Moka Aesthetics
Jane Forsey, The Aesthetics of Design
Oxford University Press, 288pp, £32.99, ISBN 9780199964369
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
Look around you and, according to Jane Forsey, you’ll see three different sorts of made things: art, craft, and design. Forsey’s contention in The Aesthetics of Design is that ‘design’ – as a class of things in the world – does not get the philosophic attention it warrants and her goal is to make design visible to philosophy through understanding our aesthetic interest in it. So, for example, she sees an original painting, a gift from the artist; a hand-made desk by a craftsman; and a mass-produced pen but with a designer label. How are they different in kind? Only one attempts profundity (‘art’), one is hand-made (‘craft’), and the rest, like the pen, comprise the bulk of that with which we surround ourselves, are ‘design’. But all are aesthetic objects, objects of aesthetic interest.
This is a reasonable enough intuitive base to ground the aesthetics of design – we do ordinarily distinguish between art, craft and design, and distinctions draw on ideas of the emotional and intellectual expressiveness of artworks, the skilled workmanship of craft, and... Well, there’s the question for Forsey: does ‘design’ really designate a separate class of made things or rather some activity within making more generally? When we think of design, aren’t we thinking about things taking form? The painting on the aesthetician’s wall is not the artist’s conception magically thrown on the canvas; it has composition and technique too. The carpenter making the desk had at least some rudimentary design in mind before applying his carpentry skills. Still, with Forsey, we can agree there’s aesthetic interest in design. But it might not be an interest in a separate class of things called ‘design’. Rather, our aesthetic interest seems at least to be one in design work, in that activity that both formulates loose ideas and directs workmanship for all made things, so is integral to both artworks and everyday functional artefacts like desks and pens.
Of course there are people called designers – but their work falls between the conception and the delivery of made things. They do not instigate their work but are employed to solve design problems to make things wanted by individuals and businesses and governments. Their products are not things like Forsey’s pen, but design solutions – a drawing, some specifications and so on – to the problem of making a pen that people like Forsey will buy. And after the solution comes the making, reliant then on craft skills or machinery to deliver the design.
It is here then that Forsey’s aesthetics of design falters – our aesthetic interest in paintings, desks and pens seems to necessarily involve in each case an interest in design work. Moreover, each ‘sort of thing’ itself engages at least our aesthetic interest in more than one aspect of making – we can admire the table’s and the pen’s design and finish. Forsey simply neglects this – that even the manufactured product has a finish as well as a design that merits aesthetic evaluation, something that is a quality of the process of delivering a design.
We have to turn too to what we mean by ‘aesthetic’. Forsey properly devotes a large part of the book to this, roughly two of the four chapters. She argues a Kantian position, but laudably ends that with the story of two stove-top espresso makers. These are a version of the classic Moka coffee pot designed by Bialetti in 1933 and a more recent stylised design by Alessi. Forsey prefers her Moka because, for all its wear and tear, it looks good and it works well and the two come together in a sense of it being a thing of designed ‘beauty’. The Alessi pot, in contrast, lacks that beauty in use (Forsey explains it burns on handling, for instance). It’s right that our aesthetic interest in everyday functional things like coffee pots is properly about their pleasure in use – otherwise, we’re not aesthetically interested in the coffee pot but in some abstraction of it. But we should be careful about judgements of beauty of functional things. There’s a lexicon of aesthetic evaluation and it’s wasted, along with our aesthetic sensibility, by lazy approbations.
So one way to avoid having to talk about the ‘beauty’ of coffee pots but still argue that everyday functional things are philosophically and aesthetically significant is to reach back to the ways things are made. But Forsey’s commitment to ‘design’ as a class of things rather than an activity precludes this possibility. Her aesthetics of design effectively disallows, wrongly, theorising on the intuition that good designers conceive design problems to include both products’ core functional aspects (what a product must do to be the sort of thing it is) and their normatively functional possibilities (to deliver larger, social and environmental goals for instance). With that in mind, aesthetic evaluation of ‘design’ is altogether more sophisticated and worthy of the name, properly related to design as an activity.
The goal of making ‘design’ a distinct and important aspect of philosophical aesthetics remains open then. One recent and influential strategy is Everyday Aesthetics: its leading proponent, Yuriko Saito, argues for a divided aesthetics between that of art and of the everyday, between disinterested aesthetic experience of artworks and active aesthetic involvement with the everyday, with ‘design’ in the ‘everyday’ half. Forsey concludes The Aesthetics of Design by challenging this divide, broadly on the grounds that the class of things called ‘design’ are still objects of aesthetic interest like artworks – we experience them as beautiful or not, albeit in use.
A coherent, undivided theory of aesthetics across art and the everyday (including craft and design) is not dependent on committing theoretically to a shared conception of the ‘beauty’ of artworks and coffee pots. It is right to acknowledge and ground aesthetic theory in our interest in things being ‘felt right’ and with associated positive aesthetic evaluations; but it’s a divided interest between the ‘rightness’ of artistic conceptions, of designs, and of workmanship, of different activities involved in making things well. There’s a need for an aesthetics of design but it’s not a Moka aesthetics of designed beauty – it’s properly one embedded in a general aesthetics of work. Forsey concludes with some examples of our everyday aesthetic lives: the aesthetics of choosing a coffee pot (again), of positioning a sofa, of choosing a pleasant route to walk to work. But with that it’s finally impossible to tell in what our aesthetic interest subsists beyond personal preference (and the ‘beauty’ of a well-positioned sofa seems absurd).
An aesthetics of design can be substantial and reasonable though, and share something with art and craft (Forsey’s original intention). We are not the Supreme Maker perhaps, most of us not artists even, yet we are capable of being free and proud shapers of our environments and ourselves. This Mirandolian ‘dignity of man’ then is also the loftiest, humanist ideal of design, of making more generally. Making the best we can necessarily involves design work to create functional things and flourishing human beings from given situations. Our aesthetic interest in made things is therefore properly rooted in why and how they are made.
Such interlocking humanist and aesthetic claims are sometimes made for Apple and other products of modern technology, that pleasure in using digital products is directly related to a ‘design ethos’ of creative thinking and manufacture. Long before, John Ruskin famously listed the moral characteristics of the ideal ‘Gothic’ worker, their savageness, love of change and nature, their disturbed imagination and generosity. He argued that we could see these reflected in the buildings they produced, in the related features of Gothic architecture. So if we can, after Ruskin, see builders’ character in the buildings they produce and make aesthetic judgements accordingly, what products now, and how, truly bear signs of free, human work?
This is a reasonable enough intuitive base to ground the aesthetics of design – we do ordinarily distinguish between art, craft and design, and distinctions draw on ideas of the emotional and intellectual expressiveness of artworks, the skilled workmanship of craft, and... Well, there’s the question for Forsey: does ‘design’ really designate a separate class of made things or rather some activity within making more generally? When we think of design, aren’t we thinking about things taking form? The painting on the aesthetician’s wall is not the artist’s conception magically thrown on the canvas; it has composition and technique too. The carpenter making the desk had at least some rudimentary design in mind before applying his carpentry skills. Still, with Forsey, we can agree there’s aesthetic interest in design. But it might not be an interest in a separate class of things called ‘design’. Rather, our aesthetic interest seems at least to be one in design work, in that activity that both formulates loose ideas and directs workmanship for all made things, so is integral to both artworks and everyday functional artefacts like desks and pens.
Of course there are people called designers – but their work falls between the conception and the delivery of made things. They do not instigate their work but are employed to solve design problems to make things wanted by individuals and businesses and governments. Their products are not things like Forsey’s pen, but design solutions – a drawing, some specifications and so on – to the problem of making a pen that people like Forsey will buy. And after the solution comes the making, reliant then on craft skills or machinery to deliver the design.
It is here then that Forsey’s aesthetics of design falters – our aesthetic interest in paintings, desks and pens seems to necessarily involve in each case an interest in design work. Moreover, each ‘sort of thing’ itself engages at least our aesthetic interest in more than one aspect of making – we can admire the table’s and the pen’s design and finish. Forsey simply neglects this – that even the manufactured product has a finish as well as a design that merits aesthetic evaluation, something that is a quality of the process of delivering a design.
We have to turn too to what we mean by ‘aesthetic’. Forsey properly devotes a large part of the book to this, roughly two of the four chapters. She argues a Kantian position, but laudably ends that with the story of two stove-top espresso makers. These are a version of the classic Moka coffee pot designed by Bialetti in 1933 and a more recent stylised design by Alessi. Forsey prefers her Moka because, for all its wear and tear, it looks good and it works well and the two come together in a sense of it being a thing of designed ‘beauty’. The Alessi pot, in contrast, lacks that beauty in use (Forsey explains it burns on handling, for instance). It’s right that our aesthetic interest in everyday functional things like coffee pots is properly about their pleasure in use – otherwise, we’re not aesthetically interested in the coffee pot but in some abstraction of it. But we should be careful about judgements of beauty of functional things. There’s a lexicon of aesthetic evaluation and it’s wasted, along with our aesthetic sensibility, by lazy approbations.
So one way to avoid having to talk about the ‘beauty’ of coffee pots but still argue that everyday functional things are philosophically and aesthetically significant is to reach back to the ways things are made. But Forsey’s commitment to ‘design’ as a class of things rather than an activity precludes this possibility. Her aesthetics of design effectively disallows, wrongly, theorising on the intuition that good designers conceive design problems to include both products’ core functional aspects (what a product must do to be the sort of thing it is) and their normatively functional possibilities (to deliver larger, social and environmental goals for instance). With that in mind, aesthetic evaluation of ‘design’ is altogether more sophisticated and worthy of the name, properly related to design as an activity.
The goal of making ‘design’ a distinct and important aspect of philosophical aesthetics remains open then. One recent and influential strategy is Everyday Aesthetics: its leading proponent, Yuriko Saito, argues for a divided aesthetics between that of art and of the everyday, between disinterested aesthetic experience of artworks and active aesthetic involvement with the everyday, with ‘design’ in the ‘everyday’ half. Forsey concludes The Aesthetics of Design by challenging this divide, broadly on the grounds that the class of things called ‘design’ are still objects of aesthetic interest like artworks – we experience them as beautiful or not, albeit in use.
A coherent, undivided theory of aesthetics across art and the everyday (including craft and design) is not dependent on committing theoretically to a shared conception of the ‘beauty’ of artworks and coffee pots. It is right to acknowledge and ground aesthetic theory in our interest in things being ‘felt right’ and with associated positive aesthetic evaluations; but it’s a divided interest between the ‘rightness’ of artistic conceptions, of designs, and of workmanship, of different activities involved in making things well. There’s a need for an aesthetics of design but it’s not a Moka aesthetics of designed beauty – it’s properly one embedded in a general aesthetics of work. Forsey concludes with some examples of our everyday aesthetic lives: the aesthetics of choosing a coffee pot (again), of positioning a sofa, of choosing a pleasant route to walk to work. But with that it’s finally impossible to tell in what our aesthetic interest subsists beyond personal preference (and the ‘beauty’ of a well-positioned sofa seems absurd).
An aesthetics of design can be substantial and reasonable though, and share something with art and craft (Forsey’s original intention). We are not the Supreme Maker perhaps, most of us not artists even, yet we are capable of being free and proud shapers of our environments and ourselves. This Mirandolian ‘dignity of man’ then is also the loftiest, humanist ideal of design, of making more generally. Making the best we can necessarily involves design work to create functional things and flourishing human beings from given situations. Our aesthetic interest in made things is therefore properly rooted in why and how they are made.
Such interlocking humanist and aesthetic claims are sometimes made for Apple and other products of modern technology, that pleasure in using digital products is directly related to a ‘design ethos’ of creative thinking and manufacture. Long before, John Ruskin famously listed the moral characteristics of the ideal ‘Gothic’ worker, their savageness, love of change and nature, their disturbed imagination and generosity. He argued that we could see these reflected in the buildings they produced, in the related features of Gothic architecture. So if we can, after Ruskin, see builders’ character in the buildings they produce and make aesthetic judgements accordingly, what products now, and how, truly bear signs of free, human work?