The concept of ‘great design’ is something I’ve been working to define over on my other blog, and this was the subject of this week’s presentation by Nicholas Oddie. He discussed how subjective and fleeting ‘great design’ really is and how it links directly to society’s situation.
Oddie discussed the Forth Rail Bridge, considered (at least in Scotland) to be one of the greatest feats of engineering ever created. However, it could be argued to be a terrible design on a financial level - it was over-engineered as 3-4 times stronger than it needed to be, meaning more material and man-power was needed. But while its overwhelming structure is mostly unnecessary, in the wake of the Tay Bridge disaster, it was a cultural necessity as people were left shaken and needed the assurance of complete safety.
More notable to my assignment topic, there was Ford motor cars. Henry Ford was a pioneer of welfare labour and his was the first company of its kind to mass-produce assembly-line motor cars that were sold relatively inexpensively. He paid his employees a fair living wage and is accredited with introducing the 5-day working week. In doing so, he ensured that his workers would be able to afford to buy his vehicles, so while his reasoning may have been more self-serving than altruistic, his methods did revolutionise the way we produce our cars and culturally changed them from an expensive curiosity, unattainable for most, into a practical convenience for everyone to enjoy. At this point I should also mention, that while Ford was quite progressive in his labour laws, he was also raging anti-Semite whose views inspired Adolf Hilter himself.
It’s a commonly used phrase that great design is ‘timeless’- I’ll confess to using it time and time again. But as Oddie pointed out, this concept of timelessness changes as we do. The UK’s road signs are a great design I’ve previously discussed but send any of them back to the 16th century and they would make no sense whatsoever. In addition to this, on a financial level, great design is design that generates a profit. In this way, planned obsolesce could be argued to be the greatest design choice of all.
Great design is also often geared towards people with money. Oddie talked about how, in a sport such as polo, hundreds of different helmets can be bought in a range of shapes, sizes and colours, because the people who play polo typically have a lot of disposable income, while construction worker’s hard-hats come in a very limited range.
All this talk of how great design is subjective reminded me of this interesting Telegraph article essentially talking about how what you consider ‘great’ will depend on your wealth - designs which resonate more with the working classes tend to be looked down upon and considered ‘tacky’ by the middle class. When I was visiting the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art not too long ago, I saw paintings by artist Beryl Cook. Cook was known for her somewhat comical paintings that narrate the everyday lives of raucous men in pubs and strip clubs, large women on hen nights and sunbathers on package holidays – as she puts it ‘ordinary people enjoying themselves’. In the art world, however, her work has been met with distaste and snobbery as art critics condemn her work as a celebration of distasteful people. Because her work shows everyday, stereotypically working-class people having a good time rather than some beautiful scenery or a perfectly poised models trying to look deep and meaningful, she is criticised. Personally, I believe her paintings, while not to everyone’s taste, are witty and memorable.
Oddie’s presentation was a fun and oftentimes amusing take on how we can never separate great design from society– the very concept of ‘greatness’ is inherently tied to the market, to prejudices and to ourselves.
Morven
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