Beauty is Valuable
January 4th, 2010Seth Godin posted a great piece on beauty last year. In Beauty as a signaling strategy Seth contends that beauty is attractive because it communicates the investment of time, effort or expense – or all three.
Ultimately, Seth is articulating a core principle of design….that beauty is valuable. We believe this deeply.
But this is something that designers have been made to feel somewhat ashamed of. As an industry we have been forced to find elaborate ways of qualifying the value of “styling”. The development of ancillary services in industrial design has exploded in order to communicate that the practice has some depth. Design research, ethnography, change management, project planning are all buttresses against the looming maxim that beauty is only skin deep.
In some way we are led to believe that truth and authenticity are never beautiful. But the problem with beauty is not that it is shallow, the problem is that it is subjective, difficult to measure and impossible to predict. There is an element of magic that is conjures beauty out of thin air. This does not sit well with the system into which industrial design has to play. This system has been created by economists, marketers and engineers who thrive on measureability and predictability.
Beauty/attraction/desire trancend all of this.