FROM: Keith Russell
The Coke bottle seems to have struck several nerves (heads?).

The complaint about what is missing from the general daily discourse of
Design (Royal Society exclusions) offers its own reply - that is, just
do it - talk the talk of the excluded.

And so to orning.
In first bashing about the problem of decoration, Herbert Read offered
the following:

The necessity of ornament is psychological. There exists in man a
certain feeling which has been called horror vacui, an incapacity to
tolerate an empty space. This feeling is strongest in certain savage
races, and in decadent periods of civilization. It may be an
ineradicable feeling; it is probably the
same instinct that causes certain people to scribble on lavatory walls,
others to scribble on their blotting-pads. A plain empty surface seems
an irresistible attraction to the most controlled of men; it is the
delight of all uncontrolled children. Whilst I think that a little
discipline would be a very good thing, I by no means wish to urge the
total suppression of the instinct to fill blank
spaces. … At present, all I wish to insist on, is that the instinct is
not essentially aesthetic. All ornament should be treated as suspect. I
feel that a really civilised person would as soon tattoo his body as
cover the form of a good work of art with meaningless ornament. The only
real justification for ornament is that it should in some way emphasise
form. I avoid the
customary word “enhance”, because if form is adequate, it cannot be
enhanced. Legitimate ornament I conceive as something like mascara and
lipstick—something applied with discretion to make more precise the
outlines of an already existing beauty.

Since both our educationists and manufacturers have for so long been
blind to the formal elements in art, they have tended to regard ornament
as the only essential element, and their failure has been largely due to
this misguided attempt to contort and twist and otherwise deform the
naturally austere and precise forms of manufactured articles into the
types of ornament they
mistake for art. (Art and Industry, London: Faber & Faber, 2nd ed. 1944,
pp. 32-33.)

For Reid we are several times blind to the truth of true form; firstly
we are psychologically drawn into the habit or marking our presence;
and, secondly, because we are ignorant of the real functional form of
things in our world, we mistake the mere surface of things for the
things themself. The moral burden is something that should cause us a
major pause: deceived by the devil inside and the devil outside we are
all in need of a good dose of Plato.

And, perhaps we all do need such an emetic. However, the moral gloss is
insufficient as an account of experience. The lipstick, we discover, on
closer observation, is in fact the replication of a formal quality that
is temporal - that is, ephemeral. The quickly passing flush of blood
that accompanies sexual excitation is a thing of beauty and wonder and,
an unmistakable sign of pleasure - that is, it is an index of the
gratification of desire. The simulation of such a wonder is no mere
decoration, rather it is an attempt at adornment - a thing that is
strangely good.

(Note that Reid's approach reinforces the virtue of fixity over the
decadent aspects of temporality: in its weaker version, this argument
allows that Industrial Design is serious and Graphic Design is trivial.
The same general material morality is taken to sexual relations in terms
of heterosexual relations lead potentially to real outcomes in the form
of off-spring whereas homosexual relations lead to decadent emptiness
that then fills itself with sparklers and tinsel and feathers that are
stuck on.)

Following through this paradox (ornament bad; adornment good) we can
take Reid's distinction to some useful outcome. Just as the sentimental
is the granting of an excess of emotion to an object of attention (in
contrast to sentiment) so ornamentation is the granting of excess
information to an object of attention (in contrast to adornment). The
burden of the poet, in T.S. Eliot's terms, is the determining of an
objective correlative for an emotion sufficient to the emotion as it is
educed in the receiver of the object. Watch out for the Alessi objects
of fun and joy and play!

And from here we can easily bridge to the secret (or not so secret)
gendering of the argument. Notice that Reid selects the decoration of
women as his example - decoration, and ornamentation are then to be seen
as female aspects of form.

Katrina Pallowski offers this account:

It is not only women's subjects areas and themes which have little
prestige in design but even certain creative forms favoured by women
rather than men. The long tradition of this deprecating attitude is
shown in a book by Bruno Taut, published in 1924, entitled "The New
Home" which bears the subtitle "Women as Creators" and is dedicated
expressly "To Women." In it, Taut declares that the home's ideal state
of "perfect simplicity and spotlessness" is spoiled by women's
decoration. "The articles of embroidery and crochet work with their
thousand nerve-chafing variations," he writes, "are irrelevant and
worthless." Only the "deliverance" of women from the slavery of
decoration would leave men free to create the "new home," the house
without ornament.
Even if Taut's examples are out-dated and today's women students do not,
as a rule, crochet blankets or embroider cushion covers, the ban on
ornament and the norm of functionality have remained fast and binding
rules of professional design - to the explicit or implicit detriment of
the preferences in everyday things displayed by certain women who,
either in their style of dress or taste in decor, give greater room to
playful and non-functional ideas than men. Similar to Taut's
juxtaposition of the sexes, there is in design today a juxtaposition
between the technically functional and constructive, which is regarded
as positive and provides the absolute criterion for authentic design and
the disparaged domain of the "purely aesthetic," "fashionable" or
"frivolous." Innovations of form, if not closely combined with practical
innovation, are dismissed as superficial "facade design." ("Women
Designers Today: Women's Experience in a 'Man's Profession' ", in Women
in Design: Careers and Life Histories since 1900, Angela
Oedekoven-Gerischer, Andrea Scholtz, Edith Medek & Petra Kurz (Eds.)
Stuttgart: Landesgewerbeamt Baden-Wurttember Design Center Stuggart,
1989, p. 17.)

The wedding cake is then to be a pure white thing with no more icing
except that required to express the inherent cylindrical nature of the
underlying true cake? The attempts to adorn are attempts at objective
correlatives to give external form to aspects of humanity that have no
other form except the form we give to them in our ornings. The hundreds
of hours of needle work are meant to express, through giving form.

And then, back to the darker world of the human eye that would have its
satisfactions. The crease in the inner elbow, at the wrist, at the
corner of the eye - these are ornaments that our eyes seek out as
indicators of form both for certainty and for pure pleasure.

Or, if that be too much at lunch time, try this from Donald A. Norman:

The principle of visibility is violated over and over again in everyday
things. In numerous designs crucial parts are carefully hidden away.
Handles on cabinets distract from some design aesthetics, and so they
are deliberately made invisible or left out. The cracks that signify the
existence of a door can also distract from the pure lines of a design,
so these significant cues are also minimized or eliminated. The result
can be a smooth expanse of gleaming material, with no sign of doors or
drawers, let alone of how those doors and drawers might be operated.
(The Design of Everyday Things,  London: MIT Press, 1998 p. 100)

This sounds like Reid re-visited, after the success of Reid's argument.
That is, having taken away all but the required ornaments, we now
discover, in the sparse and illegible world, that much more
ornamentation is required for the sake of the eye.

Norman's point can be taken further, however, into the realm of the
objective correlative, that is, the urge to make visible (manifest) is
an aspect of primary design. While visiting the design offices of FITCH
in Ohio, many of us saw the loft. I comment to Dean Richardson, at the
time, that the loft allowed for the making visible of the invisible
aspect of the design team and the design process at FITCH. My urge,
within this visibility, was to throw a paper plane across the loft space
- as soon as I announce this desire, it was pointed out to me that a
paper plane had crash landed in the cross beams of the loft. Here the
evidence of the invisible being visible was to be seen! The designers
had performed their own, disturbing, ornamentation.

Which gets us to the further secrets of ornamentation that get taken up
in spite of the worst intentions of the machine process. Henry Petroski
offers this dulling account of why  the lovely little neck appears on
our aluminium drink cans:

Among the most effective means of reducing weight [in aluminium cans]
was in reducing the size of the can top. Because a top must be thicker
than a can's body to maintain strength after being scored and riveted,
the top takes a disproportionate amount of aluminum to fabricate. Thus,
in the mid-1970s, can manufacturers began to narrow the can body ever so
slightly in order to employ a smaller-diameter top. Since the area of a
can top is proportional to the diameter squared, a small decrease in
diameter resulted in a substantial reduction in aluminum used. However,
the can body cannot be narrowed too much, or else it would not feel
right in the drinker's hand. To keep the can body sized for comfortable
use and to maintain familiar proportions, the body began to be tapered
at the top so that a smaller top could be fitted to it. By the late
1980s, this tapering had become very pronounced, but it could only be
taken so far without making the can look too unconventional or be too
difficult to drink from. Furthermore, there was the need to have the top
diameter large enough to incorporate a tab opening. (Invention by
Design: How Engineers get from Thought to Thing, London: Harvard
University Press, 1996, p. 102.)

And here was me thinking the dimple was for the pleasure of my eye and
my hand and a way to embrace the object? Like the African with the
unexplained Coke bottle, I have long appropriated this dimple as part of
my experience of drinking from aluminium cans.







%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%