One student who has flourished in this whole-minded atmosphere is Sean Canty, a junior. He’s a smart, skinny kid who is as poised as a veteran designer, yet as gangly as a typical sixteen-year-old. When I talk to him after classes let out, he tells me that in his rough-and-tumble middle school, “I was the kid who always sketched in class. I was the kid who was always good in art class. But you’re always the oddball because the artistic person in the classroom is the weird one.” Since enrolling as a freshman, he has found his comfort zone and gained a range of experience unusual for someone his age. He interns two afternoons a week at a local architecture firm. He’s traveled to New York to design a poster with the help of an architect mentor he met through CHAD. He’s built models of “two cool towers” he’d like to see constructed one day. Yet Canty says the most important thing he’s learned at CHAD is broader than any particular skill: “I’ve learned how to work with people and how to be inspired by other people.”
“Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.”
—PAOLA ANTONELLI,
curator of architecture
and design, Museum
of Modern Art
Indeed, merely walking the halls here is inspiring. Student art-work is on display in the lobby. The hallways sport furniture donated by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. And throughout the school are the works of designers such as Karim Rashid, Kate Spade, and Frank Gehry, some of which are presented in lockers CHAD students have converted into display cases. The students all wear blue button-down shirts and tan pants. The boys also wear ties. “They feel and look like young architects and designers,” the school’s development director, Barbara Chandler Allen, tells me, no small feat in a school where a substantial portion of the student body is eligible for free lunches.
For many of the students, the school is a haven in a harsh world—a place that’s safe and orderly and where the adults care and have high expectations. While the typical Philadelphia public high school has a daily attendance rate of 63 percent, at CHAD it’s 95 percent. Equally revealing is what isn’t here. CHAD is one of the only high schools in Philadelphia without metal detectors. Instead, when students, teachers, and visitors pass through the front door on Sansom Street, they’re greeted by a colorful mural crafted by the American minimalist Sol Lewitt.
Although CHAD is a pioneer, it is not the only school of its kind. Miami’s public school system boasts Design and Architecture Senior High, New York City has the High School of Art and Design. Washington, D.C., has a charter elementary school called the Studio School, where many of the teachers are professional artists. And beyond the elementary and secondary level, design education is positively booming. In the United States, as we learned in Chapter 3, the MFA is becoming the new MBA. In the United Kingdom, the number of design students climbed 35 percent between 1995 and 2002. In Asia, the sum total of design schools in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore thirty-five years ago was . . . zero. Today, the three countries have more than twenty-three design schools among them.2
At these schools, as at CHAD, many students ultimately might not become professional designers. That’s fine, says deputy principal Christina Alvarez. “We’re building an awareness in students of what design is and how it can affect their lives,” she tells me. “I see the design curriculum as providing a modern version of a liberal arts education for these kids.” No matter what path these students pursue, their experience at this school will enhance their ability to solve problems, understand others, and appreciate the world around them—essential abilities in the Conceptual Age.
The Democracy of Design
Frank Nuovo is one of the world’s best-known industrial designers. If you use a Nokia cell phone, chances are good Nuovo helped design it. But as a younger man, Nuovo had a difficult time explaining his career choice to his family. “When I told my father I wanted to be a designer, he said, ‘What does that mean?’” Nuovo told me in an interview. We “need to reduce the nervousness” surrounding design, Nuovo says. “Design in its simplest form is the activity of creating solutions. Design is something that everyone does every day.”
From the moment some guy in a loincloth scraped a rock against a piece of flint to create an arrowhead, human beings have been designers. Even when our ancestors were roaming the savannah, our species has always harbored an innate desire for novelty and beauty. Yet for much of history, design (and especially its more intimidating cousin, Design) was often reserved for the elite, who had the money to afford such frivolity and the time to enjoy it. The rest of us might occasionally dip our toes into significance, but mostly we stayed at the utility end of the pool.
In the last few decades, however, that has begun to change. Design has become democratized. If you don’t believe me, take this test. Below are three type fonts. Match the font on the left with the correct font name on the right.
1. A Whole New Mind
2. A Whole New Mind
3. A Whole New Mind
a. Times New Roman
b. Arial
c. Courier New
My guess, having conducted this experiment many times in the course of researching this book, is that most of you completed the task quickly and correctly.* But had I posed this challenge, say, twenty-five years ago, you probably wouldn’t have had a clue. Back then, fonts were the specialized domain of typesetters and graphic designers, something that regular folks like you and me scarcely recognized and barely understood. Today we live and work in a new habitat. Most Westerners who can read, write, and use a computer are also literate in fonts. “If you are a native of the rain forest, you learn to distinguish many sorts of leaves,” says Virginia Postrel. “We learn to distinguish many different typefaces.”3
Fonts, of course, are just one aspect of the democratization of design. One of the most successful retail ventures of the last decade is Design Within Reach, a network of thirty-one studios whose mission is to bring great design to the masses. In DWR’s studios and catalogs are the sort of beautiful chairs, lamps, and desks that the wealthy have always purchased but that are now available to wider segments of the population. Target, a family visit to which I described in Chapter 2, has gone even further in democratizing design, often obliterating the distinction between high fashion and mass merchandise, as it has with its Isaac Mizrahi clothing line. In the pages of The New York Times, Target advertises its $3.49 Philippe Starck spill-proof baby cup alongside ads for $5,000 Concord LaScala watches and $30,000 Harry Winston diamond rings. Likewise, Michael Graves, whose cerulean toilet brush I purchased during that Target trip, now sells kits that buyers can use to construct stylish gazebos, studios, and porches. Graves, who has designed libraries, museums, and multimillion-dollar homes, is too expensive for most of us to hire to build out the family room. But for $10,000, we might be able to buy one of his Graves Pavilions and enjoy the beauty and grace of one of the world’s finest architects literally in our own backyard.
“Aesthetics matter.
Attractive things work better.”
—DON NORMAN, author
and engineering
professor
The mainstreaming of design has infiltrated beyond the commercial realm. It’s no surprise that Sony has four hundred in-house designers. But how about this? There are sixty designers on the staff of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.4 And while God is bringing artists into the room, Uncle Sam is redoing the room itself. The General Services Administration, which oversees the construction of U.S. government buildings, has a “Design Excellence” program that aims to turn drab federal facilities into places more pleasant to work in and more beautiful to view. Even U.S. diplomats have responded to the age’s new imperatives. In 2004, the U.S. State Department declared that it was abandoning the font it had used for years—Courier New 12—and replacing it with a new standard font that would henceforth be required in all documents: Times
New Roman 14. The internal memorandum announcing the change explained that the Times New Roman font “takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look.”5 What was more remarkable than the change itself—and what would have been unthinkable had the change occurred a generation ago—was that everybody in the State Department understood what the memo was talking about.
Design Means Business/
Business Means Design
The democratization of design has altered the competitive logic of businesses. Companies traditionally have competed on price or quality, or some combination of the two. But today decent quality and reasonable price have become merely table stakes in the business game—the entry ticket for being allowed into the marketplace.Once companies satisfy those requirements, they are left to compete less on functional or financial qualities and more on ineffable qualities such as whimsy, beauty, and meaning. This insight isn’t terribly new. Tom Peters, whom I quoted in the last chapter, was making the business case for design before most businesspeople knew the difference between Charles Eames and Charlie’s Angels. (“Design,” he advises companies, “is the principal difference between love and hate.”) But as with the State Department’s font memo, what’s remarkable about the business urgency of design isn’t so much the idea but how widely held it has become.
“Businesspeople don’t need to understand designers better. They need to be designers.”
—ROGER MARTIN, dean,
Rotman School of
Management
Consider two men from separate countries and different worlds. Paul Thompson is the director of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. Norio Ohga is the former chairman of the high-tech powerhouse Sony.
Here’s Thompson: “Manufacturers have begun to recognize that we can’t compete with the pricing structure and labor costs of the Far East. So how can we compete? It has to be with design.”6
Here’s Ohga: “At Sony, we assume that all products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price, performance, and features. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace.”7
Thompson’s and Ohga’s arguments are increasingly borne out on corporate income statements and stock tables. For every percent of sales invested in product design, a company’s sales and profits rise by an average of 3 to 4 percent, according to research at the London Business School.8 Similarly, other research has shown that the stocks of companies that place a heavy emphasis on design out-perform the stocks of their less design-centric counterparts by a wide margin.9
Cars are a good example. As I noted in Chapter 2, the United States now has more autos than drivers—which means that the vast majority of Americans who want a car can have one. That ubiquity has brought down prices and boosted quality, leaving design as a key criterion for consumer decisions. U.S. automakers have slowly learned this lesson. “For a long time, going back to the 1960s, marketing directors were more focused on science and engineering, gathering data and crunching numbers, and they neglected the importance of the other side of the brain, the right side,” says Anne Asenio, a design director for GM. And that eventually proved disastrous for Detroit. It took mavericks like Bob Lutz, whom we heard from in Chapter 3, to show that utility requires significance. Lutz famously declared that GM was in the art business—and worked to make designers the equals of engineers. “You need to differentiate or you cannot survive,” says Asenio. “I think designers have a sixth sense, an antenna, that allows them to accomplish this better than other professionals.”10
Other car companies have shifted gears and headed in this same direction. BMW’s Chris Bangle says, “We don’t make ‘automobiles.’” BMW makes “moving works of art that express the driver’s love of quality.”11 One Ford vice president says that “in the past, it was all about a big V-8. Now it’s about harmony and balance.”12 So frenzied are the car companies to differentiate by design that “in Detroit’s macho culture, horsepower has taken a back seat to ambience,” as Newsweek puts it. “The Detroit Auto Show . . . might as well be renamed the Detroit Interior Decorating Show.”13
“Design correctly harnessed can enhance life, create jobs, and make people happy—not such a bad thing.”
—PAUL SMITH, fashion
designer
Your kitchen offers further evidence of the new premium on design. We see it, of course, in those high-end kitchens with gleaming Sub-Zero refrigerators and gargantuan Viking ranges. But the phenomenon is most evident in the smaller, less expensive goods that populate the cabinets and countertops of the United States and Europe. Take the popularity of “cutensils”—kitchen utensils that have been given personality implants. Open the drawer in an American or European home and you’ll likely find a bottle opener that looks like a smiling cat, a spaghetti spoon that grins at you and the pasta, or a vegetable brush with googly eyes and spindly legs. Or just go shopping for a toaster. You’ll have a hard time finding a plain old model, because most of the choices these days are stylized, funky, fanciful, sleek, or some other adjective not commonly associated with small appliances.
Some pundits might write off these developments as mass manipulation by wily marketers or further proof that well-off Westerners are mesmerized by style over substance. But that view misreads economic reality and human aspiration. Ponder that humble toaster. The typical person uses a toaster at most 15 minutes per day. The remaining 1,425 minutes of the day the toaster is on display. In other words, 1 percent of the toaster’s time is devoted to utility, while 99 percent is devoted to significance. Why shouldn’t it be beautiful, especially when you can buy a good-looking one for less than forty bucks? Ralph Waldo Emerson said that if you built a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to your door. But in an age of abundance, nobody will come knocking unless your better mousetrap also appeals to the right side of the brain.
Design has also become an essential aptitude because of the quickened metabolism of commerce. Today’s products make the journey from L-Directed utility to R-Directed significance in the blink of an eye. Think about cell phones. In less than a decade, they’ve gone from being a luxury for some to being a necessity for most to becoming an accessorized expression of individuality for many. They’ve morphed from “logical devices” (which emphasize speed and specialized function) to “emotional devices” (which are “expressive, customizable, and fanciful”), as Japanese personal electronics executive Toshiro Iizuka puts it.14 Consumers now spend nearly as much on decorative (and nonfunctional) faceplates for their cell phones as they do on the phones themselves. Last year, they purchased about $4 billion worth of ring tones.15
Indeed, one of design’s most potent economic effects is this very capacity to create new markets—whether for ring tones, cutensils, photovoltaic cells, or medical devices. The forces of Abundance, Asia, and Automation turn goods and services into commodities so quickly that the only way to survive is by constantly developing new innovations, inventing new categories, and (in Paola Antonelli’s lovely phrase) giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing.
Designing Our Future
Design can do more than supply our kitchens with cooking implements that stir both our sauces and our souls. Good design can change the world. (And so, alas, can bad design.)
“It’s not true that what is useful is beautiful. It is what is beautiful that is useful. Beauty can improve people’s way of life and thinking.”
—ANNA CASTELLI FERRIERI,
furniture designer
Take health care. Most hospitals and doctors’ offices are not exactly repositories of charm and good taste. And while physicians and administrators might favor changing that state of affairs, they generally consider it secondary to the more pressing matters of prescribing drugs and performing surgery. But a growing body of evidence is showing that improving the design of medical settings helps patients get better faster. For example, in a study at Pittsburgh’
s Montefiore Hospital, surgery patients in rooms with ample natural light required less pain medication, and their drug costs were 21 percent lower, than their counterparts in traditional rooms.16 Another study compared two groups of patients who suffered identical ailments. One group was treated in a dreary conventional ward of the hospital. The other was treated in a modern, sunlit, visually appealing ward. Patients in the better-designed ward needed less pain medicine than those in the less inviting ward and were discharged on average nearly two days early. Many hospitals are now redesigning their facilities to include greater amounts of natural light, waiting rooms that provide both privacy and comfort, and an array of design features such as meditative gardens and labyrinths that physicians now realize can speed the healing process.
Similar potential exists in bringing a new design sensibility to two other settings where beauty has long taken a backseat to bureaucracy—public schools and public housing. A study at Georgetown University found that even if the students, teachers, and educational approach remained the same, improving a school’s physical environment could increase test scores by as much as 11 percent.17 Meanwhile, public housing, notorious for its abominable aesthetics, may be in the very early stages of a renaissance. A nice example is architect Louise Braverman’s Chelsea Court in New York City. Constructed on an austere budget, the building has colorful stairwells, airy apartments, and a roof deck with Philippe Starck furniture—all for tenants who are low-income or (formerly) homeless.
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