Nobody asked for this
A short defence of working with unreasonable care
Happy Monday, this week I’m interrupting our regular schedule to share some thoughts on design, business and love that were inspired by a recent trip to Mexico. Enjoy!
Earlier this month I travelled to Mexico City and had the chance to visit some of the houses of the architect Luis Barragán—a hero of mine since architecture student days. Minimal and understated, his buildings nevertheless possess an emotional intensity that comes from very careful control of light and the transitions from room to room. Some of the transitions in his later works, such as the yellow light-soaked corridor above in the Casa Gilardi that leads to an ultramarine pool room are literally breath-taking. Several members of my morning tour group gasped as the door onto the corridor in the photograph was opened.
During the trip I was scouring the internet for as much reading material as I could find about Barragán and came across a 2020 NY Times article by Suleman Anaya about some of the architect’s very earliest and less-visited works:
Visiting these often unassuming buildings, one senses the architect’s inner conflicts and his unwillingness to compromise, endowing even the most prosaic of works with extraordinary angles, emotionally affecting progressions between rooms, abundant natural light and a wealth of other sensory gratifications that no one asked from him, least of all the people who employed him at this stage of his career.
—Suleman Anaya, writing in the New York Times in 2020
There are lot of different ways to define great design, but this display of obsessive care over the things that “no-one asked for” is probably my favourite. More than a little neurotic and almost never making financial sense, this desire to go further than required has always seemed to me so noble, a pure expression of the deferred love contained within every act of design. Of course history tells us that’s there’s normally more than a little ego involved too. Though speaking for myself I’d always sooner take the kind of ego that glorifies itself by creating things for others than the kind that only glorifies in taking.
A skim through the Design Lobster archives reveals countless other examples of this kind of this fastidiousness. The precise composition and dozen layers of lacquer of an Eileen Gray screen, the optical subtleties of type lettterforms or the delicate balance of a Flensted mobile, even the fanatical desire of the Apple packaging team to the get the resistance of an iPhone box lid just right.
All this is to say is that for design, as for other fields, the road to greatness is often paved with obsession—an immoderate, unjustifiable surplus of care. Doing things that no-one asked for with a love that no-one could reasonably expect.
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In June this year I wrote the following about the Japanese design philosophy of Hodo-hodo (ほどほど):
It captures a subtle and almost paradoxical shade of the work of a designer that I have always found hard to communicate to others. The way we will work really really hard to refine a detail that most others might never actually consciously notice. What I’ve learned though is that these details are felt even if they stay under conscious awareness, and create the seeds for an emotional connection to grow.
—from Design Lobster #150: Just enough design
After a I wrote this, a more business-minded friend wrote to me to say yes detail and care matter, but wouldn’t it be better if designers could be better at knowing where to focus. To discern between the details that really matter and those which are ultimately superfluous. A reasonable appeal and in some ways hard to argue with. What I wrote back to him however was that this line of thinking can be a little dangerous. Here’s a video of Jony Ive talking about his design philosophy as I attempt to explain why:
Jony Ive puts better than I could an important idea that has a big impact on what it means to design something. Humans are fantastically good at feeling things, but often terrible at disentangling exactly why. This means that the little details add up in ways we can’t quite plan for. There’s risk and certain degree of hubris to assume we can foretell how and where we should apportion our care. And maybe more pernicious still is the idea that care can be apportioned at all.
We don’t care for parts of a child or partner, we care for them as a whole. Once you start down the road of deciding some parts of a thing are more worthy of our care and attention it can be hard to care about any of it, or at least your care becomes quite different: savvier and colder and an altogether more tactical thing. The whole attitude really is a contradiction of the idea of craftsmanship. Like love, I believe a designer’s care is best when it is unconditional.
The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside. And just as they were aware that the Macintosh’s motherboard was also designed as elegantly as possible.
In the part of the design world that I work in, which rubs along somewhat uneasily with the raw powers of technology and commerce, the way of working and the type of care I’m describing can be hard to explain at the best of times. A well-run business after all is an efficient one. Deploying scarce resources to maximum effect and ensuring that just enough is done to satisfy the market (and no more). The kind of exacting and wasteful care I have been advocating for in this essay will be a case-study in many a business school in how not to do things.
Even my own discipline of UX design has a certain horror of the idea of investing work in creating something that might turn out to have been unnecessary or unwanted. Great time and effort go into conducting the workshops and the research to make certain, to, as we say, de-risk the possibility that we might bark up the wrong tree and put something into the world that the world did not in fact want.
It is of course always good to talk to people, to understand their hopes and their frustrations and craft things that we think have a good chance of solving their problems. But the world is too complex and strange to be read as a set of instructions and something is missing if you take this philosophy to its extreme. No-one will ever tell you in an interview to flood the corridor with yellow light and paint the pool room blue. And yet, when you do eventually open the door they will gasp all the same.
Scott Berkun, who has been a great supporter of Design Lobster over the years and writes the excellent newsletter Why Design is Hard writes very elegantly on the need for designers to accept the reality that they are ultimately business-people. There is much practical truth to this, especially I think for junior designers and to those who end up pining away their hours in frustration that their company/manager/colleagues do not appreciate them in the way they believe they deserve. It is dangerous too, to take refuge in fantasy, and business and designers should be clear-eyed about the circumstances in which they operate as much they should be clear-eyed about a particular design choice.
For me however there is a but. I think we should also be careful not to go completely native. To talk ourselves out of taking care at all. It’s my belief that even as we use the language and operate within the shinily efficient contours of the business world that we should still nurture that wholly unjustifiable and wasteful part of us that just wants to make the thing wonderful for its own sake. Inevitably the thing won’t be quite as wonderful as we maybe wanted, but I can guarantee it will be a whole lot more wonderful than if we had not.
The contradiction within Apple, one of the largest and most successful businesses that the world has ever seen— is that in its very heart it doesn’t operate much like a business at all. That it pours unreasonable effort into the inner workings of a laptop casing or the way a volume button behaves. Not every company is like Apple and not every designer is the same, but I do think that each of us should cherish rather than deny the same contradiction that exists in us.
Lots of you will be reading this on a Monday and heading into an office (or maybe just your bedroom desk) to start another week. Amidst the hubbub of meetings and deadlines, I hope you can find the time to do something no-one asked for this week 😉
Thanks for reading this special edition, see you in a couple of weeks.
Ben 🦞
PS. Speaking of doing things with care that no-one asked for I’ve been working with the very talented Ranine Chav Khun and Mathieu Favreau of Montreal animation studio Faav on a little project I’m teasing below. More to share in a future issue!
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Reading Design Lobster frequently brings me such solace and validation about being a designer. This post prompts me to share an example of nobly asked for this from my own life.
Lucy, my mother and, in all seriousness, my most influential design teacher and mentor, made me a special dress for graduation. The dress fabric was an exquisite, hand screened Swiss cotton featuring a stylized print of red, raspberry and blue tulips on a dark navy background. The idea of using dark navy thread to hem a ruffled edge, even for tiny stitches, and how it would mar the fabric’s darling blossoms disturbed her. So, she decided to change the thread color at each and every blossom to assure a match. The result was an exquisite hand-rolled hem held by invisible stitches, enough to satisfy any couture standards by a long shot.
My mother's motivation to sew like this - whether arduously matching thread colors or tailoring something to drape perfectly- is her quiet way of honoring exquisitely beautiful fabrics and design. To this day, the sewers at Ginny’s Fine Fabrics use the phrase, “to do a Lucy” when referring to any ridiculously over-the-top technique used when taking great care to honor beautiful fabrics.
Surplus care can come across as either pointlessly anal (opposite of hodo hodo) or inspiring because what you care about is what the viewer/consumer never realized was important - until (s)he encountered your design.
In mediocre products, surplus care reflects the political history of the maker (probably a department that grew too large and needs to exercise its authority).
But in other cases (even as humble as the magnetic 'sucking' of the mac charger to the relief/delight of a nocturnal programmer) is simply inspired design