Innovation is more than just design; a reply to Virginia Postrel

Early on in her 2003 book The Substance of Style (HarperCollins) Virginia Postrel celebrates our old friend, the Apple iMac. Enthusing about aesthetic value and design, she goes on: ‘Volkswagen reinvents the Beetle. Karim Rashid reinvents the trashcan. Oxo reinvents the potato peeler. People will pay an extra five bucks for a little kitchen tool that looks good and feels good.’

Her subsequent dissing of Dyson (Blueprint, March 2005) for his defence of functional performance against aesthetics misses the point. For what Dyson did to the vacuum cleaner through design was a little bit more than the ‘reinventions’ Postrel raves about. First publicised by this magazine (‘The last of the inventors?’, Blueprint, September 1984), Dyson introduced cyclonic technology to bring about dramatic improvements in the performance of vacuum cleaners. Beginning with niche sales in Japan, he went on to change the European floorcare market forever.

Dyson massively reworked a single species of consumer product. But he did not transform the world’s production processes. Dyson would no doubt concede that he is not quite a Bessemer, Solvay, Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, W Edwards Deming, Toyota or Dell Computer. For her part, Postrel needs to pay that pantheon a bit more respect.

Postrel is right to suggest that functional performance and form are not just counterposed to each other, but also comprise a unity. It is also nice to receive news from her about ‘today’s intensely competitive business environment’. But just how intense is inter-firm competition in 2005 – competition, that is, not in aesthetics and branding, but in genuine process and product innovations?

Postrel imagines that computers are so capable these days that people prefer a beautiful case to a faster processing chip. But perhaps people would most prefer Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard to engage in a real competitive struggle to make one that cost £100, or one capable of responding professionally to the human voice.

The process and product innovations on which such improvements will rely seem beyond Postrel’s brief. After all, solving manufacturing problems, lowering costs and increasing convenience are, she hints, so last-century, for function is now ‘reliably good’. Twenty years ago, Britain’s postmodern design critics breathlessly concluded that computer chips had liberated form from function. In 2005, when PCs still crash all the time, Postrel’s Blueprint bash takes Terence Conran to task for his supposed failure to move with the times.

Her chutzpah is admirable, but she fails to convince on the origins of today’s aestheticisation of everyday life. Our aesthetic sensibilities, she believes, reflect our ‘deep, biological nature’. But they are also, her book argues, the result of rising incomes, falling prices, US population growth, credit cards, lifestyle magazines and home shopping catalogues, IT, travel, immigration, education, feminism, gay and other subcultures, and the extension of liberal individualism.

This list does not persuade. It is as shallow as those critics of consumption, from Vance Packard to Naomi Klein, whom Postrel rightly accuses of always indicting The Corporation for duping consumers with brands, encouraging new wants in them, and pandering to their desire to keep up with the Joneses.

Postrel ventures that ‘style allows us to say something about who we are’. Her book argues that aesthetic value is what individual consumers make it, since, for her, surfaces, Christmas lights, dreadlocks, cosmetics and cosmetic surgery all confer identity, and, at their best, provide personal affirmation of our sense of self.

Daring stuff. It does not seem to occur to Postrel that the mass pursuit of aesthetics in everyday situations might have something to do with the loss of self. For if, in 2005, there are no inspiring political visions of the future to motivate us, if we lose meaning in interpersonal life, if we cannot find out who we are at work, in the realm of production, then a desperate search for identity may well wind up as a flight to aesthetics in the realm of consumption.

Artifacts indeed do not need to apologise for pleasing our visual, tactile, emotional natures. Yet neither are aesthetics just about what Postrel calls ‘our sensory side’. As she says, fondness for aesthetics has become more universal of late; at the same time aesthetics themselves have long been characterised by certain universals. From this evidence alone it ought to be clear that what Postrel terms ‘experience and culture’ influence aesthetics more than biology does. Yet biology is the factor she is much more comfortable highlighting.

The Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment, New Labour’s own design police, should read Postrel’s attack on US regulators of design, and in particular her on the New Urbanist impulse to believe that, if we build new houses with porches, we’ll be neighbours – like we were in the good old days. Sadly, however, Postrel’s concept of aesthetics and design is that their merits are in the eye of the individual beholder, and so are all relative. At no time in Substance of Style does she really prefer one design to another. Here Postrel’s free-market pluralism overcomes her.

The hedonistic, playful pursuit of difference in design, style, fashion and The Face has become part of the mainstream. Yet still Postrel insists on tilting at Modernist puritans. Why? Dyson is more radical and more to the point in believing, as Postrel says, that New Labour’s continuing policy of Cool Britannia has demeaned innovation in Britain.

In what her book calls ‘the aesthetic economy’, oh-so-multisensory service environments such as Starbucks take precedence, for Postrel, over products.  The market has decreed it, and presumably China and India, which make the granite countertops and marble floors that Postrel loves, can now take charge of all of Planet Earth’s boring old manufacturing economy. Apart from the baleful influence of design regulators, then, everything will be for the best in all possible worlds. Is this really the ‘dynamist’ society to which Postrel looks forward?

In fact even committed aesthetes need to take a critical attitude to today’s enthronement of aesthetics. In her book, Postrel mentions Joan Kron. She describes the woman as ‘a journalist who writes about her own and other people’s experiences with plastic surgery’. But as older readers of Blueprint may recall, Kron used to be known as the co-author of High-tech: the industrial style and source book for the home, a 1978 bible for Manhattan trendies out to put factory equipment and materials in their lofts.

From interior design buff to plastic surgery buff. That looks like a retreat – away even from rather complacent attempts to ‘reinvent’ old artifacts through design, toward outright narcissism.

Today’s aestheticised climate smells of anaesthesia. Designers will do themselves no favours by overstating the case for aesthetics. They should take their distance from those whose often balanced appraisals of function and form are continually vitiated by a preference for the latter.