Making the ordinary useful, affordable and beautiful

Design is not art. We visit galleries to see inspirational works too expensive or impractical for us to have at home. We visit museums to gaze at artefacts of great cultural value that we would otherwise not have access to. These are aged, authentic objects made into pseudo religious relics for an atheistic, materialistic age, placed on pedestals. Design is the diametric opposite of art. It is about making the ordinary useful, affordable and beautiful; it is interactive.

Design, or at least, what I do, which I call “design”, is also about finding out about the ordinary. The extraordinary things that people do every day that become ordinary through their repetition. It’s about making the ordinary clear again, showing it to be extraordinary, taking it apart to understand it, putting it back together again, re-making it into more than the sum of its ordinary parts and and making the accomplishment of the ordinary clear.

When we show that the ordinary, something overlooked perhaps, or unregarded, is unsual, we often also discover that it is beautiful and useful. We also show that it is accountable and affordable (which is, perhaps, wresting more mileage out of the term affordance than is proper or at least suitable for use in mixed company).

[quote from "What is the point of design?" by Edwin Heathcote, originally at the FT website, now available from sphereboy.]