Function and Flourishing: Good Design and Aesthetic LivesAuthor(s): Jeffrey Petts

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education , Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 2019), pp. 1-18
Published by: University of Illinois Press

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Function and Flourishing:
Good Design and Aesthetic Lives

Jeffrey Petts

1
Monroe Beardsley wrote that there would be no aesthetics if everyone was
silent about works of art.1 Similarly, there would be no philosophical aes-
thetics of design if no one ever talked critically about, but instead quietly
enjoyed or put up with, our built environment and things of everyday use.
But whereas Beardsley could draw on an established and distinct body of art,
music, and literary criticism to set the aims and scope of aesthetics, a similar
metacritical approach to the aesthetics of design has no directly equivalent
body of critical work. That’s not to say designed things aren’t objects of criti-
cal appraisal raising judgments of a distinctively aesthetic character. Charles
Rennie Mackintosh’s ladder-back chair was “designed to enhance the white
walls of the Hill House bedroom,” a house Mackintosh designed too, and
its “poise and elegance” suitably “contrasted with the spatial proportions of
the room.”2 A sampling of nominations for the UK Design Museum awards
reveals a range of products where “beauty” is part of the rationale for nomi-
nations, from a phone offering “an elegant and thoughtful aesthetic” to the
beauty of a vase, “the facets of which beautifully absorb and reflect ambient
light,” or a new “elegant but minimalist lounge chair, which reveals its com-
position and joinery.”3
But such aesthetic attributes and evaluations of furniture, interior design,
products, and buildings sit alongside other distinct judgments of them. So
a chair might be elegant but also meet demands that it be durable and easy
to stack, like Robin Day’s 1960s polypropylene chair.4 Design awards usu-
ally refer also to aesthetic considerations as one among several evaluative
criteria. So while the UK Design Museum’s annual award typically refers
to beauty or related aesthetic concepts, it always lists a range of criteria that
also include consideration of materials, functions, and cost. Similarly, the

Jeffrey Petts is an independent scholar based in London. His research centers on the
concept of work and its relations to art, design, workmanship, and everyday aesthetic
interests. He was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of York in 2013.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 53, No. 2, Summer 2019

© 2019 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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2  Petts

UK Furniture Makers’ Company awards the Design Guild Mark based on

criteria that include appropriate materials, sustainable sources, and value
for money.5 It’s worth noting too that judging panels tend to reflect this
diversity of “aesthetic,” “ethical,” “engineering,” and “commercial” inter-
ests. And even in the most extreme of socioeconomic circumstances, this
range seems a constant: statements about 1940s UK utility furniture stressed
that, even within the constraints placed on materials by war, designs aimed
at sound construction, usefulness, convenience, reasonable price, and a
pleasing appearance.6 Designers acknowledge this range. So, for example,
Dieter Rams (chief design officer at Braun from 1961 to 1995) sees the role
of the designer as essentially that of an employee working on project teams
with “marketing” and “engineering,” with business and technical directors.
There is a mix of things to consider in design work, such as shape and colors
but also problem-­solving about how something will work.7
Still, critical thinking about design has also been by designers thinking
critically about their work, about designing, per se. This thinking is about
the general value of design work. So while it refers to the range of evaluative
criteria used in assessing individual designs, it also expresses general “apol-
ogies” for, or defenses of, design.8 I shall argue that these statements about
design work form the most significant material for metacriticism, setting
both the general value ascribed to design as an activity and, significantly,
feeding back into specific evaluations of designs.9 In that too, then, they are
key to understanding what general ideas are operating in design education.
Apologies answer questions like “What makes design a good thing to
have in one’s life?” So, for example, a recent general introduction describes
all design’s “shared interest in improving society,” its necessarily “optimis-
tic and forward-­looking” approach, and its traditional intention of making
humans stronger, more adept, and better able to manage their environment.10
For Rams, in a similar vein, these translate to key design principles about
“innovation” and “usefulness” (as well as “aesthetics”).11 He argues that
technology offers opportunities to innovate with original designs. Addition-
ally, products are useful by what he calls “psychological” as well as strictly
functional criteria, given that they are “used every day and have an effect on
people and their well-­being.”12 Design awards, like those mentioned here,
also refer to similar overarching aims: for example, “promoting change to
enable new ways of living” and “offering excellent user experience that will
improve lives.”13
I shall argue that such apologies for design in terms of “improvement,”
“fit,” “well-­being,” and related terms are properly understood in terms of a
general account of aesthetic experience as an adaptive and consummatory
experience. In short, when designers talk about the general value of design,
they do so on the grounds that it delivers that kind of experience. Apologies
for design, then, are essentially aesthetic defenses of design. They do not

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  3

offer or support any overtly moral or political claims (even when seemingly
moral-­political terms are being used, like “designing for freedom”).14 To reit-
erate: a metacritical approach to design takes what designers say about good
design in general seriously but also aims to understand what they mean by
the terms they typically use. The main claim I shall make is that, using terms
like “improvement,” “fit,” and “well-­being,” they mean experiences of felt
rightness in our relationships with everyday things and experiences that are
explicable and open to public discussion, that is, ones of real value. In short,
their collective endeavor at good design is one aimed at aesthetic quality in
our everyday experiences of things and the built environment. Design edu-
cation, insofar as it concerns itself with the principles and practices of good
design, then, is properly also a de facto part of aesthetic education.

* * *
This aesthetic quality of good design is not to be conceived as a claim for
design’s “artistic” status, though, as an “art” apology for design, in other
words. Nor does it support some kind of formal “artistic” training for
designers.
It is as well at this stage to clear the philosophical ground of the supposed
artistic elements and aspirations of design work. Such a set of claims is a
common aestheticist prephilosophic intuition about design work, oppos-
ing a functionalist view. They are views too that occasionally find resonance
within the broad community of designers, marking a supposed fault line in
design practice between engineering and styling.15 The broadly functional
intuition understands design work as making things that fulfill their basic
function, requiring the appropriate problem-­solving and engineering or
technical skills for that type of thing. The broadly aesthetic intuition under-
stands design work as a discrete activity concerned with giving functional
things a stylish “look and feel” or form and requiring broadly creative and
artistic skills. In other words, the functionalist intuition sees design as solv-
ing problems about how something will work, and its exemplary worker
is an engineer-­designer; the aestheticist intuition sets any design problem
as one about a functional thing’s form and supposed aesthetic appeal and
designers are essentially thought of as creatives.
Critical thinking about the issue suggests that design’s artistry qua cre-
ativity is not intrinsic to design work or at best has a meaning that is unique
in the context of design. So Kees Dorst associates a certain kind of design
creativity with artistry, arguing that, where designers develop their own
goals and build these into projects, they “are something of artists.”16 Dorst
thus suggests that design’s supposed art status resides in the artfulness of
self-­generated goals, rather than in some shared, transferable practical skills
or professional standards between designers and artists. For Dorst, the point
at which designers are artists is that at which they develop an individual

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4  Petts

style, albeit one that is only enacted through the possibilities for creativity
set by design problems. But this means there is a key difference with art too:
while a designer’s goals are essentially set by others, because stakehold-
ers in the end product require a practical need to be met, artists set their
own goals. Norman Potter similarly argues that the key difference between
art and design work is in the freedom artists have to generate works.17 He
notes that a designer’s output, like models and drawings, are neither ends
in themselves nor the sole output of the designer’s vision but rather the out-
come of many discussions with clients and other stakeholders. These might
be procedures familiar to artists—especially those working on public or
other commissions, of course—but, still, the origins of artistic work are more
inward, so that “a painter’s first responsibility [unlike a designer’s] is to the
truth of his own vision.”18 Again in a similar vein to Dorst, Potter character-
izes design’s artistry in a “shared visual sensibility” or a designer’s having
a sense of style.19 But that does not direct us to any necessarily common
skills, procedures, or general aims for art and design. Creativity in design
may be evidenced by style, but that is not evidence of art. It marks imagi-
native, practical problem-­solving. This becomes clearer when examples of
thinking about design work and its aims are examined (in the next section).
Still, design has its general freedom issue like art, but it typically centers on
its proper relation to advertising and marketing rather than to ideas about
artistic “true-­to-­self” authenticity. So, for example, Olga Gueft, a leading fig-
ure in twentieth-­century American design and editor of Interiors for twenty
years, warned that “Madison Avenue pressures can oppress as tyrannically
as law,” referring to that area’s cluster of advertising agencies and their no-­
holds-­barred commercialism.20

* * *
As a final preliminary, it is worth noting that the metacritical approach
is distinct from recent interest in the concept of design in that it changes
philosophical focus to questions about good design.21 I do not seek to define
design or provide an ontology of design. But in seeking to establish good
design’s philosophical foundations, design’s distinctive contribution to aes-
thetic value is revealed.
This has broadly educative consequences too. First, the contribution of
metacriticism to design education is not to verify design principles and their
various applications, as expressed in statements about design in general by
practitioners. Rather, it explains how these statements represent overarch-
ing design ideas of fitness and related terms that are essentially aesthetic
in character. Second, metacriticism of design statements thus contributes to
thinking about aesthetic education more generally by revealing the meaning
of good design’s key ideas and explaining how design works for improved,
flourishing aesthetic lives at personal, household, working, and social levels.

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  5

Good design indeed becomes a key component of aesthetic education con-

ceived in those developmental terms.
I explore these educative and developmental aspects in the concluding
section. But prior to that, it is necessary to examine and categorize design
statements themselves.

2
In the examples and analyses that follow, I aim to show that designers think
good designs culminate and are evidenced by a final aesthetic moment
when a design solution is tested and experienced as just right and being fit
for purpose. Designers reflecting on design give this aesthetic characteriza-
tion central importance in their apologies for it, whether explicitly or not.
But they do so in different ways.
The statements examined here are categorized and chosen to show varia-
tions in the way in which aesthetic fit as an overarching design value or
apology is envisaged. I suggest three broad, distinct categories. The first
category covers the way designers think about the personal experience of
using particular things; the second examines how designers conceive the
individual’s experience of the aesthetic value or beauty of their everyday
domestic lives; and the third covers claims designers make about designing
communities that support the good life. Each category supports the gen-
eral thesis that apologies for design are essentially about improving human
experiential life in explicably aesthetic terms.

Category 1. The Personal Experience of Things:

Needs and Problem-­Solving
The idea that design work is essentially a practical problem-­solving activity
directly related to human needs is expressed by Henry Dreyfuss’s anthro-
pological intuition that design as an activity began when the design flaws
of cupped hands for holding water were recognized by early humans.22
Similarly, when asked “What is the primary condition for the practice of
design?” Charles and Ray Eames simply replied, “a recognition of need.”23
In both Dreyfuss’s intuition and the Eameses’ observation, then, there is nei-
ther a designed thing nor a design as such at the heart of design work: that
is, no physical cup or beaker nor a physical plan or model of the solution.
The suggested essence of design work is the conception of design problems.
Conceiving design problems based on user needs, though, leads to the
kinds of practices noted in design’s history, including the work we now rec-
ognize as that of specialist, professional designers.24 For millennia, design
solutions were delivered by what we can roughly, but reasonably, call craft-­
like planning and delivery. Conceiving design problems and solutions for
mass production using machinery marks the point at which design work

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6  Petts

is associated with professional designers and their work becomes estab-

lished as industrial design, with its own principles, qualifications, and stan-
dards.25 And the general progression of industrial design seems to indicate
an increasing range and depth of the idea of need, and therefore of func-
tion, in conceiving design problems and solutions. At the time design was
establishing itself as a profession, Anthony Bertram in the United Kingdom,
for example, produced a guide for the general public showing this range
of interests and asking individuals how needs were best met.26 The range
is now familiar, from “furnishing and equipment of the house,” through
“housing,” “transport,” “roads,” “shops,” “clothes,” “town and country
planning,” and “public buildings” to more specific things like typewriters
and stamps and fountain pens, reflecting the state of 1930s technology. All
these everyday products required, in Herbert Read’s terms, a new “indus-
trial art” for machine-­made goods, not as some decorative/artistic add-­on.27
By the mid-­1950s, when the American designer Raymond Loewy reflects on
his work, he too distinguishes between industrial design proper, which is an
integrated process engaging engineers and other specialists, and mere “face-­
lift” jobs.28
At this point, we see that design solutions in general were conceived as
properly assessed against standards of fit that were not reducible to style
considerations. Rather, we witness key features of good design work estab-
lished, which are now understood as universal: client and user needs estab-
lishing the parameters of a design problem; engineering and style issues;
models and testing; and a design solution. As such, statements about design
as needs-­based do not assert some necessarily discrete or free aesthetic
interest in design work. What we have, rather, is a model of good design
work as solving problems set by the needs of makers and users in ways that
work well or fit. Maker and user needs can be conceived in more or less rich
ways for each design problem. So, for example, Charles Eames’s suggested
sophisticated notions of needs and of how designs meet them in his advice
to students in his design office: a) avoid the pat answer, the formula and pre-
conceived ideas; b) study objects made in the past, recent and ancient, but
never without the technological and social conditions responsible; c) search
out the true need, physical and psychological; d) art is not something you
apply to your work; it is the way you do it.29
Statements like Eames’s about design generally include issues about the
complexity of needs and about the creative or artistic aspect of design work.
But, importantly too, they support the idea of a general “design ethic,” as
Eames called it, which for him meant that design aims at products that are
“necessarily useful.”30 He means, in other words, that good designs respond
to real needs and that these needs are typically complex and never austerely
functional. They are designs that allow us to survive and flourish as human
beings. While raising important practical and philosophical questions about

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  7

objectivity, wants, and universality, my intention here is to show how the

needs-­based approach to design work is essentially an apology for design in
terms of designs that are genuinely “fit for purpose” in terms of the experi-
ences of users.
The experiential measure of fit, of true needs well met, is also developed
by Dreyfuss when he sets certain key tenets as a kind of mission statement for
industrial design. These are that design centers on people as users of things,
and, in that relation, there’s either “friction”—that is, failed design—or suc-
cess, which is indicated by a product’s being “safe, comfortable and efficient
to use, and being attractive to buy and giving a sense of happiness.”31 The
first three features—safety, comfort, and efficiency—can be analyzed as a
product meeting core functional requirements associated with the product
per se. The latter two—attractiveness and happiness—are normative func-
tional requirements associated with taste and ethical considerations. But all
are seen to work within an overarching concern with fit, with experiential
rightness. We can usefully see this, indeed statements about good design
generally, in the light of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that “when aes-
thetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful,’ ‘fine,’
etc, play hardly any role at all”; rather “the words you use are more akin to
‘right’ and ‘correct.’”32 He observes that, in designing a door, its designer
will “look at it and say: Higher, higher, higher . . . oh, all right.”33 Drey-
fuss’s statements about design for the people and Eames’s about real needs
in terms of the experiential aims and achievements of good design amount,
then, to an aesthetic defense of its general value.

Category 2. Experiencing the Beauty of Everyday Life

An editorial in the periodical Wallpaper* (*the stuff that refines you) character-
izes design in terms of its “hope to make the world, in small ways perhaps, a
more civilised and lovely place to be.”34 Such statements (indeed, the title of
this magazine itself) may seem glib, especially when they are typically found
in publications where it is often difficult to see clear distinctions between
thoughtful commentary and marketing of specific products. 35 However,
such expressions of design’s worth have a serious meaning and intent. They
refer to that band of aesthetic interest at the everyday, household level that
lies between the design and appreciation of particular products and that of
the environmental fabric of whole societies.
An early recognizable account is Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household
Taste, concerned with the need for “improved taste in objects of modern
manufacture” that make up the “internal fittings of a house.”36 The key
to good design was “simplicity of style,” so that these objects were “pic-
turesque and interesting without being rude and clumsy in form.”37 These
are hints for users of objects but are directions too for designers, suggest-
ing principles of good design for industrial art, for designing “artistically

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8  Petts

appointed houses.”38 Eastlake challenged, then, both any “indifference to

art” of the public and any “narrow perceptions of beauty” in human-­making
that limited it to “the fields of painting and sculpture.”39
In this general approach, Eastlake shared with his contemporary Wil-
liam Morris a core idea of good design being artistic and contributing to the
general beauty of life. Morris developed the idea that all human work was
potentially artful and that it followed that art was available to the mass of
people through the everyday things they made and used. So, “a house, a
knife, a cup, a steam engine . . . anything that is made by man and has form,
must either be a work of art or destructive to art.”40 Morris and Eastlake
share a broad notion of art that is essentially a demand for aesthetic interest
in making things. Morris’s statements about the artfulness of design, like
Eastlake’s, are not prefaces to a stylistic preference but statements about
good design’s contribution to the general beauty of life. They mean to influ-
ence taste by “giving them [the general public] a share in art.”41 This share
happens through good design work and the correlate pleasure in using
things made with aesthetic interest.
Its apogee in this British tradition was perhaps the 1951 United King-
dom’s South Bank Exhibition’s use of a stock list, compiled by the United
Kingdom’s National Council of Industrial Design, which provided a stan-
dard for everyday products centered on their “workmanship,” “appear-
ance,” and “fitness for purpose.”42 In the United States, the equivalent of a
quality mark was “Good Design.” The 1950 “Good Design: An Exhibition of
Home Furnishings” showcased products that met a set of criteria that were
also labeled with a “Good Design” logo and sold across the country.43 Today,
with the same general aesthetic intent, the light bulb can be redesigned so
that it is “transformed from a thing of bland utility into a thing of coveted
beauty, which then becomes more usable and more enjoyable.”44
Artistic work is thematic in statements about design and the consequent
beauty of life. Here is another example. The designer Bruno Munari took
inspiration from Bauhaus because its manifesto aimed to make a “new kind
of artist, an artist useful to society”:45 “[W]hen the objects we use every day
and the surroundings we live in have become in themselves a work of art,
then we shall be able to say that we have achieved a balanced life.”46 While
Munari does not clarify this, the history of design statements taken as a
whole suggests that such apologies for design, from Eastlake as mentioned,
invoke the idea of a promised aesthetic life.
In that context, consider the “world of the Eameses.”47 They are inter-
ested in designing and making products that are “the best for the greatest
number of people for the least [price].”48 But there is a concern too with
attitudes toward living, expressed by Ray Eames: “[W]hat finally matters is
that your house works the way you want it to. And that it is a pleasant place
to be in.”49 There is an apology for design here and one that can be expanded

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  9

even to the idea that design contributes to a “hands-­on, improvisatory and

innovative” life.50
But in all this—from Eastlake to the Eameses and beyond—there is an
idea of design’s general value as creating conditions for a certain kind of
domestic life. This is properly understood (as an apology for design) not as a
momentary and fashionable life-­style but as a life actively engaging aesthetic
interest in things in one’s private surroundings and appreciating the design
work going into them.

Category 3. Designing Communities and the Good Life

Perhaps the clearest examples in design history of design problems cast in
terms of producing the general environmental conditions thought necessary
for the good life are associated with housing and town planning. Typical of
these are garden city projects and the planning of housing estates. Examples
are Hampstead Garden Suburb at the beginning of the twentieth century
to current schemes like Staiths South Bank.51 Henrietta Barnett’s vision for
Hampstead Garden Suburb was a community showing “how thousands of
people, of all classes of society, of all sorts of opinions, and all standards of
income, can live in helpful neighbourliness” and that against a design prob-
lem of doing “something to meet the housing problem by putting within
the reach of the working people the opportunity of taking a cottage with a
garden within a 2d. fare of Central London.”52 Hemingway Design states
that the Staiths project “marries contemporary design with a nostalgic nod
to community values. . . . It will be a development where everyone can rec-
ognise their own home from the way it looks, where children can play safely
free of cars and where private gardens open out into communal gardens
where residents can get to know each other.”53
Stephen Hunt, investigating the garden-­suburb movement in Bristol,
UK, at the beginning of the twentieth century, notes how designs offer
“utilitarian solutions to immediate social ills while attempting to advance a
progressive, even utopian impulse.”54 This, of course, reflected the conten-
tion of Ebenezer Howard, the movement’s founder, that the task he had set
for designers was nothing less than “reconstructing anew the entire exter-
nal fabric of society.”55 The goal was equally impressive: “a new sense of
freedom and joy” in the hearts of people, “a social life which permits alike
of the completest concerted action and of the fullest individual liberty,”
and “reconciliation between order and freedom—between the well-­being
of the individual and of society.”56 Bauhaus, formed in 1919 out of exist-
ing arts-­and-­crafts and fine-­arts organizations and designated an Institute
of Design in 1926, similarly combined “romantic socialist and utopian
aspirations.”57
It is clear that such ventures, designing whole communities, require
sensitivity to a wide range of functional considerations. These will include

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10  Petts

comprehension of the psychological and social impact of the things being

designed (and of course in large-­scale housing projects, social consider-
ations take on an added significance, absent in, say, designing a chair). The
argument, we see, is premised on the idea that products alter the aesthetic
fabric of the world in ways that necessarily impact the quality of life: that a
housing estate design impacts on neighborliness, allows, for example, chil-
dren to play outside their homes, and so on. In short, good design reflects an
extended notion of functionality couched in terms of an apology for design
as enabling positive relationships between people and their, especially built,
environments. The idea and apology was reiterated by Lewis Mumford in
his introductory essay to Howard’s “garden city idea,” claiming he had laid
the foundation for a new “urban civilization” in which designs “needed for
biological survival and economic efficiency likewise lead to social and per-
sonal fulfilment.”58
Similar claims are still made, recently for “Californian Design,” for
example. A 2017 UK Design Museum exhibition states its “central premise
is that California has pioneered tools of personal liberation, from LSD to
surfboards and iPhones . . . [and] interface designers in the San Francisco
Bay Area are shaping some of our most common daily experiences.”59 The
meaning of design becomes political, it’s claimed. “‘Designed in California’
is not a style but an attitude,” and the attitude is “Go, see, say, make, join
what you want”; design works to “empower individuals”; well-­designed
things are “tools of personal liberation.”60
So, in the twenty-­first century, design’s concern with needs retains an
idea of improving lives at both personal and social levels. Take another exam-
ple from the UK Design Museum’s Designs of the Year. In 2016, the four cri-
teria for nomination indicated both core functional demands and norma-
tive values, sometimes within a single criterion: so, for example, “design
that promotes or delivers change, from using new materials or processes to
enabling new ways of living”; or “design that enables access from a website
offering an excellent user experience to design that will improve lives.”61
Designs, then, are merited in terms of their categories, the types of design
problems they engage (architectural, digital, transport, and so on), and how
they best solve them in specific instances (a housing estate, a government
website, a city tram) within overall criteria strongly related to general norms
of good living to which design necessarily contributes.
In passing, an editorial titled “A Matter of Definitions” in the design jour-
nal Disegno recently admitted having “no Idea” how to answer the ques-
tion “what even is design?” given the seeming disconnected diversity of the
contents of the issue, that included the material history of silipol, gender in
design, the restoration of Jesus’s tomb, and porcelain tiling at London’s Vic-
toria & Albert Museum.62 Persevering but without too much certainty, the
editor fixes on what he or she conceives as a common thread, namely, that

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  11

all are “about how people have attempted to shape their environments.”63
Such doubts are assuaged further if other statements about good design are
in mind, like those examined here, which relate aesthetic quality in the built
environment to the good life generally.

3
We can conclude from this, albeit introductory, metacriticism that apologies
for design are variations of a broad aesthetic functionalism about design’s
general value. In summary, aesthetic functionalism about design amounts
to a cluster of criteria about its value as an activity around meeting needs
in fitting ways that improve practical life, adding things of beauty, of aes-
thetic value, to everyday lives, and creating built environments that aid the
good life.
I conclude with some thoughts on how aesthetic functionalism about
design’s value as an activity might support existing developmental views
of the nature of the aesthetic and, in turn, contribute to the concept of aes-
thetic education. Paul Guyer notes that a general developmental view of
the aesthetic argues that aesthetic experience has a value beyond discrete
moments of felt pleasure and aesthetic evaluation. In short, aesthetic inter-
est and experience have an educative role in life more generally. So he notes
theorists who acknowledge that aesthetic interest allows us to develop our
imaginative and cognitive capacities but who additionally value it “because
of the benefits the development of these capacities can bring to the rest of
our lives.”64
This general developmental view of the aesthetic—arguing for its impact
on the “rest of our lives” or its educational value—is evident in different
theoretical idioms. I will briefly note three and how design’s aesthetic func-
tionalism accords with each. They are John Dewey’s pragmatic account of
human adaptation, the expansive view of the aesthetic field argued by the
everyday aesthetics movement, and the broadly social view of the signifi-
cance of the aesthetic in the tradition of Friedrich Schiller.

Dewey’s Aesthetic Theory

John Dewey’s aesthetic theory is developmental insofar as it explains aes-
thetic experience as an adaptive encounter with things. Aesthetic experience
has a rhythmic “movement” and “consummation” that produces works
that “become part of the environment.”65 “Works” are not limited to “high
art” but include “dance, song, utensils, and articles of daily living.”66 All
contribute to “the life of a civilization”; they are its “manifestation, record
and celebration.”67 The account has clear and strong resonances with design
work, especially its general rhythm or pattern of assessing human needs,
creating design solutions, and subjecting them to critical testing for fit. Good

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12  Petts

design, then, has an aesthetic quality that is, in Deweyan terms, “internal”
to its work, properly done. It is not an “external and partial” producer–
consumer relation or a commercial exercise.68 Rather, good design, by its
aesthetic quality, is not determined by such externals but is indicated as a
consummatory human experience of things. We experience things as “hav-
ing their own internal functional adaptations” that “fit in a way that yields
aesthetic results.”69 In the round, good design is part of the everyday inte-
gration of the live human creature with her environment. As such, designers
contribute in unique ways, by their focus on everyday things, to the stock
of aesthetic value in the world. It is worth noting too that Dewey sees this
threatened, and not just by external commercial factors, by what he calls
“mechanical production,” which he regards as anathema to aesthetic qual-
ity. Yet industrial conditions of production can, he thinks, be manipulated
to aesthetic ends by thinking about products’ “efficient use,” for example,
by removing “silly encumbering ornamentations.”70 So, ultimately, Dewey’s
developmental aesthetics sits four-­square with aesthetic functionalism about
design, especially fundamental ideas about needs and aesthetic fit, summed
up by his general contention, albeit in the context of industrial design, that
“aesthetic revolution [is] brought about by better adaptation to need.”71
Dewey goes on to suggest that this “revolution” extends from products
themselves to how production, including, of course, design work, generally
is organized: “No permanent solution [to the absence of aesthetic quality
in artifacts] is possible save in a radical social alteration, which effects the
degree and kind of participation the worker has in the production and social
disposition of the wares he produces.”72

Everyday Aesthetics
The everyday aesthetics movement is developmental in its commitment to
ideas about the extensive range of opportunities for aesthetic interest and
experience and their value.73 It challenges what it perceives as the Western
art-­centered bias of philosophical aesthetics and also disputes the idea of
aesthetic experience as essentially a disinterested encounter with artworks,
arguing for accounts of aesthetic experience that acknowledge its active and
practical nature. Yuriko Saito, for example, argues for a divided aesthetics
between that of art and of the everyday, between disinterested aesthetic
experience of artworks and active aesthetic involvement with the everyday,
with design in the “everyday” camp. She argues that a significant part of
that active everyday experience should be a “green aesthetics” in design-
ing artifacts.74 The general point, however, remains that something about
design work as an activity enriches our aesthetics lives and is also signifi-
cant because “engagements with everyday objects and environments far
exceeds interaction with art.”75 So, in Saito’s everyday aesthetics, we see an
aesthetics-­society nexus suggested: “Everyday aesthetic tastes and attitudes

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  13

often do lead to consequences which go beyond simply being preoccupied

with and fussing over the surface, and that they affect not only our daily life
but also the state of society and the world.”76
Aesthetic functionalism about design ex hypothesi supports this broad
and developmental idea of the aesthetic but focuses it on development that
occurs through making and using everyday things well (which includes
Saito’s environmental concerns, if an idea of fit with the natural environ-
ment is a necessary part of good design). These basic reflections counter
any suggestion that everyday aesthetics trivializes the idea of the aesthetic,
with design included in the analysis and trivialized by default. Christopher
Dowling, for example, doubts whether everyday life experiences amount
to aesthetic ones, given they are unlikely to meet the criteria of aesthetic
interest associated with exemplary art appreciation: that they are subject to
agreement, amendment, and critical discussion.77 But all these elements, we
have seen, are key features of good design in the experiential context of our
making and using everyday functional objects. So, unlike Dowling, there is
no need to dismiss everyday encounters as nonaesthetic, arguing that they
do not involve necessary art-­like appreciative engagement. Everyday aes-
thetics’s central notion of a wide range of aesthetically appreciable made
things is indeed supported by design’s general aesthetic interest in making
things that work well.

Aesthetics in the Tradition of Schiller

I want to introduce finally the idea of developmental aesthetics in the philo-
sophic tradition that starts with Friedrich Schiller’s claim that “it is by way
of beauty that one approaches liberty.”78 It has recently been re-­expressed in
these terms: that, in our times of “(dis-­)integration and transition,” it might
be right to look again at how freedom and consensus in modern societies
can be achieved “through the cultivations of our feelings and judgements.”79
This might seem a large load for design, even if only in part, to bear, but
designers have, as noted above in their statements about their work, an
interest in the general social effects of designs. Moreover, it does seem a
defensible position that good design at least contributes to free and consen-
sual societies by engaging with problems of human needs and cultivating
sensibilities to them in making things and creating the built environment.
Good designs evidence that we are capable of being free and proud shapers
of our environments. This “dignity of man” is perhaps the loftiest, human-
ist ideal of design and of making more generally. It is an ideal of making
the best we can, which necessarily involves design work to create everyday
things that allow human beings to flourish in making and using them.
I have noted this ideal in metacriticism of general statements about
design like this recent one from the curator of the UK 2017 Designs of
the Year: “Design can be defined as the improvement, or optimisation, of

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14  Petts

things.”80 In this case, “improvement” is elaborated in terms of the effects

of design on life in terms of “production, distribution, use and waste” and
more specifically design’s environmental impact, how it can help “access to
information,” and encourage “cross-­cultural communication.”81 But what-
ever the details, designers continue to talk and write about the “transforma-
tive power of design to change the way we live our everyday lives.”82
Explaining the “transformative power” of design has long been a concern
for design educators. For example, W. R. Lethaby noted that, while design-
ers deal with “very complex and technical matters” so that “their works . . .
show our science,” their actual “business is with civilization.”83 Designers
should be “ministers of civilization,” no less.84 Lethaby thus saw the two-
fold character of design work and its education: “train us [designers] to
practical power, make us great builders and adventurous experimenters,”
but additionally “[design] education must be recast in the public service.”85
Design work is considered to be about “betterment all round” and work
that is accordingly not at the mercy of commerce and patronage.86 But how
is the idea that design work has an overarching civilizing aim made clear to
designers? Lethaby suggests that design students need “contact with larger
ideas than ‘shop’ and the passing of examinations.”87
There is no doubt something ineffable about “larger ideas” of cultivat-
ing “feelings and judgements” toward more civilized ways of living. But
metacriticism about design statements at least reveals the meaning of exist-
ing apologies for design as being essentially aesthetic in nature and that
therein—in cultivating aesthetic interest in designers and aesthetic experi-
ence in users of things—lies design’s contribution to improving—civilizing,
indeed—human lives.

* * *
In summary, aesthetic functionalism about design endorses and deepens
the developmental understanding, in its various idioms, of the role of the
aesthetic in our everyday lives. It shows how good design is an integral
part of the concept of aesthetic education. And placing statements about
design work in general in the context of developmental aesthetics deepens
our understanding of them.

Notes

1. Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1981), 1.

2. Susie Hodge, What Makes Great Design (London: Francis Lincoln Ltd, 2014), 2.
3. Taken from Designs of the Year (London: Design Museum, 2013), describing a
Windows phone, faceture vases, and a Medici chair, respectively.
4. The Frederick Parker Collection: A Selection of Chairs (London: London Metropoli-
tan University, n.d.), 44.

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  15

5. For the Design Guild Mark, see https://www.furnituremakers.org.uk, accessed

October 27, 2018.
6. Utility Furniture (London: Board of Trade, 1943).
7. Gerrit Terstiege, ed., The Making of Design (Basel, CH: Birkhauser, 2009), “Inter-
view with Dieter Rams,” 8–15.
8. The term “apologies” is used similarly by Terry Diffey to refer to general defenses
of the value of art in “Aesthetic Instrumentalism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 22,
no. 4 (1982): 341.
9. So I exclude from analysis the numerous first-­order practical guides to various
design specialisms, like housing, transportation, furniture, graphics, electronic
goods, and so on.
10. Gareth Williams, Design: An Essential Introduction (London: Design Museum,
2015), 8.
11. Dietar Rams, “10 Principles of Good Design,” available at various online sources,
for example, Vitsœ, https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-­design, accessed
October 22, 2018.
12. Rams, “10 Principles.”
13. Simon Coppock, ed., Designs of the Year (London: The Design Museum, 2016), 11.
14. A recent exhibition and related literature on Californian design was premised on
the idea of systematic “designing for freedom,” for example. I return to this and
similar examples in more detail in the next section.
15. See, for example, Andy Hamilton’s “The Aesthetics of Design,” in the collec-
tion Fashion and Philosophy, ed. Jeanette Kennett and Jessica Wolfendale (Lon-
don: Blackwell, 2011) for “engineering versus fashion” debates within the design
community.
16. Kees Dorst, “But Is It Art?,” in Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles (London: Whitecha-
pel Gallery, 2007), 88.
17. Norman Potter, “Is a Designer an Artist?,” in Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles (Lon-
don: Whitechapel Gallery, 2007).
18. Potter, “Is a Designer an Artist?” 32.
19. Potter, 32.
20. Olga Gueft’s editorial for the periodical Interiors, May, 1962, 81. I merely wish to
indicate here, by this, one aspect of design’s essential distinctiveness from the
solely commercial work of advertising and marketing.
21. I refer particularly to attempts to set the aims and limits of the philosophical aes-
thetic of design by Glenn Parsons, The Philosophy of Design (Cambridge: Polity,
2016), and Jane Forsey, The Aesthetics of Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013).
22. Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 8;
and John Heskett Design: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005) provide a useful outline of the historical evolution of design.
23. Charles Eames and Ray Eames quoted from the transcript of a film interview
conducted with them by Madame L. Amic in 1972, titled Design Q&A, in The
World of Charles and Ray Eames, ed. Catherine Ince (London: Thames & Hudson,
2015), 256. The transcript can be found online at http://www.eamesoffice.com/
the-­work/design-­q-­a-­text/, accessed October 28, 2018.
24. A recent history of design by Pat Kirkham, History of Design (New York: Yale
University Press, 2013), spans 1400 to the present day and includes design work
from East Asia, India, the Islamic World, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The
editor’s introduction, even given its breadth, regards the book’s scope as arbi-
trary insofar as design extends back to antiquity, citing work from the late Neo-
lithic period. See also Charlotte Fiell and Peter Fiell, The Story of Design (London:
Goodman Feill, 2013).
25. See Raymond Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1951), 198, on the background to the establishment of the Society of

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16  Petts

Industrial Designers in America in 1944. In the United Kingdom, the Design

and Industries Association had been formed in 1915, and this can be traced back
to William Morris’s appearances before government committees in the 1880s
worried about the competitiveness of British products for export. Morris and
the arts and crafts movement argued for artistic or design work in manufac-
turing to help but also advocated for radical social change. Notable too is the
Deutscher Werkbund established in 1907, perhaps the first recognizably mod-
ern incarnation of design work, with its mix of artistic, commercial, and social
motives.
26. Anthony Bertrand’s pamphlet Design in Everyday Things (London: British Broad-
casting Corporation, 1937) accompanied a series of weekly radio broadcasts; it
was also a response to the plethora of design lectures since the publication of
Charles Eastlake’s general book on design, sometimes considered the first of its
kind, Hints on Household Taste, first published in 1874.
27. Herbert Read, Art and Industry (London: Faber, 1936). For Read, “industrial art”
and “industrial design” amounted to the same thing and owed much to Walter
Gropius and the Bauhaus’s commitment to new forms for the Industrial Age, as
stated in their 1919 manifesto.
28. Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone, 83.
29. Charles Eames, quoted in Catherine Ince, “Something about the World of Charles
and Ray Eames,” in The World of Ray and Charles Eames, 16.
30. The World of Charles and Ray Eames, 256.
31. Dreyfuss, Designing for People, frontispiece.
32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed.
Cyril Barrett (London: Blackwell, 1966), 3.
33. Wittgenstein, Lectures on Aesthetics, 13.
34. Editorial by Tony Chambers in Wallpaper, a design periodical, August 2017, 40.
35. And I assume the magazine’s title alludes to Oscar Wilde’s playful insight that
violence is caused by ugly wallpaper.
36. Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1878 ed., New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 2003), xxi.
37. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, xxiii.
38. Eastlake, xxii.
39. Eastlake, xxiii.
40. William Morris, “Art: The Socialist Ideal,” in William Morris: The Collected Works,
vol. 23 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 255.
41. Morris, “Art: The Socialist Ideal,” 63.
42. South Bank Exhibition, Festival of Britain, Guide (London: His Majesty’s Stationery
Office, 1951), 87.
43. Fiell and Fiell, The Story of Design, 353.
44. Description of the Plumen 001, in the Design Museum’s catalogue, Designs of the
Year (London, 2011).
45. Bruno Munari, Design as Art trans. Patrick Creagh (1966; London: Penguin,
2008), 27.
46. Munari, Design as Art, 27.
47. I take the phrase from The World of Charles and Ray Eames and the example par-
ticularly from a section of articles titled “At Home with the Eameses,” 61.
48. The World of Charles and Ray Eames, unattributed introductory text for section of
articles titled “Art of Living,” 138.
49. The World of Ray and Charles Eames, 138. There are, I think, striking similarities
between the Morrises (William, Jane, May) and the Eameses in terms of both
general ideas and practices that integrate domestic and working life around cre-
ative design—but that’s another thing.
50. The World of Ray and Charles Eames, 62.

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 Good Design and Aesthetic Lives  17

51. A “History of Hampstead Garden Suburb (HGS)” is available at http://www

.hgs.org.uk/history; and of Staiths Estate at https://www.hemingwaydesign
.co.uk/projects/staiths-­south-­bank/, both accessed October 22, 2018.
52. Hampstead Garden Suburb website, http://www.hgs.org.uk/history.
53. Hemingway Design website, https://www.hemingwaydesign.co.uk/projects/
staiths-­south-­bank.
54. Stephen Hunt, Yesterday’s To-­morrow: Bristol’s Garden Suburbs (Bristol, UK: Bristol
Radical History Group, 2009), 2.
55. Hunt, Yesterday’s To-­morrow, quoting Howard, 2.
56. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-­Morrow (London: Faber, 1965), 151.
57. Bauhaus: Art and Life (London: Koenig Books, 2012), 13. No editor is cited; this book
was published in association with the Barbican Art Gallery, London, on the occa-
sion of an exhibition of the same title. See Kathleen James-­Chakraborty’s “Between
Revolution and Reform,” 18–29 in the same, for the case that Bauhaus “has always
been linked with substantive political and social change” (18) involving new com-
munities of makers aiming to produce affordable beauty for everyone.
58. Lewis Mumford, “The Garden City and Modern Planning,” in Howard, Garden
Cities of To-­Morrow, 40.
59. The Design Museum, “California: Designing Freedom,” https://designmuseum
.org/exhibitions/california-­designing-­freedom, accessed October 28, 2018.
60. California: Designing Freedom, UK Design Museum exhibition, London, May–
October 2017.
61. Designs of the Year (London: Design Museum, 2016).
62. Disegno, The Quarterly Journal of Design 15 (2017): 7–8.
63. Disegno, 7–8.
64. Paul Guyer, “History of Modern Aesthetics,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed.
Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31.
65. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), 326.
66. Dewey, Art as Experience, 327.
67. Dewey, 326.
68. Dewey, 335.
69. Dewey, 342.
70. Dewey, 342.
71. Dewey, 342.
72. Dewey, 343.
73. See key texts by Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007),
and Thomas Leddy, “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics” in The Aesthetics of
Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005), 3–23.
74. Chapter 2 of five in Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics is dedicated to an environmental
argument about this topic.
75. Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, 243.
76. Saito, 55.
77. Christopher Dowling, “The Aesthetics of Daily Life,” British Journal of Aesthetics
50, no. 3 (2010): 240.
78. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. Alexander Schmidt,
trans. Keith Tribe (London: Penguin Books, 2016), 6.
79. Alexander Schmidt, “Introduction” to Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man,
xxxii.
80. Glenn Adamson, “Design: A Risky Business,” in Beazley Designs of the Year 2017
(London: Design Museum, 2017), 13.
81. Adamson, “Design: A Risky Business,” 13.
82. The Design Museum, “Beasley Designs of the Year, 2017,” https://designmuseum
.org/exhibitions/beazley-­designs-­of-­the-­year, accessed October 25, 2018.

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18  Petts

83. William Richard Lethaby, “Education of the Architect,” in Form in Civilization

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 123 and 127. Note that, although Letha-
by’s paper was delivered to architects about their work, it’s clear that his interest
was in all made things and his general points about architects’ education apply
across all makers: as he puts it in “Education for Appreciation and for Produc-
tion,” from “bread and books” to “houses and cities” (Form in Civilization, 138).
84. Lethaby, “Education of the Architect,” 127.
85. Lethaby, 128.
86. Lethaby, 128.
87. Lethaby, 12

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