Thread by @mulegirl

Welcome to Sunday morning coffee thoughts.

Today: what if uncritical infatuation with the Bauhaus is contributing to the inability of some designers to engage with the underlying social and economic implications of their work?

"The Bauhaus is an answer to the question: How can the artist be trained to take his place in the machine age."
—1938 MOMA retrospective catalog

Substitute internet age for machine age and that's an appealing framing for anyone looking to reconcile style, craft, and scale.

The principles of functional beauty made attainable through mass production are inherently comforting to designers who might feel lost in a world of design systems materializing from rapid growth enterprises.

(I'm slightly surprised BauhausOps isn't yet a thing.)

And of course the multidisciplinary orientation towards architecture dovetails right into the way we talk about designing and building digital systems.

"Together let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form."—W. Gropius

So this harmony in principle—along with the output of a lot of really cool stuff—makes it easy to conflate a century-old movement that was a reaction to the visceral horror of the recent past and encroaching mechanization of the dawning future with Good Design.

But…

The Bauhaus-stan mindset has some baggage (I mean, nice baggage, clean lines, and all that).

The most dangerous of which is the conflation of aesthetics with ethics. Infusing the consumer-facing layer of technology with universalist humanism is construed as Doing Good.

Why else does Apple get such a pass? Why does outrage over poor keyboard design so far surpass outrage over the factory conditions at which that keyboard is produced.

I'm not immune. My MacBook Air (11in, early-2014) *feels* in my hand like a utopian fusion of art and science.

But it's a little ridiculous to obsess about the virtues of craft grounded in empathy when those appealing qualities only serve to divert attention from and attract resources to an inhumane underlying system, like the glowing lure on an anglerfish.

Then there is the whole notion of universal principles. Convenient for aesthetic unity and mass production, sure.

But are they really universal? Really? Whose experience are you generalizing from to develop these principles and whose perspective or existence are you erasing?

"Form follows function" sounds good, sure—especially because we're biased to believe that alliteration enhances truth value.

But we aren't designing modernist can openers, we're contributing to systems that mediate multisided marketplaces.

Often the function of one layer of design is to obscure the existence of another.

The mere existence of the Bauhaus was, in its context, confrontational.

We have to ask ourselves how to carry that work forward, not by conforming to our impression of it—which is very comfortable for designers (and DWR)—but by confronting the dehumanizing forces of our moment.

This has been Sunday Morning Coffee Thoughts.