Design and Aesthetics

A Reader

Mo Dodson, Jerry Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415072335
• eBook ISBN: 9781134908493
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Design and Aesthetics: A Reader is a comprehensive student reader on design history and aesthetic theory. It includes contributions from many of the writers whose work has been foundational to these two fields, including classic articles by Raymond Williams and Roger Scruton, and newer articles which provide an overview of current concerns and debates.
The role of design in the world today has aroused much controversy. The first half of this book deals with the main arguments which have emerged from contemporary analysis of its role in the communication process. Essays focus on the question of absolute aesthetic standards versus cultural relativism, and the role of objects in cultural and social life. The second part turns to particular areas of design history, ranging from architecture and pottery to the history of dress. These two main sectors are prefaced by contextualising introductions by Jerry Palmer and Mo Dodson.

Part I

Chapter 1: Introduction to Part I

Jerry Palmer

We start from the commonplace recognition that ‘an aesthetics of design’ is always problematic insofar as ‘design’ and ‘aesthetics’ refer to divergent traditions of understanding creative activity—indeed to different traditions of such activity—despite twentieth-century attempts to resolve divergence (both in theory and in practice) around slogans such as ‘form follows function’. The essays that compose this collection all address some aspect or other of the knot of problems that arises when this subject is considered.

It is difficult to reconcile the criteria for design-based artefacts with the traditional aesthetic criteria applied to the arts. This is because the basis of the latter is the universality and non-utilitarian nature of beauty, whereas the basis of design is that the object in question is created for the benefit of some group of potential users, and is therefore aimed at satisfying some need, desire or economic demand. It is clear that there is a tension here between the thrust of aesthetic judgment, at least according to traditional theories where it is always conceived as universalizing; and design judgment, which must articulate the functions of artefacts, where such functions are ultimately historically and sociologically determined.

We recognize that any definition of ‘design’ is likely to be controversial, and partial, and that this is so for reasons intrinsic to the subject: in a nutshell, the boundary between ‘art’ and ‘design’ is always necessarily fluid insofar as all artefacts can be said to have elements of both in them, whether the artefacts in question are conventionally classified as ‘art objects’ or ‘design objects’. This is necessarily so because all objects have a function of some sort by virtue of occupying some place in human society (this might include the function of being rejected as ‘worthless’ or ‘foul’, which reinforces the evaluative boundary of usefulness and worthiness), and all objects have to be created according to some imaginative process where the creator imagines them in their completed state before the completion occurs in actuality. This points to ambiguities in the definition of the terms ‘design’ and ‘art’.

Our starting-point in trying to define them is historical and relativistic: we see no purpose in trying to arrive at some ‘eternal essence’ of art or of the design process at this point since the debate we set out to chart is (among other things) about whether such a definition is possible or even worth attempting Whatever else may or may not be true about ‘art’ and ‘design’, it is clear that the meanings these words have in contemporary English emerged at a particular point in history, and therefore it is open to question whether the ‘reality’ to which these terms refer in fact existed before these meanings became current, or whether the new meanings attached to the words refer to some new human activities. Bearing these provisos in mind, the word ‘design’ in contemporary English appears to refer to a process based upon the following:

• (1) the possibility of a separation of the maker from someone who is responsible for the ‘blueprint’ of the artefact;
• (2) the location of decisions about what is to be produced in the hands of the person who commissions the artefact, usually on the basis of a brief;
• (3) the possibility of multiple ‘runs’ of the object for which the designer constructs a model;
• (4) a tight relationship between this modelling and the economic function of the object in question.

In this context, we would define ‘art’ in a way that both underlines the distinctiveness of its separation from ‘design’, and which insists upon the historical localization of the term and what it refers to. ‘Art’ thus would refer to the creation of artefacts which potentially appeal universally, to any public, regardless of what localizes them sociologically. It is thus—sociologically speaking—the product of a particular division of labour, since it is only in certain societies that attempts have been made to produce artefacts with universal appeal; and yet because the objects in question are held to potentially appeal to anybody and everybody, the fact that they are the product of a given division of labour is of secondary importance: according to the definition we are pursuing, it is the potential universality which defines the art object, not the location of its source in space, time and social structure. ‘Aesthetic judgment’ is the type of judgment which is held to be appropriate to this type of object, and ‘aesthetics’ (as a branch of philosophy or an academic discipline) is the analysis of such judgments and the objects to which they are applied.

Furthermore, by placing attempts to debate the relationship between design and aesthetics in a historical framework, we point to a wider set of questions about the place of artefacts in human society, questions which have been central to intellectual agendas in the industrial world throughout the modern period. Many of the essays we have chosen in the first half of this collection refer to these wider debates and the arguments about the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and design make a contribution to the wider philosophical debates about the relationship between human beings and the artefacts they create. This can best be demonstrated by analysing what is at stake in the essays we have chosen for the first half of our collection (the essays in the second half will be presented in a separate introduction—see chapter 11).

In the first place, these essays deal with the vexed and currently controversial question of relativism versus absolutism. In both moral and aesthetic questions it is possible to argue either that the meanings of objects and actions only make sense, and can only be judged, within the context of the particular frameworks that gave them meaning in the first place; or it is possible to advance the countervailing argument that both moral and aesthetic standards must be universally applicable if they are to have any purpose or relevance at all. To restrict our discussion to the realm of art and design, the relativist side of the argument starts from the proposition that artefacts have meaning only within cultural contexts: it is the contexts that set what the meaning is. For example, as has often been pointed out by anthropologists, the artefacts of pre-industrial civilization which have ended up in Western museums have been taken out of their original contexts and placed in a new context which gives them a different meaning. The original meaning of—say—a ritual adjunct in a particular ceremony becomes the meaning of ‘a curious example of primitive religion’ to the museum’s visitors. Against this, absolutists argue that regardless of the meaning deriving from the original context, the aesthetic value of an artefact derives from the application of a set of universal criteria: whatever the meaning that ancient Greek beliefs may have given to the carvings now known as the Elgin Marbles, they occupy a place in the canon of eternal beauty which is independent of this meaning.

This is not the place to try to resolve the disagreement, but to point out some of the things that are at stake in it. First, the distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘beauty’. For adherents of the canonical view, it is difficult to avoid concluding that beauty must be independent of meaning, since it is empirically clear that an object like the Elgin Marbles no longer has the meaning it had in its original context; more exactly, the element of its meaning which is summarized in the term ‘beauty’ is independent of the other elements of its meaning. For relativists, the fact that an object is held to be beautiful by one person or a group of people is a simple empirical fact, and we could investigate which groups consider a given class of objects beautiful and which do not: aesthetic value, in this analysis, derives only from the actual judgments of actual groups of people, and has no existence outside those judgments; beauty—in short—indeed lies in the eyes of the beholders. In this analysis ‘beauty’ is an attribute of an object which is not qualitatively different from any other attribute imputed to it by a public.

Second, ‘beauty’ as it is conceived by proponents of the canonical approach must consist of membership of an ideal order, in other words of an entity whose only existence lies outside of the actual history of humanity, at least as it has so far existed. Tony Bennett shows below how this is a necessary postulate in Kant, whose analysis is usually considered the basis of modern conceptions of the canon. Mo Dodson shows, through an analysis of Reynold’s Discourses and their position within the cultural configuration of his time, how the relativism versus absolutism argument derives from a particular historical conjuncture, since it is at this point in time that the argument assumes its characteristic modern form. Scruton’s Aesthetics of Architecture—of which we reprint one chapter—is one of the most sophisticated recent attempts to preserve the essence of the Kantian case, while avoiding the commonly imputed implication of some ideal future order. For Scruton, it is possible to preserve the argument that beauty is an objective feature of the world, independent of individual or group preference, by showing how aesthetic judgment operates within the human mind—where properties of mind are considered as universally present in humanity. This argument is pursued by bringing together an analysis of perception and an analysis of identity. Function—as it is theorized in design—is for Scruton a product of desire: we want such-and-such a situation to obtain and we conceive of the role of objects in achieving this aim. But when we judge an object aesthetically we do not judge it in relation to some individual objective, but in terms of its appropriateness to our whole identity; such a judgment is based on value, and value is something that acts as a focus for decisions about the future without our necessarily realizing what it is we are committing ourselves to in any clear detail. We may perceive an object non-aesthetically, in which case our understanding makes us aware of a limited series of possibilities that the object offers us; or we may perceive it aesthetically, in which case we are aware of aspects of the object—its formal properties—which are not forced on our attention by our understanding of what the object is, but which we know will be revealed to us if we are sufficiently attentive to what the object can reveal to us (Scruton 1979:31–6, 74ff).

In short, aesthetic judgment is necessarily a potential feature of the way in which we attend to objects. At the same time, it is entirely distinctive, with its own rules; these rules show us how certain potentialities may be realized, which leads us justifiably to demand that others accede to our judgments, because our judgments reveal how these potentialities may be realized. But such a conclusion is only possible on the grounds that the features of mental processes that he presents as deter mining the nature of aesthetic possibility are genuinely universal. Against this foundation are ranged two countervailing arguments.

The first of these is the lengthy empirical evidence in favour of cultural relativism, which makes the achievement of generalized true descriptions of all of humanity difficult to achieve (for a cogent recent defence of this position, see Rosaldo 1993). The second is that the supposed universalism of arguments such as Scruton’s is necessarily false because it is based upon the suppression or exclusion of other possibilities. The strongest version of this case is to be found in Bourdieu, a summary of whose arguments by Garnham and Williams we include here. Bourdieu’s argument, in a nutshell, is that the capacity for making the judgments Scruton calls for is an element in social class distinction, responsible for that class’s continued economic and political domination of other classes; but beyond that Bourdieu argues that the capacity to produce such judgments involves the suppression of sensual enjoyment of the type of artefacts in question. Scruton speaks of the incompatibility of sensual enjoyment of objects and their aesthetic appreciation, distinguishing pleasures which are caused by objects from aesthetic delight at an object. In aesthetic pleasure

some act of attention, some intellectual apprehension of the object, is a necessary part of the pleasure…and any change in the thought will automatically lead to a redescription of the pleasure. For it will change the object of the pleasure, pleasure here having an object in addition to its cause.

(Scruton 1979:73)

For Bourdieu, this incompatibility amounts to a suppression: the ‘refinement’ implied by the process Scruton describes leads to the inability to participate any longer in the other process, at least where classes of objects which have been made the object of aesthetic delight are concerned. If suppression of human faculties is involved, how can the results be universal?

Bourdieu proceeds, in part, by demonstrating through empirical analyses of patterns of artistic taste that they are very class specific: to do this he uses techniques which are widely used in the communications industries, especially in marketing, advertising and media planning; we include an essay by David Docherty, Head of Strategic Planning at the BBC, on how such techniques are used on a day-to-day basis in media organizations. In general, such organizations need detailed empirical information about audience preferences in media output in order to make informed planning decisions about future output. While such information can never replace creativity, it is commonly the case in such organizations that it is used in the process of managing creative teams. Broadcasting, in fact, pushes fundamental views on aesthetics to the centre of public debate, for the nature of the delivery system—direct to the home—and the range of choice that is the current economic base of broadcasting makes argument about the relative influence of public versus private taste inevitable. Although the size and complexity of broadcasting organizations sets them somewhat apart from other organizations producing artefacts with a high design component, what broadcasting organizations do with empirical information is not in principle very different from any designer who sets out to investigate the tastes of potential clients—it is in the internal task differentiation and the scope and rigour of their investigations that significant differences lie.

Such arguments shift the terrain of debate away from the polemical focus of relativism versus absolutism towards the enlarged focus of the relationships between human beings and the material world of objects, both the objects we make and those that the universe places around us. That this does indeed involve a shift is clear from the terms of Scruton’s discussion of the relationship between aesthetic delight and needs. For Scruton ‘needs’ are whatever is necessary for survival, ‘animal needs’ as he calls them, the satisfaction of which gives sensual pleasure and is organized through subjective preference; in design theory, he says, both aesthetic delight and the satisfaction of needs are often reduced to preference, as if nothing else existed (1979:30–1). However, aesthetic delight is distinctive because of the element of attention to its object, as we have seen. The argument continues:

Now some might argue that people absorb from the organic contours of our ancient towns, with their human details, their softened lines and their ‘worked’ appearance, a kind of pleasure that sustains them in their daily lives; while in the bleak environment of the modern city a dissatisfaction is felt that disturbs people without their knowing why…. Such inarticulate pleasures and displeasures have little to do with architectural taste…. They can be accommodated…only on the level of human ‘need’.

(Scruton 1979:112)

However, if an enlarged non-biological notion of need is used where we could include valuation as a need in itself, then we can speak of needs such as seeing in one’s surroundings ‘the real imprint of human labour and the workings of human history’, but only on the condition that this appreciation takes the form of aesthetic attention, which would make it transcend ‘mere sociology’ (Scruton 1979:113), in other words be more than a set of shared preferences.

In short, for Scruton, ‘needs’ and ‘aesthetic discrimination’ inhabit largely separate dimensions of experience; the relationships to objects that humanity may have are bifurcated—on the one hand, those things that are necessary; on the other hand, those things that act to evoke our full potentiality. Certainly this is one way in which the relationship between humans and objects has traditionally been theorized; but there are many others.

Science would be one: viewed from this point of view, science is a programme for regulating our relationships with objects and subordinating them to our purposes. Another would be economic distribution, the way that arguably dominates thinking on the subject in the late twentieth century; here the relationship between people and objects is thought through the concepts of production and distribution, supply and demand, costs, preferences, etc. A third way, which has arguably been the most influential in recent debates, locates this relationship in culture; that is to say, it is not the individual relationship between individual humans and objects that is of interest, but the collective relationship between specifiable groups of humans and the range of objects that they use; this, in general, is the subject matter of the essays in Part II of this collection.

This emphasis may operate in various ways. For example, in the study of consumer taste, anyone with a practical interest in design and marketing knows that one element in the design process is an awareness of consumer preferences. But while certain ‘luxury’ goods may be designed to suit literally individual preferences (e.g. commissioned pieces of jewellery or haute couture), this is an exceptional situation: certainly most consumer preferences are expressed by individuals, because the basic spending unit in consumer purchases is the individual; but it is clear that the reasons that lead to certain preferences being more current than others at any given time and place are located in groups, and thus the study of such preferences is a study of group behaviour. More generally, one way in which groups define themselves is through the range of objects that they produce and use, and the ways in which production and distribution are carried out. In general, nineteenth-century thinkers—especially Marx—held that it was the productive or directly associative element in human activity that defined societies by being responsible for those dimensions of their behaviour that constituted them as societies. Subsequently, many thinkers have argued that the manne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II