THE THREE PILLARS OF GOOD DESIGN
““dal cucchiaio alla città” (from the spoon to the city)”
Today, we live in environments that are almost completely artificially created, which is to say designed. In fact, almost everything you touch, from your bed at night to a box of cereal in the morning, is designed for a purpose. Or, if you’re an Italian architect, you might say everything from the humble spoon to the grand city is designed.
Even the natural (read: non-designed) aspects of our lives are, as often as not, in designed contexts – like parks.
And when that design is good, it makes your life better. When it’s bad, it makes life harder.
But, it’s never neutral.
Our three pillars of ‘good design’
Over the years, as we’ve built structures and delivered them across North America, we’ve developed guiding lights for the structures we make, the website we have, and even the pictures we take.
People-centric
“Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.”
Thomas J. Watson
Design serves a variety of purposes, from the purely aesthetic to the brutally pragmatic, but we believe that no matter how brutal or grandiose, design’s first job is to serve people.
Often, as designers and dreamers, we get caught up in visions of new designs and new objects. But, when we fall in love with an idea, design, or object, we end up serving them, spending our time and energy working around a piece of design because we think it’s cool.
But that only lasts until the object stops being cool, and then all the effort that goes into working with the idea/design/object stops being worth it. So, the idea goes in the trash along with the trend and we’re left looking for something else to fill the role, or take up our attention.
That’s, in our opinion, bad design.
Instead of sacrificing usability and the human element to passing trends, we believe sure that all designs, all good ideas, should be aimed at making a person’s life better.
That means, no design is complete without the final human element.
Whether it’s a computer program or a DROP Structure, it’s not finished until it’s inhabited and used by a person. Without that, it’s just an object.
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”
– Walt Disney
“Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.”
– Melinda Gates
Experiential
“I don't design clothes, I design dreams.”
– Ralph Lauren
The difference between understanding a concept and experiencing a thing is as wide as the ocean.
We can read Wikipedia and understand how big the ocean is, how deep it is. We can read about the life in it, and its colors, and how at night the waves can shine with phosphorescence, but until we experience it by playing in the waves, by looking out over a vista of endless ocean, by tasting the sharp stab of salt water, we don’t know what the ocean is.
Design is the same.
The experience of being in the Sagrada Familia is different from the facts of it, or even the pictures.
Design connects our senses to create novel experiences that we can’t get from knowing. It’s a holistic experience that gains something undefinable from interacting with it.
“Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”
– Charles Eames
Aesthetically pleasing
“Design is about the betterment of our lives poetically, aesthetically, experientially, sensorially, and emotionally.”
– Karim Rashid
Walk into a forest and you’re surrounded by beauty – the soaring trees and crawling moss, the sound of water flowing and the breeze moving through the leaves.
But none of it was designed to be beautiful.
The delicately veined leaf was not designed to stand out, just so, against the rough bark of a tree. Its purpose is not to make the tree look good, but to function as a tiny factory of energy, turning sunlight into the energy required to grow and flourish.
But it still looks good. And we find value in its inherent beauty.
We believe design is the same, that the solutions we are looking for, the jobs we need to get done, should, at the end, look good. It’s, in the end, not a balance of form versus function, function residing within form that makes design worth something.
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
- R.Buckminster Fuller
Good Design?
From our eyes, these pillars are essential to good design, but in the end, it only matters if our design speaks to you.
That’s why we work hard to design structures that add to our client’s lives, designs that allow our clients to:
Quickly set up a structure wherever they want, whether that’s a backyard in a major city or in the middle of an endless forest in Montana.
Use it for whatever purpose they have in mind, whether it’s a classroom, a cabin or a cabana.
Stay protected from the elements without being cut off from the beauty outside the windows.
Does that make ‘good design’? We’ll let you decide that.
