3 What is good design?

Tasteful rubbish is still rubbish.

— Reyner Banham ¹

For one of the most popular lecturers of his time, William Morris was a surprisingly nervous public speaker. During the late 1800s, he aired his opinions on art, design, politics, education, the nature of civilization, the history of Byzantine textiles and the palaces of the Assyrian kings in hundreds of lectures throughout Britain. Morris prepared meticulously for each one, writing out the words in lined exercise books and revising them doggedly, yet his family and friends watched anxiously as he stood at the lectern, toying with his pocket watch and shuffling from foot to foot. Afterwards he shared his concerns in letters to his wife Janey, worrying that the people in the audience had not understood him, or were somehow dissatisfied.²

Morris was more confident when it came to the content of his lectures. Take ‘The Beauty of Life’, a forbidding subject that he addressed in 1880 with a whistle-stop tour of art history, a concise comparison of Gothic architecture and literature, followed by scathing analyses of the cultural consequences of the Industrial Revolution and ‘the (so-called) restoration of St Marks in Venice’. He also distilled his theme into what he described as ‘a golden rule that will fit everybody’, namely: ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.’³

‘Useful’ and ‘beautiful’. Those words were Morris’s contribution to a debate that has preoccupied designers, design theorists and design historians ever since. These days, the title of his lecture would be something like ‘Good Design’ rather than ‘The Beauty of Life’, though defining exactly what that is would be even more difficult now than it was in Morris’s era.

The design curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a decade of exhibitions to what they considered to be ‘the best modern design … available to the American public’ starting in 1938. Those shows inspired the foundation of the Good Design Awards at the Chicago Athenaeum Museum in 1950.⁴ The same theme was the leitmotif of the work of the various government-funded bodies that championed design in post-war Europe: ‘good design’ in Britain, bel design in Italy and gute Form in Germany. If you Google ‘good design’ today, you will discover the latter-day version of the Chicago awards as well as dozens of other design prizes, magazines and websites. In every incarnation, ‘good design’ has been a combination of different qualities, but what those qualities are, their relative importance and how they respond to each other has changed significantly over time. Where do they all stand now?

One essential tenet of good design, which has existed throughout the ages, is that no design exercise can be deemed worthwhile unless it fulfils its function and does so efficiently. Plato said as much in 390 BC by stating that the ‘virtue and beauty and rightness of every manufactured article, living creature or action is assessed only in relation to the purpose for which it was made’.⁵ In other words: is it fit for purpose or, as Morris put it, useful? Not that it would suffice for it to be useful in theory, because good design must also be useful in practice, or simple to use.

It is frighteningly easy to think of examples of designs which are not: over-complicated phones; malfunctioning ticket machines; uncomfortable chairs; illegible typefaces; supposedly recyclable materials riddled with toxins; unreliable cars that are prone to breaking down, usually at the least convenient moments; television remote controllers with nearly as many buttons as 747 jumbo-jet flight decks. We all risk coming across them every day, more than once if we are unlucky.

A chilling example of design which was not fit for purpose is the original version of the M-16, the US Army’s standard service rifle during the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces were equipped with the AK-47 assault rifle, which had been used by the Soviet Army since 1949 and was described by C. J. Chivers, a former US marine officer and war correspondent, in his book The Gun as ‘the most abundant and widely used rifle ever made’.⁶ The story of the AK-47’s design was romanticized by the Soviet authorities for propaganda purposes, but the end result was named after Senior Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov, who was wounded in 1941 while serving as a tank soldier and, according to the official version of events, developed a prototype in a local workshop during his convalescence. After years of testing and numerous modifications, the AK-47 became a model modern gun. Lighter and more reliable than existing assault rifles, it was capable of firing at a faster rate at close quarters using such small bullets that each soldier could carry more of them. The AK-47 was made from noisy moving parts that rattled alarmingly but were tough enough to cope with extremes of heat and cold, as well as rough treatment in turbulent conditions. Not only was it an asset to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops during the Vietnam War, but some of the earliest models, manufactured in the 1950s, have proved so resilient that they are used to deadly effect in war zones today.⁷

As the conflict in Vietnam escalated during the early 1960s, the US Army sent more troops there and stockpiled weapons. In 1963, it placed an order for over one hundred thousand M-16s, hoping that the new gun would be superior to the AK-47, but it was not. Chivers argues that the testing of the M-16 was rushed, and key decisions about its final specifications were taken by people with little or no field experience. The resulting rifle was accurate, often more so than the AK-47, but flawed in other respects. Critically, it was prone to jamming after being fired, and when that happened, removing the empty shell was cumbersome and time-consuming. This posed grave problems for US servicemen in Vietnam as they fought the North Vietnamese and Vietcong armies, both of which were armed with more efficient AK-47s. Chivers cites one marine who wrote to the local newspaper in his hometown describing a battle near Khe Sanh in the spring of 1967: ‘“Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle.”’ A fellow marine, Gunnery Sergeant Claude Elrod, found an AK-47 beside the corpse of a North Vietnamese soldier and used it for most of the rest of the time he served in Vietnam. When his colonel demanded to know why he was carrying a Soviet weapon, Elrod replied: ‘Because it works.’⁸

That is why the AK-47 passes the ‘fit for purpose’ test, and the early version of the M-16 did not. If a rifle is not reliable enough to be depended upon in battle, how can it be well designed? Similarly, how can a signage system be considered good design if it is not legible? A phone, if it is too complicated to be used easily because its operating system is so befuddling? Or a chair, if it is uncomfortable to sit on for long? It does not matter if they have other merits: if those signs are rendered in beautiful typography; if the phone boasts more functions than anything else on the market; or if the shape of the chair looks spectacular. However impressive they may be in other respects, they do not do their jobs properly. As the artist Donald Judd wrote: ‘If a chair … is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous.’⁹

Conversely it is possible for something that fails on other criteria to qualify as good design, providing it is useful. Take Google’s logo. Design purists tend to loathe it, and it is easy to see why. The company’s standard logo, which spells the word ‘Google’ in brightly coloured, wonkily shaped letters, looks infantile. The original was designed by Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, when he and a fellow Stanford University computer science graduate, Larry Page, began the business in 1998. The following year they asked Ruth Kedar, a graphic designer and friend from Stanford, to refine it. She slimmed down the typeface and lost a jaunty exclamation mark from the end, but kept the gaudy colours and its playfully amateurish style. By then, Brin and Page had also introduced what Google calls ‘doodles’ by temporarily replacing the usual logo with customized versions to mark special occasions.

The first doodle appeared in 1998 when Brin and Page took time off to attend the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Instead of posting an ‘Out of Office’ message on the home page of their website, they hinted at where they were going by drawing a little stick figure behind the second ‘o’ of Google, in a nod to the wooden effigy which is ceremonially burnt at the festival.¹⁰ Google has since posted hundreds of doodles to celebrate everything from Thanksgiving, Halloween, Earth Day and St Patrick’s Day, to lunar eclipses, the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, the Mars Rover landing, major sports events and the birthdays of Jane Austen, Andy Warhol, Charles Darwin and the ice-cream sundae. Each one is executed in the same twee style as the everyday logo. Jackson Pollock’s name was written in the ‘drips’ of his paintings, and Isaac Newton’s accompanied by an animated apple falling off a tree.¹¹

Looking cringy is one of the doodles’ functions. They are intended principally to make us like Google. Trying to do so by convincing us that Google is still the sort of cool, friendly company whose co-founders might slope off to the Burning Man Festival is a good start, not least because it is fiendishly difficult for a business to convey that impression, especially one as big and powerful as Google. The doodles achieve this by giving us something new to look at for the day, while suggesting the sort of things that Google is into. So what are they? Judging by the doodles, Google likes science, literature and contemporary art, without being so snooty that it doesn’t also enjoy the Super Bowl and ice-cream sundaes. Critically, the doodles communicate all this by suggestion: always more persuasive than being explicit, because we are likelier to believe in something if we think that we discovered it for ourselves.

 

R. Buckminster Fuller with models of the geodesic dome at Black Mountain College in 1948

 

László Moholy-Nagy in Chicago in 1945

 

György Kepes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971

 

Muriel Cooper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977

Oddly, the clumsy aesthetic of Google’s logos, both the everyday one and the doodles, makes this seem plausible. It is only natural to feel sceptical about whatever Google or any other powerful multinational company tells us about itself. No one likes to be taken in by a corporate titan and its army of expensively paid advisors. That is why corporate identities seldom work, because we are instinctively suspicious of them, often sensibly so. Besides, we have become so expert at decoding visual symbols like logos that the more sophisticated they seem, the deeper our suspicions are likely to be. This is why the cringiness of Google’s logos is so clever. How can something so gauche be manipulative? Google’s corporate identity excels thanks to its aesthetic flaws, because they help rather than hinder its efforts to fulfil its function.

There are also instances when usefulness alone is not enough to produce good design, because we expect it to deliver something else too. Traditional book covers come into this category. Of course they must protect the pages of the book, but if that is all they do, they will not qualify as good design. A really well-designed jacket should also sum up what the book promises to deliver so compellingly that we cannot resist reading it. The same goes for film titles. Telling us the names of the cast and crew of the film simply covers the basics. Well-designed title sequences, like the ones devised by György Kepes’s student Saul Bass in the late twentieth century, not only seduce us into wanting to see the film, but heighten the experience of doing so.¹² Before Bass, most film titles simply listed the cast and crew, and were projected on to closed curtains, which were not drawn until the action began. The animated sequence he devised for the opening of the 1955 drama The Man with the Golden Arm was so striking that its director Otto Preminger attached a note to the film cans insisting that the curtains were drawn before the projectionists screened the movie.¹³ Bass designed dozens of other title sequences over the years. He began Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo with the camera zooming into a woman’s face and then her eye, which spirals terrifyingly as blood soaks across the screen;¹⁴ while the opening credit sequence of Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino shows Robert de Niro’s body falling helplessly through the macabre neons of the Las Vegas Strip like a Dantesque descent into hell.¹⁵ By preparing us for what we will see on screen, Bass’s titles make us more emotionally responsive to the film, and more perceptive about it.

The ‘something else’ that elevates his cleverly conceived and executed film titles into not merely good, but great, design is their aesthetic impact, another important element of design throughout history. It is still immensely powerful, particularly as a medium of communication. Just as Bass’s opening sequences for Hitchcock’s thrillers convey foreboding and suspense, the Red Cross’s symbol commands our attention and alerts us to danger, while insisting on respect and cooperation.¹⁶ But one traditional element of design aesthetics is gradually becoming less important – visual beauty.

For a long time, beauty was deemed indispensable to good design, just like functionality. William Morris affirmed this in his 1880 lecture, and over half a century later, ‘excellent appearance’ and ‘progressive performance’ were chosen as the key criteria for inclusion in the first of the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Good Design’ exhibitions.¹⁷ But Google’s identity is not the only example of a successful design project whose looks are far from appealing. Another is the Post-it Note, which scores highly for usefulness and ingenuity, but poorly visually, at least in its original shade of urine yellow.¹⁸ Nor is it pleasurable in any other way, in terms of smell, for instance, or touch.

Not that there is anything wrong with beauty in design: on the contrary, it can make our lives pleasanter, inspiring even. There is an argument that this is a field where design has taken over from art, partly because the visual elements of design have become so much more refined. Thanks to digital technology, designers in many disciplines can now work with greater expressiveness and precision. Imagine how miraculous an Apple iPad would have looked in the 1960s when a ‘computer’ meant an enormous room packed with millions of dollars’ worth of noisy, cumbersome machinery; or how extraordinary the intricate digital imagery we see on their screens would have appeared.

This argument also reflects the changing role of art. For centuries, people sought beauty from art, but since the birth of modernism it has been expected to be challenging and provocative, by exploring subversive, frightening or ambiguous aspects of life that we struggle to understand, often because they defy rational analysis. If a painting or sculpture is simply beautiful, it can be difficult – though not impossible, as Cy Twombly and Lucio Fontana’s gloriously sensual work proves – for us not to suspect it of being trite; whereas we are less likely to feel embarrassed about enjoying the graceful proportions and smooth surfaces of one of Fiskars’ gardening tools, because we know that visually and sensually appealing though that trowel or rake is, it will also be useful. If it was not, we might suspect its beauty of being a deceptive trick, making us disinclined to feel quite so uninhibited about enjoying it.

Yet it is still possible for something that qualifies as good design on other criteria to fail because of its aesthetic shortcomings. An example is the London 2012 Olympic Games logo.¹⁹ Functionally, it has several strengths: being recognizable, memorable, versatile enough to work in any medium – static in print, and animated on screen – and capable of being customized for use in different contexts, by changing colour or gaining new symbols. So far so good, except that, if you have actually seen the logo, you may think, as I do, that it is recognizable and memorable for the wrong reasons, because it looks so dreadful, with its ugly typography and clumsy shape. Some critics have likened it to a Nazi swastika, others to Lisa Simpson performing an obscene act.²⁰ And admirable though versatility is, what is the point if the logo looks equally dire in every incarnation? (An honourable exception being an unofficial version that appeared a few years ago on East London fly posters in which the numbers 2, 0, 1 and 2 were replaced by the letters S, H, I and T. ²¹)

Another tension inherent in design aesthetics is that such judgements are always subjective. After all, there may be some people who like the London 2012 logo and possibly the colour of the Post-it Note. Deciding whether or not we find something visually pleasing is fairly straightforward. We tend to know instinctively, just as we sense intuitively whether we like or dislike the taste of food. Identifying why we feel that way is trickier. It is much easier to explain whether design succeeds functionally, because its performance is often, though not always, quantifiable. Analysing why we feel the way we do about how it looks is more complicated.

Yet there are some clear-cut cases. One is illustrated by the aesthetic differences between two typefaces that are included in the Font menus of most computers and are used in this book: Arial and Helvetica. Both are what are called sans serif fonts, which are ones without decorative flicks at the ends of the letters. At first glance they look very similar, so much so that each is often mistaken for the other. When Arial was introduced in 1982, it was generally seen as a copy of Helvetica, which dates back to 1957 and has since become a familiar sight on New York subway signs and corporate logos such as those of American Apparel, BMW, 3M and North Face.²² But if you examine the characters in each font closely, the differences between them soon become apparent.

The American graphic designer Mark Simonson produced an excellent analysis of the two, which shows how much more refined Helvetica’s detailing is than Arial’s. The tail of the ‘a’ is gently curved in Helvetica, as is the first connection of the bowl to the stem, but not in Arial. Similarly, the top of the ‘t’ and the ends of the strokes in the ‘C’ and ‘S’ are perfectly horizontal in the former, but slightly angled in the latter. He also noted that the stem of Helvetica’s ‘G’ has a small spur at the bottom and a subtle curve flowing into it, whereas the stem of Arial’s ‘G’ has neither.²³ In other words, the characters in Helvetica are more complex in structure than those in Arial. The distinguishing details are so tiny that you can only see them if you scrutinize magnified versions of each character as Simonson did. Only a handful of the millions of people who use either typeface will ever look closely enough to notice them. Yet it is these subtleties that make Helvetica a finer example of design than Arial. Functionally the two fonts are roughly equal, as both are admirably clear and easy to read, but aesthetically Helvetica is superior.²⁴

The problem is that most judgements on the visual aspects of design are more muddled, and the impact of digital technology is making them more so. Consuming our daily diet of information and entertainment from the pixelated images on a computer or phone screen changes how we see the world, both on and off screen. Imagine looking at a stretch of street in real life, then seeing it on a photograph, cinema screen, television set, computer and phone. Think of how different it would appear in each one.

There are subtler influences too. Many of the objects we see and use in real life were designed digitally, with the designers sending computer files to printers or manufacturers. This process has a dramatic effect on how the finished pieces look. None of the ‘blobby’ shapes, the smooth ovals that appeared in product design during the 1990s, would have been possible without the precision of design software, nor would the futuristic forms of data visualizations, of the buildings of architects like Rem Koolhaas, SANAA and Farshid Moussavi, or of the new genre of objects produced by 3D printing and other emerging technologies. Digital technology is not only changing what we see, but whether we like or dislike the result, often without our noticing.

One consumer products company set out to analyse this phenomenon by studying how people of varying ages and levels of computer-savviness responded to various objects. Half of them were designed digitally and the rest developed in the traditional way, but the participants were not told this. They were simply asked if they liked the look of each one. How the products were designed had no apparent bearing on the responses from people who rarely used computers. But it had a significant effect on the techier participants who spent lots of time on the Internet or playing video games. Almost all of the things they said they liked had been designed digitally. They were attracted to them instinctively, without realizing why.

The elusive influence of digital technology is one reason for our ambiguity about visually appealing design, but there are others too. One is fear of frivolity. In an era when the moral dimensions of issues like environmentalism and ethical concerns are increasingly important, it is easy to feel uncomfortable about enjoying the aesthetic side of design, because it can feel superficial to care about how things look. Equally problematic is our growing suspicion of beauty, especially the conventional variety, at a time when cut-price cosmetic surgery, jaw-dropping digital effects in movies and the digital retouching of photographs makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish artifice from reality.

Some designers have responded by challenging conventional stereotypes of beauty, often by giving their work a jolie laide quality, akin to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which finds pleasure in imperfection or impermanence.²⁵ The work of the German product designer Konstantin Grcic often looks clumsy, even ugly, at first sight, but the longer you look at it, the more beguiling it becomes, as you sense the underlying logic of its blunt edges and awkward shapes. That is because Grcic does not begin the design process with a sense of what the end result will look like, but by visualizing how it should be used. He develops each object by building rough cardboard models and adjusting them, to make, say, a stool more comfortable to sit on or an espresso machine easier to operate. Once the model is completed, its dimensions are fed into a computer to refine the details.²⁶ The beauty of his products stems not from their looks, but from the warmth you feel towards them, once you have realized that the odd contours of the stool are perfectly positioned to enable you to perch on or to lean against it.

The Dutch designer Hella Jongerius achieves a similar effect by introducing intentional flaws to her objects – mismatched colours and odd buttons on the upholstery of a sofa, and tiny irregularities on what we would expect to be the smooth surface of a dinner plate – to trick us into associating them with antiques, heirlooms and keepsakes that we have grown to love over time. She believes that this forges a stronger emotional rapport with the user than a ‘perfect’ object would do. Jongerius also puts considerable thought and effort into refining the tactile qualities of her work.²⁷ Powerful though these sensual aspects of design can be, articulating why we are drawn to them can be even more difficult than explaining why we are attracted to something visually, not least because the vocabulary for doing so is limited.

Other designers celebrate abstract qualities, which are related to the spirit of a design project and its impact on its surroundings. The British designer Jasper Morrison and his Japanese counterpart Naoto Fukasawa coined the term ‘super normal’ to describe this approach. A ‘super normal’ object is useful, appropriate, modest, robust, enduring and, as Morrison put it, should ‘radiate something good’. Among the examples that he and Fukasawa chose were a Bic biro, a pair of Fiskars scissors and a Cricket disposable lighter.²⁸ They also included products developed by the Japanese industrial designer Sori Yanagi, whose work embodied many of the principles of the Mingei movement founded in Japan in the 1920s by his father, the writer Soetsu Yanagi. It celebrated the simple, solid virtues of the handmade everyday objects that had been overlooked in Japan since the Industrial Revolution. Such qualities have a similar effect to something that is aesthetically or sensually appealing, by giving us instinctive pleasure whenever we see or use them.

Another optional element of good design is originality, as many of Morrison and Fukasawa’s ‘super normal’ products demonstrate. They are not new at all, yet their other design merits are unassailable. Nor is originality of value in itself, as Spencer Silver, a scientist working at 3M, discovered in the 1960s when he invented an unusual new type of glue. It was strong enough to stick something light, like a sheet of paper, to a smooth surface, but too weak to do so permanently, enabling you to peel it off whenever you wished. The problem was that 3M could not work out what to do with the glue, despite urging its research team to find a suitable – and marketable – function for it. In 1968 another 3M scientist, Art Fry, stumbled across a solution while singing in his church choir. He had placed slips of paper on the relevant pages of his hymn book, but was irritated to discover that they kept slipping out. Then he remembered Silver’s formula for the sticky but not too sticky glue, and suggested that 3M should use it to produce a removable bookmark.²⁹ Before Fry’s brainwave, Silver’s glue had been pointlessly new. Putting it to good use as the sticky component of what was to become the Post-it Note transformed it into a valuable innovation and an inspiring example of good design – despite 3M’s unfortunate decision to use that uriniferous yellow paper.

Optional though originality is to good design, it can be one of its most compelling elements. Design is often at its most seductive and most convincing when introducing us to the new. The first mass-manufactured chair. The first bicycle. The first motor car. The first aeroplane. The first high speed train. The first mainframe computer. The first personal computer. The first electric car. The first deep-sea drone. Many of the most thrilling episodes of design history have been filled with ‘firsts’.

Not that those ‘firsts’ need to be conspicuous. A quietly impressive example is the series of screen-friendly typefaces developed by the British-born typography designer Matthew Carter for Microsoft during the mid 1990s. Up until then most fonts used on computers were originally designed to be read in print, and were not necessarily legible when seen on a screen, where each digital character is constructed from individual pixels, which are considerably more cumbersome than a fluid stroke of ink. Carter began by identifying the problems of replicating typographic characters digitally, then worked out how to resolve them. The characters that tended to be confused most often on screen were the letters i, j, l and the number 1. He made each one as simple in style as possible, with no superfluous details, and paid particular attention to the spacing between them when designing the first of the new fonts, the sans serif Verdana. The same principles were applied to its serif companion Georgia, which was even more problematic because of the bulk of the strokes at the ends of the characters, the numbers especially. Carter’s solution was to exaggerate the difference between each number by varying their height. The 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 in his serif font Georgia drop below the line, while the 6 and 8 rise above it.³⁰ Not only did these details make the new screen-friendly fonts clearer and more legible, they enhanced their aesthetic impact.

So far, good design equals something that must be useful, and may or may not be visually pleasing or original. But there is another indispensable element alongside usefulness, which is best summed up as integrity. If the word strikes an old-fashioned moral tone, that is because it is intended to. Qualities such as honesty, clarity, sincerity, decency, soundness, incorruptibility and other components of integrity have been central to the debate on good design since Plato’s Early Socratic Dialogues. Unless it has integrity, no design project can be deemed to be good, however useful, beautiful or innovative it may be. ‘Good design enables honest and effective engagement with the world,’ wrote the American philosopher Robert Grudin in his book Design and Truth. ‘If good design tells the truth, poor design tells a lie, a lie usually related, in one way or another, to the getting or abusing of power.’³¹

Integrity extends to every aspect of design, starting with its purpose, and the objectives of whoever designed or made it. Chillingly efficient though the AK-47 is when it comes to fulfilling its function,³² how can something which was designed to destroy human life be considered good design? It cannot.

Good design must also have symbolic integrity. Google’s doodles do, despite their tacky style, because the sports, artworks, scientific breakthroughs and other subjects they depict were chosen by the company’s employees and genuinely reflect their interests. By contrast, BP’s green and yellow sunflower-inspired logo does not. BP adopted that emblem and dropped its old name, British Petroleum, in 2001 at a time when ecological protests against the oil industry were growing, and it wished to present itself as a responsible company that cared about the environment. Whenever BP has been embroiled in ecological disasters, such as the 2010 explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, its sunflower logo has been ridiculed as insincere and inappropriate.³³ Understandably so.

Structural integrity matters too. Anything that is unduly fragile or unreliable, like the perpetually jamming M-16 rifle, fails this test. As do show-stoppingly alluring chairs that are neither strong nor comfortable enough to be sat upon. They have so little integrity that they are not simply badly designed but ‘ridiculous’, as Donald Judd put it. Nor can design have integrity if, like those chairs, it is simply showing off. Take the gun lamps devised by Philippe Starck for the Italian lighting company Flos.³⁴ They are structurally sound and fit for purpose, in that they illuminate a room perfectly well, but modelling the base of a lamp on a Beretta or AK-47 was sensationalistic. Trading on the taboo of a potentially deadly weapon to sell a lamp is not an act of integrity. The same goes for skyscraping buildings, such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, whose architects were charged with making them as tall as possible. They might be popular with tourists who want to peer down from the top and city officials who enjoy bragging about having commissioned a record-breaking structure, and may even make striking additions to the cityscape, but they are too bombastic to be well designed. In Design and Truth, Robert Grudin levels the same accusation against St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, whose elegant design by Donato Bramante and Michelangelo was destroyed by Pope Paul V’s determination to enlarge it into the world’s biggest church in the early 1600s as a monument to the power of the papacy.³⁵

Critically, integrity also embraces environmental and ethical responsibility in design. Scientists may still be squabbling over the causes and eventual impact of the ecological crisis, but the situation is so grave that no one can pretend to ignore it. Nor can most of us claim to be unaware of the wider implications of the things we buy. If we have any reason to feel guilty or even uncomfortable about the ethical or environmental consequences of a design project – or the way it was conceived, developed, manufactured, shipped, sold and will eventually be disposed of – it cannot be considered to have integrity, and is therefore disqualified from being good design. How can we be expected to take pleasure in something that we suspect of being harmful either to the environment or to other people?

Take a seemingly mundane example: the espresso pod. Making an espresso with one of those neatly sealed little pods is undeniably faster, more efficient and less messy than doing so with ground coffee, and the result is likely to be more consistent. But even the most devoted pod-o-phile must baulk at all the packaging used by those tiny portions of coffee and the boxes they come in. Not only is there an awful lot of superfluous packaging, but some of it is not recyclable. In other words, the functional strengths of the espresso pod are negated by its environmental weaknesses and dearth of integrity. (Personally, I consider making espresso in the traditional way to be more pleasurable, and would cheerfully trade the pod’s dependability for the delicious smell of ground coffee, and the frisson of waiting for it.)

Or consider the reassessment of the design merits of the world’s best-known chair, the one that more people have seen and sat upon than any other. It is not the work of a historically important designer or a contemporary auction star, but the cheap chunk of plastic known as the monobloc, which has been manufactured as a single piece of polypropylene weighing two and a half kilograms since the 1980s.³⁶ No one knows how many have been made, but once you become aware of them you notice monoblocs everywhere: perching in the corners of car parks and construction sites; floating in the debris of typhoons, hurricanes and other natural disasters; and appearing in the background of TV news footage on alleged atrocities in military prisons, like Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the capture of terrorist cells and deposed dictators.

Unprepossessing though it looks, the monobloc has some design virtues. As well as being inexpensive, it is compact, portable, stackable, waterproof and easy to clean. In other words, it boasts many of the functional qualities that responsible designers prize, but it is also cursed by grave environmental flaws. If the polypropylene breaks, it is impossible to repair and, because it is not biodegradable, landfill sites are doomed to be stuffed with the corpses of unwanted monoblocs for decades to come. For the same reason as the espresso pod, the monobloc can no longer be deemed to be well designed.

Other lapses of design integrity occur when dubious environmental and ethical claims are made, as they were for a bunch of bananas sold in a London supermarket that were swathed in what was proudly described as ‘organic packaging’.³⁷ Why waste material, regardless of whether it is recycled or recyclable, on a banana, whose skin is a perfect example of natural packaging that protects the fruit and can be easily removed when you want to eat it, before decomposing quickly and safely once you have finished? To do so is idiotic, but trying to score eco-points by billing it as ‘organic’ is dishonest.

The environmental case against those over-packaged bananas is unusually straightforward, just as it is for the espresso pod and the irreparable, unrecyclable monobloc. Assessing the ecological and ethical impact of most design projects is not: it is fraught with problems, and dissent is rife. One person’s certainty – or even their idea of an acceptable compromise – is often another’s bone of contention. Take the Toyota Prius, the first mass-produced hybrid vehicle to be powered by both a petrol engine and an electric battery.³⁸ The Prius consumes less fuel than most other cars, and that is its selling point. Some people feel not merely guiltless but virtuous when driving it, confident that they have made an environmentally responsible choice. Others disagree. They criticize Prius drivers for what they regard as their irresponsibility in choosing a hybrid vehicle when more energy-efficient cars are available. Then there is the ongoing debate about the Prius’s battery, and the environmental implications of the materials it is made from. Should you feel guilty about driving a Prius? The answer will depend on whom you ask.

There is also the question of how design is used, the integrity of its context. Again, this can compromise something of otherwise irreproachable quality, which was the fate of two totems of twentieth-century design, the Egg and Series 7 chairs.³⁹ Originally designed by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen in the 1950s for one of his buildings, the new SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, they were then licensed for production by a local furniture manufacturer, Fritz Hansen. Both chairs are excellent examples of intelligent design. Their curvaceous forms are typical of the Scandinavian style of organic modernism, which was championed by Jacobsen as a gentler alternative to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe’s work. His chairs look unusual enough to be striking, yet not so much so that they ever seem obtrusive. Stylistically, they are also subtle enough to have proved surprisingly enduring: by appearing fashionably organic in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s, yet futuristic in eras when that style was popular. Above all, they convey a sense of modern elegance, which is luxurious without being snooty, and imposing but not intimidating. One glance at them signals ‘good design’, even to someone who has never heard of Arne Jacobsen.

A few years ago, Fritz Hansen agreed to sell several thousand Eggs and Series 7s to McDonald’s as the seating for its European fast-food restaurants. McDonald’s customers were becoming fussier and the company was anxious to upgrade its image. To do so convincingly, it needed to make its restaurants more appealing. What better way of doing so than to introduce Arne Jacobsen’s impeccably designed chairs? It could be argued that this was a good thing. After all, the more people who have the opportunity to experience good design the better, regardless of whether they are perching on it to scoff a Big Mac or Filet-O-Fish. But selling those chairs to McDonald’s was risky for Fritz Hansen. Would they still be associated with modern luxury, or with Ronald McDonald, McMuffins and McNuggets?

But McDonald’s did not stop there. Having installed the original Fritz Hansen chairs, it decided to supplement them with less expensive replicas in countries like Britain, where the original designs were out of copyright.⁴⁰ McDonald’s then commissioned new chairs, supposedly ‘inspired’ by Jacobsen’s designs, which looked like parodies of the originals. Fritz Hansen refused to supply McDonald’s again. By using Jacobsen’s chairs in such a hostile context, McDonald’s had deprived them of the very qualities it had paid so much money for, and turned a textbook example of good design into a cautionary tale of the danger of forfeiting design integrity.