A couple of days ago I made the comment to my wife that we needed some constraints in our thinking about our approach to the renovation of the house. By this I meant that we needed to think carefully about and have a unifying theme in our design, color, and materials choices so as to ensure a balanced and harmonious outcome, e.g. GOOD DESIGN.
My wife (an architect) looked at me, confused, as if I were some kind of lunatic.
"Um, you know, like a theme." I stammered.
"An inspiration."
We went on for what seemed like hours, and in the end she didn't get it. She had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I just couldn't put it into words that made sense.
We revisited the subject again tonight, to no avail.
"It's the 'je ne sais qua' that separates the good project from the bad...The glue that ties everything together". Nope.
"If someone made all the "right" (finger quotes) choices but it just doesn't work".
Her response: "Then they didn't make the right choices!"
Mind you, we will both agree in the end, our goals and our taste are the same, we just have very different ways of conceptualizing, and very different approaches.
As I fumbled about trying to compose this post I realized that what I was trying so ineptly to express were the key ingredients of good design, the secret sauce if you will. This is the thing that we studied in art class, and English literature, and architectural history, and all the other good liberal arts classes that we took in college. The thing that all of the cosmologists, artists, writers, scientists, and philosophers sought to master and that we and our professors pretended to understand.
So, with this in mind, I did a Google search for the phrase, "What is good design?"
The first result was a 2002 essay by Paul Grahm called, "Taste for Makers" (found in his book Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age).
THIS IS WHY I LOVE THE INTERNET.
Google has done me the service of finding and presenting to me something new, something I have never seen, something that almost perfectly encapsulates (and at the same time goes so far beyond) the ideas that I was struggling to make clear. And they made it look so easy.
Maybe the geeks at Google should design our house?!
(PS- have you seen the ingredients of McDonald's secret sauce? YUCK!!!)
