Good design, obviously, has both legs and one other attribute that I call Design Morphogenesis. One good definition of morphogenesis is “The process in complex system-environment exchanges that tends to elaborate a system’s given form or structure. Examples are …evolution and learning. A morphogenic system is capable of maintaining its continuity and integrity by changing essential aspects of its structure or organization.”
Rather like Darwin’s finches, good designs follow the dictum of form must follow function, i.e., the form (or design) must spring naturally from the functional needs of the artifact, whether it is a chair, a web page or a newspaper. And also like the variety of finches on different Galapagos islands, good design must adapt as functional needs change.
Since I work mainly in the field of newspaper design, allow me to go there for an example. Years ago Long Island’s Newsday went with the tabloid format, despite its bad reputation for “yellow journalism,” because most of its readers wanted to read it on the train into Manhattan each day. The tab format is much easier to read on a train than a broadsheet, like the New York Times. Form follows function.
One can see this good/bad design dichotomy all around: sticking with newspapers, let’s compare the design of The Hartford Courant, The Boston Globe or Germany’s Die Zeit with that of the local fishwrap. It is clear that (a) functionally/structurally they are all alike, and (b) aesthetically, there is a wide gap. You can see the design gap everywhere you look: buildings, advertisements, cars, clothes.
The problem is that too many people involved appear to be missing the gene for aesthetics. But because the ability to design is so widespread, Design Darwinism doesn’t have the chance to operate: the hordes of bad simply overwhelm the good. How does this happen? That brings us to memes.
According to memecentral.com, “Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life.” In other words memes extend Darwinian evolution to our culture and our minds. Once a mutant meme, or idea, enters our culture, it can spread like a virus, especially in today’s techno-mediacentric world.
For instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was considered good to be pale. Having a sun tan meant that you were a poor, lower-class soul, doomed to work outside as a common laborer. Then somehow the meme mutated and the opposite became true. Now people try purposefully to get as tanned as possible, using tanning salons and tanning creams, both of which would have been incomprehensible a century or so ago. Culture adapted to the needs of the new meme, spread largely by the media.
For my money, the worst recent design meme was desktop publishing. Once the Mac and PageMaker hit the world, everybody – even the “one-legged” people – truly believed that they could design quality print pieces. Soon, the ugly overwhelmed the good and the world of graphic design has never been the same. The equivalent has happened in other design. Not that I am a neo-Luddite, but I lay the blame at the feet of technology, that great leveler of true talent.
Technology has allowed the bad to surpass the good by putting tools in the hands of people who shouldn’t be allowed to design.
Darwin’s finches wouldn’t have survived, despite their impressive adaptability, if a competitor had the tools to drive most of them off the island. Good design has failed to drive out the bad because technology allows its greater numbers to overwhelm.
And we two-legged designers continue to shake our heads and suffer.
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Owner, News Design School