Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [74]
Most of us are so engrossed in whatever it is we do with our days that we fail to consider what anyone else is doing with theirs. I attended a meeting in Washington, D.C., a short time ago and everyone there but me was a designer of things. I never knew there were so many. I came away realizing that designing what a product will look like is a substantial part of any business. There are thousands of people who spend their lives doing it.
Everything we use has been designed, well or poorly . . . your car, your toaster, your watch. When Alexander Graham Bell finished inventing the telephone, all he had was wires. Someone had to decide on the shape of the instrument it would be housed in, and they came up with that great old standup telephone. That was industrial design. There is usually trouble between engineers and designers. Most designers are creative artists who tend to ignore the practical aspects of a product. Most engineers, on the other hand, don’t usually care much what a product looks like as long as it works.
The only time the consumer wins is when design and function blend together in one harmonious unit that looks great and works perfectly. We know it doesn’t happen often.
A lot of artists who can’t make a living selling their paintings or anything else that is commonly called art often turn to commerce. Sometimes they are apologetic about having to make a living, but they ought not be. If they are bad artists that’s one thing, but if they are competent or even talented artists they ought to take a lot of satisfaction from being able to provide the rest of us, who don’t have their talent, with some visual niceties. Making the practical, everyday world good-looking is not a job to be embarrassed about.
It may even be that industrial design and commercial art are more important than art for art’s sake. Art always appeals to me most when it has had some restrictions placed on it. I like art that solves a problem or says something a new way. Uninhibited, free-form, far-out art never seems very artistic to me. Artists who can do anything in the whole world they want to do don’t usually do anything. Even Michelangelo was at his best when he had a ceiling to paint.
The danger industrial designers face is that they’ll be turned into salesmen. The first rule of industrial design should be that the product must look like what it is, not like something else. If something looks like what it is and works, it’s beautiful and no amount of dolling it up will help it. This accounts for why bridges are so attractive to us. The best bridges are built from plans that come from some basic engineering principle that hasn’t been altered by a salesman who thinks he could get more people to cross it by making it a different shape. I always liked the Shredded Wheat box for the same reason.
The best-designed packages are those whose first priority is to contain the product. The ones we are all suspicious of are the packages that are too big and too fancy for what they were built to contain. We are
Quality? 159
tired of false cardboard bottoms and boxes twice as big as they need to be to hold something.
The original green six-ounce Coca-Cola bottle was one of the great designs of all time. It was perfect in almost every way and has, naturally, been all but abandoned. The salesmen took over the bottle from the designers, and now it’s too big or not a bottle at all.
I hope our industrial designers can maintain their artistic integrity, even though they have turned to commerce, because what worries me about all this is the same thing that worries me about that chair I made. Too often we’re making things that look better than they are.
Quality?
I t is unceasingly sickening to see someone make a bad product and run a good one out of business. It happens all the time, and we look around to see whose fault it is. I have a sneaking feeling we aren’t looking hard enough. It’s our fault, all of us.
If it isn’t our fault—the fault of the American people—whose fault is it? Who is it that makes so many bad