundancy of purpose. If classic design of the post-war period arose as a response to a world without order, can there be any better chance for our profession then to adopt a new set of ideas in the face of world comprised of too much order, too much corporate influence, and an increasingly borderless consumer culture? I doubt it.

Tadeo Toulis is Creative Director of the Product Studio at Teague in Seattle Washington. Prior to joining Teague, Toulis worked at Lunar Design, Motorola's Advanced Concepts Group and Samsung's LA LAB. Toulis was also a founding member of designRAW a San Francisco based design collective.

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Archicgi Com

8 years ago

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Thank you for the interesting post!
Look at our works at http://archicgi.com
We are one of the largest 3d visualisation and 3d modeling services in the world
thank you

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Stacey

15 years ago

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Novelty is a huge component of desire. If the trend has been "good design," then it would naturally follow that "UGLY" might create real interest just because it provides a great contrast to what has been. Because our job is to create products, images, etc., that people want, I think it's actually the natural course of the design cycle/process rather than a whole new way of thinking.
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Online Printing | PrintPlace.com

15 years ago

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so not all of these items are ugly to all people. I agree that designers have to be judgmental, but that judgment is so subjective. who's to say what's ugly anyway? I find some of the pieces you've showcased here to be pretty creative, but the next reader might think they're ugly. Who's to say what's right?
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Andrew

15 years ago

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This article is definitely food for thought.
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slippy

15 years ago

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Good article... but I wish it wasn't written like the author was composing Technical Documents at Motorola. Maybe a few more commas - sorry, conventional and 'pretty' grammatical conceit.

"UGLY seeks to utilize design's unique position as co-conspirator and change agent to help evolve a practice of consumer design that goes beyond stylistic achievement in its effort to seek out new techniques and processes that can progress the profession toward an offering better aligned with contemporary problems." But can we get paid for it? Isn't this offering already the Instructables and DIY and hacking that has no need of 'formal' design? Won't the market choose for itself?
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anj

16 years ago

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As a proponent of "creative design thinking" you bring up an excellent point about how designers often miss or devalue an idea because it is ugly. What designers neglect to see is that ugly often has merit because it forces the artist to push their thinking/boundaries of their relationship to the concept/idea/embodiment. Embracing an ANTI "group herd mindset" enhances creative relationships between the product definition and one's physical, visceral senses. You've always promoted the idea of understanding the design space and finding the icons, and pushing the new directions for "diamonds in the rough". I think you've hit on a very valuable critique on ways in which designers can open their minds to designs that are not beautiful or finished in the traditional sense.
I disagree with the statement of UGLY being merely a vehicle for categorization of "bad" products, "home-made" aesthetic, and a simplistic approach to end-user design. A lot can be learned from taking the worst products and examining the motives behind their design and recognizing some pathos that is echoed in that object compared to the well-known, well-loved design patterns we're mired in. I think you're promoting recognizing this value in an area that designers often overlook because they don't seek to understand and contemplate the beauty of ugly. What designers toss away as ugly often contributes in beautiful ways to an ecology the user embraces and serves in a capacity no "pretty thing" can. Also, as a way to promote creative experience design, the examination of the special relationships people have with personal inventions can give insight to the NEW latent intents and needs that traditional design misses. For example, ripping digital music is an ugly process that evolved from homebrew audio/computer enthusiasts into the iPod mp3 market. There's a lot to be said for looking at the darker regions of design thinking and seeing value.
Thanks for the informative article. I would add on to your DIY sites, the instructables site, which is HUGE, along with readymade in Europe. Next time you're in San Fran, you should check out the instructables culture. it is a massive collection of "non-designers'" who are creating their own consumables. You'll be surprised at how much novel design insight goes on, at a deeper level than just aesthetics-- we're talking homebrew flamethrower backpacks to making your own felt from recycled sweaters. The experience of DIY culture brings beauty to the experience of using a product, rather than just visual and form aesthetics. Perhaps joining the two could create something new.
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Robert Vannrox

16 years ago

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Outstanding article. Very well done. Worth it's own bookmark...
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Product Tank

16 years ago

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Tad. All you're talking about is good design, design that shows awareness of all the factors involved in producing a good product. Yet you have to give it a new - misleading name to what is really an old problem. Lets make our products 'UGLY', or we could just make them 'BETTER'?

Computers whilst making things easier, also allow certain areas of design to think that they can 'short cut' the design process, (especially students) leading to a raft of poorly designed products. Fast tracking the design process does not always lead to the best results. Whilst software currently allows consumers to create unique pieces, the things they're producing are fairly dumb/inanimate ie, a lamp shade. This process will always be based on changing the aesthetic around some form of frame and in most cases this will be more of a hindrance to good design - except for the lamp shade.

How can programming a bedside clock to drunk dial you mates if you don't turn it off, give the object a soul? If it anticipated how late you were or your mood and modified its alert message it might get closer, but it would still be way off the mark. It's not I-Robot.
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Tim

16 years ago

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Isn't it strange that no matter how hard we try to embrace change, we resist abandoning the obsolete? If design is ever in need of saving, I suggest we cull it and move onto bigger, better things.

The 'moral' was greatly appreciated by the way!

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Anne

16 years ago

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I think there is a lot of great stuff in this piece, but the search for the new anything is a Western preoccupation and as such, is utterly conservative and conventional. 20th-century American consumer capitalism is built upon ideas about planned obsolesence and the endless production of the "new". 20th century modern art movements were about tearing down accepted notions of romantic beauty. Modern art was "degenerative"; later, punk rock was "ugly"; later still, deconstructed architecture was "ugly"... Very quickly, these movements/ideas/styles became fodder for the mass market. For a great piece on the trap of capitalism in which the endless search for the new creates the impossibility of the new, see Thomas Frank's "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," in one of the early issues of the Baffler. Tactical inversion is always bound up in an overly simplified notion of polar opposition in which the two terms are mutually defining and ultimately reinforce the paradigm--in this case the dominance/deployment of taste regimes as the defining characteristic of design. (Which isn't necessarily all bad--it's an aspect of Western design culture worthy of a more complicated discussion.)

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AN

16 years ago

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"How might product designers better position the discipline to take on the hairy problems of sustainability, economic uncertainty, global competition and the like?" - sadly, the author offers no clues as the article itself is more of the same tired and self-evident simplistic drivel that too often passes for design "thinking" today. Alright, the moral here, folks, is "stay open-minded and do not subscribe to any one way of doing things and maybe, just maybe we'll save our sorry selves". Design needs no "saving", except from the very same people now espousing "the new ugly" as the latest gimmick to - curiously - try to redefine a profession many of us feel needs no redefining to begin with.

"can there be any better chance for our profession then to adopt a new set of ideas in the face of world comprised of too much order, too much corporate influence, ...". Too much order? Maybe the author needs to spend some time with ordinary people and see if their lives are "too ordered". If anything, design is now more than ever required to bring calm, order, safety and any form of serenity to people - the vast majority of whom are non-designers who couldn't give a damn about the convoluted "theories" in this article, or whatever consequence DIY/hack "culture" is bound to have on billions too busy living their lives to find time to create their own consumables. Some of the conclusions in this article are just laughable and show that many designers are either totally disconnected from the aspirations of the common man and woman, or simply lack basic empathy for the very people they were taught to serve (hint: not the corporations).

Design is a culturally-dependent problem-solving activity and as such is unconcerned with decoration, be it "beautiful", "pretty" or "ugly", these are interpretations of a final result. Products and graphics, interiors and fashion have to function, first and foremost. And, by the way, people do look at design to provide order, still.
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Sluggo

16 years ago

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Beauty is an evolutionary device for reproduction, to discount it is to make a real error. The Saarinen dining table I use every day is second generation and will probably survive three or four generations of use because it is beautiful and functional. Most of the examples you show above are beautiful, just not to popular tastes.
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Hugo Eccles

16 years ago

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Tad, interesting article. You seem to be talking about an number of interesting issues that recent events have brought into sharp focus: Homogeneous systems are intrinsically dangerous and at risk of collapse due to unforeseen circumstances (complexity theory) whereas systems that demonstrate diversity are inherently more robust. I agree with reacting against an 'universal' aesthetic of beauty but I suspect that the latest trend of 'ugly' is just that- a fashion. Oscar Wilde expressed it well with his observation that "fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that it must re-invent itself every 6 months". Aesthetics should never be a starting point or a goal- this is the fundamental difference between design (thought) and styling (aesthetics). Another quote, this time from Buckminster Fuller: "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." or, alternatively, from Charles Eames: "I always choose function over style, because function never goes out of style".
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Klinker @ Cranbrook

16 years ago

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Nice article, Tad.
I'm comforted by smart, ugly things. They remind me to relax and to accept my own weird imperfections. A Dutch friend told me that every interior needs at least one ugly element for this reason.

Design Culture needs more aesthetic channels to surf - that's for sure. But in the rush to 'get ugly' maybe we should also recognize that there is 'good, sophisticated ugly' and just plain 'bad ugly'. A recent walk through Walmart proved that there is no shortage of bad, ugly products. Apparently, lots of designers aren't prepared to make 'good design' yet either. So maybe it's important to learn how to make good design first, then get ugly. Or learn the rules, and then break them.
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sba

16 years ago

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Most of the above articles points are based on western philosophical precepts with regard to design, consumption, corporation and trend forecasting. Any prognostication about the future of design must include an informed understanding of the thousands of years and billions of people living to the east.

Specifically, the material future that we imagine (and the ideas that will change it), create and manufacture it will include eastern Confucian ideology as well as the relatively short history of western capitalist info/industrialization.

Trying to impose western order on eastern culture is and has proved time and again to be futile.

It is a game changer....and indeed it will be 难看的.

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Dave5

16 years ago

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Awesome! A fantastic piece!
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